CHAPTER XII
This Major James D. Savage, so prominent in the Mariposa Indian War, was one of the remarkable and picturesque characters connected with the early days of the valley. His death was a violent one. It was said of him that he was of those "not unfrequently found upon the confines of civilization, who combined great, though uncultivated, strength of intellect with great, though not unkindly, coarseness in the conduct of life."
Before the day of the white woman in California, some of the early residents took up relations with squaws, even to marrying them. Most of these men were described as "coarse in manners and low in character, but some were in various respects superior men," who had yielded to their environments. Savage, it is agreed, was "the most prominent and perhaps the most able" of all these so-called squaw men. The marriage of Indian women by white men involved the latter's degradation to the Indian's level, and never in a recorded instance elevated the woman to anything like social equality with the whites. It also meant for the white man racial and social ostracism.
Savage emigrated overland to California in 1846. The earliest mention of him is as a member of Company F, Fremont's California Battalion in the California insurrection. He is named in a directory of New Helvetia ( Sutter's Fort), and also as one of the most troublesome malcontents in the battalion, necessitating a general court-martial of them in December, 1846-47. He had been a trapper and mountaineer and consorted with Indians the greater part of his life, familiar with their customs, readily mastering their dialects, wielding wide influence among them, besides later acquiring wealth by his business methods. He was one of the Philadelphia party that located, with Rev. James Woods on the Tuolumne at Wood's Crossing or Wood's Creek in the early summer of 1848.
He also worked the Big Oak Flat diggings, fifteen or twenty miles south of the rich Sonora gold placers, so named on account of a big oak tree on one of the main travelled routes to the Yosemite and later so familiarly known. At the Flat mining in 1849, he employed Indians, whom he paid in blankets and provisions, constituting himself also protector of their interests against white encroachments. He developed a faculty for dealing with the Indians and contracting domestic relations with them, while doing a lucrative business as an employer and supplier, a quarrel arose at the rancheria and a Texan was arrow-headed to death. The whites rushed to arms. Indians were killed, strained relations resulted looking to a war, but Savage pacified the Indians and they moved higher up into the mountains.
Afterward, in 1850, he opened a trading post on the south fork of the Merced, employing Indians and marrying according to mountain men custom the five daughters of as many capitanejos. By reason of the connections with as many tribes, he commanded general influence and strengthened his personal safety among the Mariposa Indians. His wealth was reported to be not less than $100,000. He was such a powerful agency that the governor hesitated not to commission him major of the ranger battalion. His services moreover were indispensable as interpreter in the treaty making negotiations with the surrendering or captured tribes. The lawless and predatory Yosemites on the headwaters of the Merced alone were beyond his authority and persuasion.
At the Merced post he did business on the principle of hiring every Indian that would work, taking all the gold dust but scrupulously paying in hardware or whiskey, ounce for ounce, pound for pound. Not alone was he a man of mark, widely known in the district but throughout a considerable part of the state. The Yosemites drove him from the Merced to Aqua Fria on the Mariposa in 1850, and he established a branch post on the Fresno as related. Galen Clark, who died in Oakland, Cal., March 24, 1910, at the age of ninety-six, said that Savage was perhaps the best friend of the Indians while in captivity.
A letter written from Hart's ranch on January 16, 1851, by T. G. Palmer of Newark, N. J., as a member of the battalion to his father gives this thumbnail sketch of Savage:
"From his long acquaintance with the Indians, Mr. Savage had learned their ways so thoroughly that they cannot deceive him. He has been one of their great chiefs and speaks their language as well as they can themselves. No dog can follow a trail like he can. No horse can endure as much. He sleeps but little, can go days without food and can run 100 miles in a day and a night over the mountains, and then sit and laugh for hours over a campfire as fresh and lively as if he had just been taking a little walk for exercise. He pointed out their fires, could hear them sing and could smell them, but his eyes were the only ones that could see, his ears alone could hear and his nose smell anything unusual."
As illustrative of the ways of the man, it is related that at the Fresno branch he kept an electro-magnetic battery and with its mysterious operation worked upon the superstition of his Indian hangers on. Also that on the visit to San Francisco in October, 1850, when he took along 600 pounds Troy weight of gold to safe-deposit and to make purchases, the lure of the gaming table seized him, and presumably in the famous El Dorado tent at Washington and Kearney Streets he leaped on the table and setting foot on the card wagered his weight in gold on the turn of the wheel — and lost. He was an ignorant man, but naturally shrewd, unable to read or write, but one of such positivism that he made many warm friends as well as implacable foes. Though in directing command of the battalion. Savage gave most of his attention to the palavering commissioners. The business connections with the treaties were transacted principally through him as the medium. The mission interpreters translated the Indian dialects into Spanish, these were rendered into English by Spanish interpreters of the commission, while Savage conducted the preliminaries and acted as ' a check on the dialect translations.
After the war, Indian affairs fell into the hands of politicians and a ring, and the pot was kept simmering to influence congressional action, or the war department, for liberal estimates for the California Indian service. The excitement was largely local, the Indians remaining quietly on the reservations, as they did for about four years, under a loose supervision. They were envied for the possession of the Kings River Farm, and a few whites were ready to squat on the land whenever the red man was driven off. This element' was headed by one Walter H. Harvey, who was the first county judge of Tulare. Handy hangers-on asserted claim to the reservation, the Indians on the rancheria warned them off, they were fired upon and several squaws were killed.
Savage denounced the agitations and murders, asserting that Harvey was the responsible cause of them. Mariposans knew little concerning the affair as the Kings River was such a distant outpost. There had, however, been strong opposition against the commissioners' location of two reservations in one county and the selection of the best farming land for them. It was openly declared that the reservation system, pretty in theory, was so mismanaged as to be one of neglect of the Indians and a fraud on the government. Bunnell asserts that while Tenieya and family were in the mountains subsisting on acorns the cost of their rations and support at the reservation was regularly charged up, and that estimates for appropriations were deceptive and "ten times more than the truth would warrant," so well established was the "California Indian Ring."
Savage successfully pursued his trade with the miners on the Fresno and surrounding territory and the Indians of the reservation, besides those of the Kings "Farm, exciting jealous ire. Self-interest prompted him to keep the Indians pacified, but nevertheless he denounced Harvey and his associates as deserving punishment, all of which came to their ears. Harvey and Sub-agent Campbell in common cause denounced Savage in return. Harvey assailed Savage's integrity and boasted that he would not dare visit Kings River while he (Harvey) was there. Savage rode over on the forenoon of August 16, 1852. He demanded a retraction of the offensive personal remarks. Harvey refused, saying that Savage had been talking about him.
"Yes," replied Savage, "I have said that you are a murderer and a coward."
Harvey retreated a pace and passed the He. Savage struck him in the face and his pistol fell out of his shirtwaist. Quartermaster John G. Marvin picked up the weapon and Harvey asserted that Marvin had disarmed him, but