Historical Footnotes

3. Los Angeles Indian Suicides

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3. Los Angeles Indian Suicides

There is no California topic more difficult to speak on than the Indians. The subject is enormously complex, the information scanty, unreliable and contradictory, and no moral perspective on what facts we have can sit comfortably with us today.

So let's shave it down to something workable. Native races lived throughout the state, but were naturally much more concentrated in Southern California where the weather was much better for a people who wore barely any clothing. When the Spanish Crown (this was before an independent Mexico) decided to lay claim to California in the latter Eighteenth Century, the plan was not to move a lot of people in, but rather to convert the Indians to Christianity and ultimately give them back the land to farm. The California project was overwhelmingly a missionary one, placed in the hands of the Franciscan Order.

Since the purpose of the missions was to convert and civilize the Indians, they were located, especially at first, where the native populations were the largest. The great basin of Los Angeles stood first in this respect, and thus the mission operation at San Gabriel was exceptionally large. As in the vast majority of California, the Southern Indians had no agriculture whatsoever. Their staple food was gruel made from acorns. The Spanish plan was based upon experience in Mexico, where natives had already built a civilization, including massive urban centers rooted in sophisticated agriculture. Thus the only issue was to make them Christians, and, where practical, to get them to speak Spanish.

But this was quickly found impossible in California. The leap to even a veneer of civilization was beyond the means of California Indians, nor did they want it. The Indians were distinguished from Hispanics in the broadest terms, as sin razon (literally "lacking reason") while the Christians called themselves gente de razon, (literally "reasoning people"). Functionally, these terms meant "wild" or "savage" as opposed to "civilized," and therefore differed little from American attitudes toward Indians. However much this language may offend our sentiments today, there is no question that the Spanish missionaries and the Indians could not communicate with one another.

But even lacking all rapport, the Indians were willing to abandon their distinctive tribe identities and submit to the control of mission Fathers. It was impossible to go back to eating acorns, squirrels and rabbits once they tasted beef and beans and corn tortillas. They ate this food but made no progress toward a state where mission lands could be distributed among them to be farmed directly. And so the plans to end the mission project kept on being deferred until the growing Mexican population (Mexico was now a country), mostly soldiers in the army, pressed to take the lands themselves for cattle ranching. This finally occurred in the mid-1830's and the missions lost almost all their lands and Indians.

The Mission Indians were free again, but their universe had long since disappeared. They became dependents of rancheros, living in small temporary villages or camps called rancherias, but moving on to other ones whenever they decided. They did all the meanest labor. Even the humblest of Californios were vaqueros riding horses, and Hispanic culture frowned on horsemen doing any tasks on foot. So the Indios subsided at the bottom of the social ladder, but recovered simple freedoms that were lost in mission days. The ranching Californian didn't care about the souls of Indians and simply used them to whatever extent possible and let them live life as they chose.

By the time Los Angeles became officially American in 1850, the Indians associated with the Mission of San Gabriel had apparently moved north and were replaced with others who'd moved up from mission country to the south. The Gold Rush immigration to the northern part of California didn't just produce that great demand for beef that made Los Angeles so wealthy. There was also an enormous call for wine, and as San Gabriel had been the place where vineyards were the most developed back in mission days, and it would take some years before new vines could be established up near San Francisco, the wine and its associated brandy business started booming in Los Angeles. A Frenchman had jumpstarted massive vineyard operations east of town, down near the river. Only Indios could be expected to dress vines, pick grapes and to perform all other necessary labor, and they did.

The ugliness attending their condition was so troubling that it even shocked the locals. Indians were quick to move and could be unreliable, and so a kind of legal slavery emerged. The Indians would work the whole week in the vineyards. On Friday evening they'd be paid in big ceramic jugs of cheap raw wine. The gringo sheriff set aside the large square where Los Angeles Street met old Aliso Road. The Indians brought their wine jugs there and held the blackest celebration all the way through Sunday dawn. The place was packed with Indios, drinking into madness, playing their most favored gambling/guessing game of peon, and getting into fights producing many homicides performed by smashing skulls with boulders. It was a scandal to all outsiders visiting Los Angeles.

Come Sunday dawn, the sheriff brought in deputies to drag off the dead bodies and herd survivors into a corral. These were charged with vagrancy and public drunkenness and sentenced to a fine they couldn't pay. The vineyard owners paid their fines in bulk, for which the Indios must work another week in compensation. Trapped in this tar pit, it was but weeks or some few months before an Indian was dead. This practice followed over years, the Indians gradually disappeared, if not from weekend violence then from the depths of alcohol destruction. All the while the fines (or rather, fees) paid by the vineyards kept the sheriff's office going.

The most important point is that, although there was an aspect of compulsion, it's very clear the Indians themselves jumped in the whirlpool. They could survive the Californians, but the arrival of the gringos drove them to collective suicide. Their mournful songs and chants while drunk and playing peon were understood by everyone as dirges for themselves. By the middle 1850's it was common to hear people ask what happened to all the Indians that used to be around. And in that sentiment so common to Americans, they claimed regret about the disappearance of what they now remembered as a peaceful, harmless people.

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