NOTICE
On and after the 1st of March, 1865, we, the undersigned, pledge ourselves to receive and pay out GOLD DUST at the following rates only:
San Joaquin River or Bar dust, where it is not mixed with other dust, at $15.50 per ounce.
Fine Gold Gulch, Cottonwood, Long Gulch, and all taken out in small gulches between the San Joaquin and Fresno Rivers (except Coarse Gold Gulch) at $14 per ounce.
Coarse Gold Gulch dust at $16.50.
Big Dry Creek at $16.50.
Temperance Flat dust, and dust taken out at the head of Little Dry Creek, at $14.
Sycamore Creek dust, free from quicksilver and not mixed with other dust, at $17.50.
Fresno River dust, taken out below McKeown's store at $15.50.
The above rates are as near as we can come at the value of the various kinds of dust in gold coin, and after this date, we do not intend to receive or pay out anything that is not equal in value to United States gold or silver coin.
(Signed): Geo. Grierson & Co.. J. R. Jones, Lewis Leach, James Urquhart, Ira McCray, Wm. Faymonville, Wm. Fielding, S. W. Henry, Robert Abbott, C. F. Walker, T. A. Long, Jno. White, Thos. Simpson, W. Krug, Geo. S. Palmer, Clark Hoxie, S. T. Garrison, T. C. Stallo, W. S. Wyatt, S. Gaster, J. Linnebacker, Geo. McClelland, J. R. Barkley, Henry Henricie, Chas. A. Hart, Tong Sing, Hop Wo, Daniel Brannan, H. W. Clark, D. H. Miller, C. P. Converse, L. M. Mathews, C. G. Sayle, Ira Stroud.
There were 138 quartz mills in operation in the state in 1856 — eighty-six propelled by water, forty-eight by steam and four by horse power, moving 1,521 stamps. The cost of the machinery was $1,763,000.
CHAPTER IX
Kit Carson, the scout, said that in 1829 the valleys of California were alive with Indians. On again visiting the territory in 1839, they had measurably disappeared. In 1851. James D. Savage, of whom more anon, gave the number of Indians on the coast as 83,000, an inflated figure, as were all the census estimates on Indians.
In October, 1856, the number of Indians on the reservations was reported to be:
Klamath, 2,500; Nome Lacke, 2,000; Mendocino, 500; Nome Cult, 3,000; Fresno and Kings River, 1,300; Tejon, 700: total 10,000.
Today the red man has practically disappeared from the haunts where he was once most numerous. It is a repetition of the old story with this doomed, unfortunate race. The passing of the Indian was hastened on by the gold diggers and the first settlers. He was an inoffensive being, but he was in the way of the white man, and the latter did not seek far or long for cause or reason to put him out of the way.
The California Indian was a nomad, moving with the seasons in the search for food, subsisting on acorns, seeds, berries and nuts, roots, fungi and herbs, fish, fowl and game — in fact nothing was overlooked as a diet. Grasshoppers, worms and the larvae of ants and insects were delicacies, and mustang horse flesh a dainty. Along the coast, sea-fish and mollusks were important dietary additions, and a dead, stranded whale was a prize to warrant general feasting. They lived in the most primitive habitations, dressed in skins, or woven bark or grass fiber, and used stone implements. The women did all the laborious work and wove beautiful baskets.
While the tribal individuals bore a general resemblance, there was a remarkable diversity in language. Their racial origin is an interesting problem. Living in a pleasant clime, with the food supply abundant in ordinary years and demanding no great exertion to procure — and then by the slavish squaws — the Indian was an indolent, shiftless creature, and there is a general consensus that in California he represented the lowest scale of human development. He did not take kindly to the labor of the civilization that the padres enforced, wherefore the frequent uprisings. With the confinement that they were subjected to in the close mission buildings, herded like so many cattle, and in the general demoralizing association with the whites, their decimation was rapid enough.
At the close of 1802, the Indian population at the eighteen missions is placed at 7,945 males and 7,617 females. In 1831 it was placed at 18,683, and in 1845 the estimate was that, while the white population had increased to about 8,000, the domesticated Indians, who twelve years before numbered close to 30,000, scarcely represented one-third of that number. There are no statistics of the wild Indians — gentiles as the Spaniards called them. Guesses ranged from 100.000 to 300,000. Yet another classification was made. All save Indians were gente de razon — rational people — in contradistinction to the natives, who were considered only as beasts — unable to reason.
The secularization of the missions with the return of the neophytes to savagery and wretchedness was their perdition. It also marked the decline of ecclesiastical power and influence in California. But no material loss was suffered by the Indians. They were no worse off than under the mission system, which held them as slaves, abject and groveling-. The missions themselves and the missionaries were the relic of a medieval age, and long had outlived their usefulness.
In 1856, when Fresno was organized as a county there were six reservations in the state under the superintendency of T. J. Henley. The Fresno and Kings River farms were, in this county, on the streams so named. They were established in 1854 and covered about 2,000 acres in extent, 1,000 under cultivation to wheat, barley and vegetables. The Indians gathered on the two farms numbered 1,300. M. B. Lewis was sub-agent of the Fresno reservation, with E. P. Hart as foreman, appointed in July, 1856, at $1,500 and $1,200 salaries, with J. B. Folsom as chief hunter. William J. Campbell was sub-agent at the other farm with one "Judge" John G. Marvin as quartermaster furnishing all the supplies, Charles A. Hart his wagon-master and D. J. Johnson an employee.
The number within the state jurisdiction was estimated at 61,600, of which 16,000 were on the reservations in March, 1857. Cost of maintenance in the state for 1855 was $236,000 and for 1856 $358,000. The idea of making treaties with them or "recognizing in any way the rights they claim to the soil" was a policy "rejected entirely" by the department, and according to Henley his wards were everywhere highly pleased with the policy proposed, "except in locations where malicious or interested persons have by false representations prejudiced them against it."
Henley was severe against this class, asserting that it had been "the cause of most of the Indian difficulties which had up to then occurred in the state," and that in "almost all cases where the Indians have been guilty of aggressions it has been to avenge some outrage committed upon them by the class of persons in question."
The late Galen Clark, who in 1854 mined in Mariposa, assisted in government surveying of west side San Joaquin Valley land and of canals for mining in the celebrated Mariposa Grant, who first visited the Yosemite in 1855 and in 1857 on a hunting trip discovered the Mariposa grove of big trees, for twenty-four years was the state guardian of the Yosemite Valley, and lies buried near Yosemite Falls, where, with his own hands, he dug his grave and quarried his own tombstone, came, by reason of his long associations, to know much of the traditions and customs of the Indians of Yosemite and of the tribes that once peopled this valley.
According to this authority, the tribes in the region of the Yosemite were affiliated by blood or intermarriage relationship. Before the coming of the whites, they had defined tribal hunting limits, though the higher Sierras were common ground. There was reciprocal barter between them, as on the west with the Paiutes on the east side of the range, in salt blocks from Mono Lake, and with the Mission Indians on the coast, in hunting knives and shells for ornament or money, beads, blankets and the like. They had an efficient relay courier system for 100 miles for the