Native American Miners
The discovery of gold brought hundreds of thousands of newcomers onto the lands of the California Indians. The Native people responded in a variety of ways. Many retreated into the interior as their homelands were invaded by the flood of gold seekers. Others, especially among the Miwok and Yokuts in the Central Valley, raided the settlements of the newcomers for horses and other livestock.
Many Native people joined in the rush for gold and became miners themselves. Colonel Richard B. Mason estimated in 1848 that more than half the gold diggers during the first year of the gold rush were Indians. Miwok prospectors and miners, for instance, helped open the extraordinary riches of the southern mines.
At first, many Indian miners worked as laborers for white Californians, often in a state of peonage similar to their status on the Mexican ranchos. Others labored as independent agents and traded their gold to white merchants for a variety of goods. In the early days, California Indians were unaware of the true value of the gold they were trading, and the whites competed with one another in cheating them. A common practice was to trade glass beads to Indian miners for gold, weight for weight. But soon the Native miners developed a finer appreciation of the white man's high regard for gold and became increasingly able and sophisticated traders themselves.
The Native American population of California declined from an estimated 150,000 in 1846 to 30,000 by 1870. Most of the decline was caused by disease and malnutrition, but thousands of Indians died in genocidal campaigns carried out by white Californians. Miners and ranchers banded together for the express purpose of killing Indians. These men roamed through the hills and valleys of northern California, hitting especially hard the Native people who lived in the heart of the mother lode, the Nisenan Maidu and the Miwok.
Local sentiment was strongly in favor of Indian extermination. The Yreka Herald in 1853 made its position unequivocally clear: "Extermination is no longer a question of time--the time has arrived, the work has commenced, and let the first man that says treaty or peace be regarded as a traitor." In 1866 the Chico Courant concurred: "It is a mercy to the red devils to exterminate them, and a saving of many white lives. Treaties are played out--there is only one kind of treaty that is effective--cold lead."
Frontier communities raised subscriptions to pay bounties for Indian scalps and Indian heads. In addition to such local remuneration, the state legislature authorized payments of expense claims totaling over $1 million. The federal government subsequently reimbursed the state. Thus the process of extermination went forward with the financial support of local, state, and federal governments. It was legalized and subsidized murder on a mass scale.
The Destruction of the Ranchos
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican American War. It provided that the property rights of Mexicans living in the lands ceded to the United States would be "inviolably respected." Hundreds of Mexican ranchos covered some thirteen million acres of land in California. As the world rushed in during the gold rush, the property rights of the rancho owners often were ignored. Newcomers settled on the rancho lands as squatters.
To resolve the confusion over land ownership, the United States Congress in 1851 passed a new land law. The law established a lengthy legal procedure by which the rancho owners could prove the validity of their land titles and remove the squatters. Ultimately the owners won confirmation of about 600 claims, involving nearly nine million acres, and lost about 200 claims, covering four million acres. But the average length of time required by the grantees to prove the validity of their titles was 17 years. By the time their grants were confirmed, the original grantees usually were bankrupt. Thus the grantees often lost their lands in the process of proving ownership.
The impoverishment of the old rancho elite of California evoked expressions of intense bitterness. Apolinaria Lorenzano, once the proud owner of three ranchos, mourned the loss of her lands: "I find myself in the greatest poverty, living by the favor of God and from handouts."
The largest group of foreign miners in the early years of the California gold rush were Latin Americans. Some came from Chile and Peru, but most were Mexicans from the state of Sonora.
Animosities between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking Californians became intense in the early years of the gold rush. Part of the animosity was due to left-over hostilities from the Mexican American War. But economic competition also propelled the antagonism. Many of the Latinos were expert miners, possessing superior mining knowledge and experience.
The state legislature in 1850 passed a Foreign Miners License Tax requiring miners who were not citizens of the United States to pay a monthly fee of $20. When Mexican miners in the town of Sonora announced their refusal to pay, hundreds of Anglo miners (including veterans wearing their old Mexican War uniforms) gathered to assist the tax collectors.
Fifteen thousand Mexican miners were working in the southern mines at the beginning of 1850. After the passage of the Foreign Miners License Tax, ten thousand left the region, most to return to Mexico.