19th Century California Indian Population

The transformation of California from an unsettled frontier to a beacon of migration and social organization was in significant part a response to the famous Gold Rush. Hurtado's book is chiefly concerned with how the rapid changes in the social environment of the California frontier in the mid-nineteenth century made a negative impact on a population that had already been made vulnerable owing to the influx, social preferences, and deeply felt prejudices of white settlers. In sheer numbers, the population of indigenous peoples declined drastically. However, in the records of those who survived the wholesale mutation of their life experience can be discerned not only the systematic and often brutal domination of indigenous culture by alien values and power but also the (often pathetic) character of (often ineffectual) coping and adaptation strategies of indigenous peoples. In general, Hurtado describes the manner in which Indians were deprived of cultural identity owing to the incursion of white Americans migrants whose attachment to values of dominant culture, irrespective of idiosyncratic deviations from the norm, was highly uniform and whose character can properly be described as capitalistic, bourgeois, patriarchal, and exploitative. The moral and cultural presumptions implicit in this social configuration are difficult to overstate. But Hurtado makes his points in a more or less personal way, "through the lens of Indian-white relations . . . a meeting ground for competi

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and farming and ranching settlements (50ff), not only during the mission period but also during and after the period of Anglo settlement and the U.S. Army incursions for Indian "pacification." The influx of Anglo populations into California altered the experience of the native population, mainly on account of the sexual encounter between white men and Indian women. The structure of traditional Anglo family units included presumptions about proper gender and racial roles. "Women provided not only emotional and social stability," says Hurtado, "but [unpaid] economic contributions as well" (27). But this stability referred to Anglo social arrangements only. Indian populations were increasingly displaced at the wholesale level in most parts of North America. In California, the pattern of native displacement was slightly different, owing to the differences between Hispanic and Anglo settlements. As Hurtado says, "Anglos excluded Indians [in marriage] and Spaniards included them for the same purposes: to regulate the cultural context of newly settled areas so that frontier resources could be conveniently exploited" (Hurtado 29). Thus, for example, Anglo family settlers could presume that Indians would be available as racially and econo

Category: History - 1