Low Life in the High Desert

by David Hirst

  Those who could (the young men) escaped on the Mexican horses and disappeared into ‘Greater Mexico’. The power of the shaman was erased in the colourless dust under the hooves of those horses.

  Meantime the Indians were put to work in the concentration camps that the Mexican Spanish were building and calling missions. Today, civilised tourists visit the missions and marvel at the beautiful simplicity, speaking in hushed and sacred tones, admiring the polished tecate tiles and the massive wood beams. This is a little like visiting Dachau or Treblinka, and ogling in reverence and respect.

  The mission system was Mediterranean — European-style inquisitorial concentration camps, state garrisons that imprisoned the local population, who were used as slaves and worked to death. The garrisons were built as part of California’s first freeway system — ‘El Camino Real’ — the King’s Highway. The missions were a chain of death camps. In all, it was a form of ethnic cleansing.

  That was the fate of the Indian tribes that came and went from the High Desert. It has been given short shrift by history, but so has the fate of Californian Indians in general, even though until the white man made his presence felt they comprised nearly one-third of all the people of North America.

  Boo was furious to find no evidence of a village anywhere on the land, and was ready to slap Jim when he announced that the spearhead was probably an ‘isolate’ — a one-off — possibly even carried in the body of a deer that was shot somewhere else but made it up here, to later die. Most likely, she grudgingly had to accept, the Indians had no permanent address up around Boulder House, but used it as a transit camp three hundred years ago, on their way from the lower desert to Big Bear when fleeing the summer’s brutal heat. The area is strewn with caves, some with blackened walls, which may be evidence of their fires.

  They moved often, these travellers, following the path of the water and the weather, migrating to the pine forest in the summer and wintering in the desert in much the same fashion as elderly and wealthy retired Americans do today. Their camps were guarded in their absence by ‘spirit sticks’, as they had no Sheriff’s Department. Water was more prevalent in those days, and it is not difficult to imagine the valley that lies before me as once approaching lush.

  Today, there is plenty of food that can be taken from the land, as the natural food sources haven’t been touched by humans in one hundred and fifty years. An Indian woman, returning to Boulder House today, would find abundance. If the going gets really, really tough, Boo and I and maybe Sailor could survive, if we knew how, on history’s surplus. For food was found almost everywhere.

  Our predecessors would have enjoyed a rich and varied diet in a good season, with plenty of game — ground squirrels, grey fox, bobcats, bighorn sheep, deer, bear, chipmunks, mice, kangaroo rats, and packrats. Meat was boiled in cooking pots, or grilled over hot coals. Ground meal could be made from the seeds and beans of many plants — acorns, catsclaw, mesquite, and pinyon pounded in rounded stone metates to make a kind of flour. We recently discovered one such metate — a lovely stone with a hollowed indent, and decorated with simple pictographs — wedged between a row of other rocks in our cactus garden. Bill hadn’t bothered to mention it.

  Bows and arrows were manufactured from the manzanita and desert willow. Arrowheads — much smaller than those of Plains or Eastern Indians — were made from quartz, obsidian, jasper, and many other readily available rocks that the area is blessed with. Small animals were hunted with stones — the Indians were expert stone-throwers — or pulled from their burrows with a specially crafted crooked stick.

  In spring, the berries and cactus fruits were eaten for nourishment and moisture. The blossoms of the cactus flowers were roasted, and roots also served as medicine.

  Dried seeds were stored in pots with tight lids to keep out the rodents and the damp. When the people moved camp, they hid them for later use. Such a pot was found by Bill Lavender’s son in a cave a few hundred yards from where I write. It is hard not to think of what happened to the people who left it there, expecting to return.

  The Chemehuevi went naked except for sandals, though the women wore a very fetching sack dress, and in the winters all donned blankets made from rabbit fur.

  Drugs were everywhere. Booze, speed, and acid were on hand. The booze they made from distilling all manner of cactus flowers, and the speed they took from the ‘squaw grass’ or ‘Mormon Tea’ that grows all around. It is a light high, but a pleasant one, and tasty if prepared properly — which is not hard.

  The acid menu is, if Tony is to be believed, decidedly diverse. The old favourite is Jimson weed or the Devil’s Trumpet, a potent hallucinogen that can cause madness and death. It was called Sacred Datura by the Indians, and utilised in religious ceremonies by the shamans, who would go into incredible trances, see things, make predictions, and turn into animals and the like. Much planning for the future was conceived under the spell of the weed. Presumably, they knew what they were doing. Today, hospitals across the country treat the unwary and the foolish who have dabbled with this deadliest of the deadly nightshade family. Whether snorted, smoked, or drunk as tea, the super-powerful hallucinogen ‘will render the taker blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, hot as a hare, dry as a bone, the bowel and bladder lose their tone, and the heart runs alone’, according to a national poison centre’s mnemonic for the clinical effects of typical poisoning.

  History is full of references to this mind-altering weed. Shakespeare got good mileage out of it in Anthony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. It also appears in Homer’s Odyssey. One does not need to travel far to encounter Jimson weed around Boulder House. It grows along all the local roadsides, and is a very fetching sight with its large white trumpet flowers. So far, however, we haven’t been tempted to pick any for afternoon tea.

  San Pedro cactus is another potent plant that can be found in our garden. The number of spines measures its strength — the maximum being nine. A drink made from an inch cut from a San Pedro boiled with water can reduce the unwary to the mental condition of a rabid dog for three days. Tony once remarked on the cactus’s qualities to a local who determined to get high, and proceeded to make a batch despite Tony’s protestations.

  ‘He drank half a cupful,’ Tony recalls, ‘and then he threw it all up. But it was still powerful enough to have him begging to come down days later.’

  Tony is not sure to this day if the chap ever did make it back to normal, but the lesson has not been lost on others.

  With the knowledge of these drugs and the fear of the grizzly bear, the shaman had some powerful tools indeed.

  Mescaline can be purchased in some cactus outlets managed by people who have no idea what they are selling. Fortunately, the great majority of those buying these plants are equally ignorant. One psychedelic that Tony pointed out to me while exploring a cactus shop comes laced with arsenic. The trick is to remove the stuff before eating or making a brew. Tony’s knowledge about how that is actually done is limited, so we passed. Don Juan need not worry about his day job.

  Across Pipes Canyon Road at the end of Roadrunner Rut are the scant remains of what is probably a Chemehuevi village. Brock speaks enthusiastically of the site, even though the arrowheads and pottery have been looted. For some of the finest rock painting in the entire desert still exists there, along with a smooth chute that Indian children would use as a slide. Rodney recalls playing in the ruins of the old village as a boy almost fifty years ago. Those days, he says, there were pottery and weapons scattered about.

  The Serranos of what we now know as Big Bear dressed in the skins of deer, rabbit, beaver, and otter, and wore buckskin leggings and intricate fibre sandals.

  Tattooing was universal in this most primitive of societies, as it remains in ours. The main weapon, a five-foot bow, was manufactured from ash, mesquite, or desert willow, and was — depending on the source — effective against firearms at either fifty feet or fifty yards
. Trade was brisk, and the desert Indian men could travel sixty-five kilometres a day on foot, sometimes through one of the hottest and harshest terrains on earth. The Serrano were also devoted to a form of football, utilising a round stone.

  The local Indian lands were first explored by the white man when the Spanish decided to expand God’s universe to include these unfortunates. On 20 May 1810, the Spanish found good water and land at what we now call San Bernardino. This happened to be the birthday of an Italian saint (Bernadine), which occurred in the year of Our Lord 1320. The name was translated into Spanish, and as many natives as could be found were rounded up. A rancho, Rancho San Bernardino, was completed in 1811, and immediately a series of earthquakes shook the grounds of the Indians. The Serrano considered this some sort of warning from their gods. They promptly burnt the rancho and drove the padres back to the San Gabriel mission whence they had come. But the Catholics returned — this time not to build a rancho, but another mission.

  The mission was built, and promptly attacked and destroyed by the would-be victims of the cross, and once again the enemies of promise fled. Some people just don’t know when they aren’t wanted. The Catholics returned to build a large mission surrounded by a larger adobe wall, which was never breached.

  Finally, the Serrano came to kneel at Christ’s feet, even interpreting the Twenty-third Psalm with a sadness that is palpable.

  ‘The Great Father above a Shepherd Chief is. I am his and with Him I want not. He throws me out a rope …’

  Meanwhile, to add to Indian confusion with the white man’s religion, the Mormons arrived in March 1851, and promptly tore down the forests, further destroying the habitat. They built communities, but left them as quickly as they had been created. They were ‘recalled’ to Salt Lake City, and California remains largely rid of them to this day.

  The various descriptions of the inhabitants of this region, chiefly the Serranos, are bewilderingly contradictory. Captain John C. Frémont, who, to the fury of those who knew the man well, is credited by many as the man who opened up the West, in 1844 wrote of the local Indians, ‘humanity here appeared in its lowest form, and in its most elementary state’. But those who have closely studied the history of the West might say the same of Frémont. The great explorer Joseph P. Walker was more withering in his description of Frémont than Frémont was of the Indians. Walker described Frémont as ‘the most complete coward I ever knew’.

  Frémont’s unsparingly hostile commentary on most of the Californian Aboriginal people must have delighted his benefactors in Washington, principally president James K. Polk and Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. Polk and Benton, both barkers for Manifest Destiny, were delighted to learn that the natives were subhuman — it being easier to dispose of a people once it is established that they are not people at all. That Frémont was a coward, a crook, and a liar did not deter following generations from naming schools, cities, and highways after him. He died in obscurity but was never properly disgraced, except by Joseph Walker. While Frémont had nothing but contempt for the Indians, Walker managed up to eight Indian wives, and for much of his life lived with the native people more often than he did with his own countrymen.

  While Frémont described the local Indians as the most wretched of people, early settlers described them as being well fed, even fat and rugged; in fact, the name Guachamas, a sub-group of the Serrano, meant ‘plenty to eat’.

  By the time California was admitted to the Union, as a free state, though with the avowed policy of exterminating the Indians, there weren’t many left, and those who remained were reduced to the state that Frémont claimed to have found them in — wretched and miserable.

  The remnants or fragments of the people then came under the benign influences of the US Government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA had the Catholic Church create ‘Indian Schools’ in the 1880s to ‘remove Indian children from the influence of their native cultural and religious beliefs, and teach them the way of the majority culture. The children were forbidden to speak their native languages and were severely punished when they did.’

  Genocide of this kind is not a matter of public scrutiny when it comes to the hapless but friendly Serrano. The native children were undoubtedly taught to labour in the boiling sun for the new white landowners, and soon the schools were known as ‘industrial schools’.

  The desert windstorms and the flash floods are as cruel to the remnants of those who came before us as the looters. But the worst offenders are the bulldozers of the developers. Jim Brock, the local archaeologist, laments that many of his colleagues are ignorant of what lies beneath the paths of huge machines that are forever extending the domain of rich retirees, especially in the Low Desert. Typical is the brand-new city of La Quinta, a perfectly manicured place of gated estates, endless golf courses, and the latest imported cars. Here a new peon class of illegal immigrants can be seen through the broiling heat clipping the grass by the footpaths (which never host the feet of the rich), or driving their dilapidated trucks and jalopies around the estates. These peons live in their cardboard and corrugated shanties, a few miles from the elegant playing fields of the Old Rich. They are mostly hidden in the reeds by the stinking waterways, thick with sewage and pesticides. They have come hundreds, even thousands, of miles, to cross a border some fifty miles away, to live and toil amongst the fragments, the shards, of the forgotten people.

  But the developers of the new cities have their tame archaeologists who are, according to Brock, either too stupid or too keen to keep their clients happy to discover what lies below.

  The best known of all local Indians was Willie Boy, a Paiute Indian whose story was turned into the Hollywood movie Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here. Robert Blake played Willie Boy, and Robert Redford starred as the kindly hunter of the young man who had the misfortune to get caught up in the ways of the white man’s politics in 1909.

  Willie Boy was rejected as the suitor for Isoleta, the daughter of a local Indian, Mike Boniface, who banned the union despite their love for each other. The two men fought, and Boniface died from a bullet — probably from his own gun. Taking Isoleta along, Willie Boy eluded a mounted posse, which in the film is led by Robert Redford, outdistancing them on foot. Unhappily, president Harding was campaigning at San Bernardino at the time, and was accompanied by the press corps who, as horrified as modern crews are when forced to Crawford, Texas, to cover the antics of the modern president, stumbled upon a real story.

  Willie Boy and Isoleta headed into the boundaries of Pipes Canyon believing that no white man would bother pursuing them. The death of an Indian was scarcely worth reporting. Unfortunately for the two young lovers, the Washington press corps, bored beyond comprehension by Harding’s set speeches and finding themselves in a Wild West fantasy land, jumped upon the death of Boniface and beat the story up with a very large stick. Harding, realising the coverage far exceeded his stump speeches, found a bandwagon he could not resist jumping upon, and turned the incident into a frontier uprising. The Hollywood mythological manifestation of these events had Robert Redford leading a brave posse against the killer. In reality, men who would never have got out of bed to avenge a slain Indian or consider crisscrossing the desert for a week in pursuit of some obscure Paiute and his girl sprung into action.

  Willie Boy was turned into a national political cause, and the media treated his run across the desert as a new Indian war. Getting poor Willie Boy became a matter of national security, and president Harding could not resist expressing concern over the danger that a barefoot kid, down to his last few bullets, posed to the southwest. After that, the story gets a little hazy. Popular history has it that Willie Boy killed his girl rather than surrender her. A less popular tale, the Indian version, has it that the posse killed Isoleta.

  Either way, Willie Boy and Isoleta, ignorant of the political-media event that attended their desire to be united, would never know that their demise was the result of just another W
ashington beat-up.

  After Isoleta’s death, Willie Boy continued down Pipes Canyon — close to where I sit writing — and across to Devil’s Garden in the Morongo Valley. There he finished his life with his last bullet. As Ed Edge, the local authority on wells, reflected over a beer nearly one hundred years after the incident, ‘It was all political. Why else would they have gone to any trouble over an Indian that killed another Indian?’

  Local shame at being forced to hunt down a kid and his girlfriend was mitigated by the public clamour, and no one stopped to wonder how the boy was able to humiliate a well-mounted posse, killing their horses at whim, wounding a sheriff he could have killed, and then taking his own life when the game was no longer worth the candle.

  The Indians burnt Willie Boy’s remains where the body fell, in the Devil’s Garden. Isoleta was buried on the reservation. The Indian women were allegedly interrupted in their task by voices from the grave of Boniface. They fled, and their task was completed by white men. Or so the story goes. Some suggest that, because she was riddled with the white man’s bullets, they took over proceedings to ensure the truth was never known.

  With Willie Boy’s death, resistance to the white man’s ways ended — at least in this part of America.

  The remaining Indians have settled on the Morongo Indian reservation at Banning or Mission Creek, where their descendants can be found enjoying the profits from the ever-growing casino industry. Indeed the clannish remnants of the tribes are amongst the richest people in the US. One member of the Agua Caliente tribe (he is one-quarter Indian) used to be one of the hardest workers in the High Desert. Today, he rakes in $60,000 from the casino without lifting a hand. The Cahuilla, who once roamed the lower desert, own most of Palm Springs — the white man, not realising its value, forgot to steal it from them. Today, the tribes play by the new rules, contributing to the war chests of Republicans and Democrats alike. Californian Governor Gray Davis has just allocated $10 million for a freeway off-ramp just down the road on Highway 10. It will make access to the Morongo Indian Casino less arduous. Perhaps it will help ease the white man’s burden — the off-ramp, that is. As more (and bigger) casinos sprout in the wilderness, the wealth and power of the remnants of the Aboriginal population will grow. Money doesn’t talk — it swears.