After the initial discoveries Indian laborers began to disappear from the mines. This disappearance coincided with the arrival of the newcomers who had no prior experience with the Hispanic history of Indian exploitation. For them the Indian was useless since most Indians in their experience had been hostile and a threat to their security. In March 1849, three years after Frémont’s volunteers had decimated the Klamath Indian village in south-central Oregon, and one and a half years after the Whitman massacre left 13 dead missionaries in Walla Walla, Washington, 7 Oregon prospectors raped several Maidu women on a ranchería near the American River. This led to retaliation by Indian men and an escalation of violence in which Indians from the village of Colima were killed, arrested, and executed. It was no accident that the Colima site had been the place where Sutter had positioned his mill, and Sutter, of course, had generated much of the outsider’s anger and jealousy. After news of this incident spread, Indians in the mines fled from the whites fearing for the safety of themselves and their families. The jealousy of the newcomers had ignited an era of mutual fear and outrage, and a decade of Indian wars.59
This is the California context in which John C. Frémont’s activities and ideas can be judged. First, it must be noted that in the late 1840s, prior to the discovery of gold, Frémont was essentially a tourist and newcomer. His behavior toward the Indian was not any more sophisticated than that of his fellow Oregonians who fought, killed, and raped Indians. Had he stayed only an explorer, his reputation as “the great pathfinder” would have been secure, but his decision to purchase the Mariposa estate transformed the surveyor into an unsuccessful entrepreneur.
The 43,000-acre estate, in the Sierra foothills only 40 miles southwest of Yosemite, had been the favorite hunting ground of the Cauchile Indians. Similar to other white rancheros, his land had been carved out of previous indigenous properties. Like his neighbors, he surrounded himself with de facto Indians slaves that worked his fields, and after the discovery of gold and silver on the Mariposas River, his Sonoran managers administered the Indian mineworkers. One of the prospectors was a black servant named Saunders, whose family was still in slavery, who was working the Mariposa mines for the purpose of working off his purchase price of $1,700.60 Generally speaking, while Frémont was generally consistent in his “free soil” views and his opposition to African chattel slavery in the South, he, like many of his contemporaries in the West, had a blind eye when it came to the issue of Indian slavery.
Jessie (Benton) Frémont was equally involved with the institution of Indian slavery. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s the most constant demand for Indian labor was that of Indian servants—male or female, young and old. In her Monterey house a Mexican chef oversaw Indian men who did most of the cooking, aided by Indian boys who hunted for food and assisted in the preparation of meals. Jessie noticed a remarkable similarity between the average California household and the “life of our Southern people.” In California it was typical for ladies of the house to be “surrounded by domesticated Indian girls at their sewing.” At Mariposa, Mission Indians were obtained by the Frémonts and required to work at laundering and other domestic chores. Jessie bragged about “playing Missionary” to a group of local Indians, plaiting their hair, and dressing them in starched calico and clean white undergarments. She was able to civilize these dirty people and transform them into “picturesque peasants.”61
For Jessie to play missionary was in character, as she had always wanted to experience the man’s world, from her teenage days as a tomboy, through her vicarious experiences of her husband’s explorations and adventures (as described in her writings of her husband’s exploits), to her playing the role of Spanish missionaries domesticating and Christianizing their Indian subjects. Her maternalism was the counterpart to the paternalism that fostered Indian servitude, and she was as consistent in her “free soil” views as she was inconsistent on the subject of slavery. In this way she was her husband’s wife.
It must be remembered that “abolitionism” and the “free soil” movement were not identical, and that, as aforementioned, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Free Soil Party as a white man’s party that was only concerned with ending slave labor’s competition with free white labor. Garrison, by the way, had written an editorial as early as 1829 criticizing the forced removal of Indians from the Southeast. In the 1850s many abolitionists and crusaders, like John Beeson and Wendell Phillips, spoke against Indian slavery and in favor of reform of the Indian service of the United States government.62 Frémont, while consistently favoring the anti-slavery point of view when talking about African chattel slavery, was ultimately a white man who ignored the rights of Indians as human beings and saw them as useful sources of labor to be exploited. His views on these matters were shared by many northerners, including the Abraham Lincoln of 1863 and after.
Lincoln and the Indians
The path to emancipation of the Afro-American slaves was a rocky one, and who better to follow that road then the “great pathfinder,” John C. Frémont. But the trail was narrow with many false exits, and as luck and fate would have it, Lincoln and Frémont crossed and met on that trail several times. Most of these engagements were less than friendly, especially the emancipation edict controversy of 1861.
As already mentioned, on August 30, 1861 Frémont, as commander of the Western Department, issued a controversial proclamation putting Missouri under martial law and declaring that anyone who took up arms against the Federal government, or supported those who did so, will have their property, including slaves, confiscated. By November Lincoln had rescinded the proclamation and relieved Frémont of his command, telling Jessie Benton Frémont in person that “General Frémont should not have dragged the Negro into it.” Yet, the second Confiscation Act passed by Congress and issued by Lincoln in July 1862 was very similar to Frémont’s proclamation in regard to the confiscation of property of persons disloyal to the United States.63
Another major confrontation came in May 1864 when Radical Republicans, meeting in a separate convention one month before the Republican convention, nominated Frémont as their candidate for president. These were anti-slavery zealots who thought that Lincoln was too moderate in his plans for the reconstruction of the South. With the Civil War still raging, Lincoln was later nominated in June as the Republican candidate for president, while a pro-Union Democrat from Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, received the vice-presidency nod.64 In the very near future Lincoln would be assassinated, and Frémont, over the next 26 years, would die a slow death after a series of scandals and financial and political failures.
Most presidents, including Lincoln, had limited experience with Indians, and even less knowledge. On those occasions in the White House when he met with Indians personally he would speak to them in Pidgin English saying to them “Where live now?” and “When go back to Iowa?” He had little doubt that they were an inferior people, and an obstacle to America’s progress and development. His major concern was winning the Civil War, after that his highest priority was settling and developing the west. The Homestead Act of 1862 accelerated white settlement of lands formerly occupied by Indians, and many of the treaties he signed opened up Indian lands for the development of the transcontinental railroad. His Indian policy mainly was one of making treaties with the Indians that would remove them from the lands the settlers coveted.65
Lincoln’s Indian policy was carried out by the Office of Indian Affairs, a bureaucratic entity that was created by the secretary of war in 1824 and moved to the Interior Department in 1849. The major and minor posts of the Indian system were filled by “spoils of office.” The commissioner of Indian affairs reported to the secretary of the interior, who in turn was responsible to the president. Lincoln’s appointees were William P. Dole of Pennsylvania for commissioner and Caleb Smith of Indiana for secretary of interior. Both men were politicians with no special expertise in Indian matters. A variety of Indian agents assigned to tribes and reservations reported to regional superintendents, which in turn were responsible to the commissioner. Claimants, contractors, and traders all milked the Indian system for federal monies. All