For every fine paid, the city marshal received a commission of eight bits (one dollar) and his Indian deputies shared one bit (twelve and a half cents), with the remainder going into the city’s coffers. The Indian auction became a lucrative source of municipal revenue, second only to the license fees collected from the pueblo’s ubiquitous drinking and gambling establishments. A cash-and-carry operation, the auction was easily corrupted. In 1852 the county grand jury charged that “Indians arrested for intoxication, disturbing the peace, etc., are taken to the jail and are there sold out to the highest bidder—without even as much as the form of a trial—and that the proceeds of the sale are divided between the mayor and the city marshal.” According to state law, before Indians could be legally auctioned there needed to be some semblance of adjudication. Mayor John G. Nichols, a Democrat who served four terms during the 1850s, dismissed the allegation, insisting that he was merely following the practice of his predecessors. In 1853 District Judge Benjamin Hayes ruled the slave mart “unlawful” on similar grounds, but his decision was either reversed or ignored, because the auctions continued, not ending until the early 1870s, by which time Indians had ceased to be an important component of the pueblo’s working class.
THE SUBSTANCE ABUSE, the debauchery, and especially the violence among emancipados were symptoms of social dysfunction if not social disintegration. These patterns had been developing for many years and were accelerated by the American conquest. Indians contributed to the general mayhem in Los Angeles as much as any group. But unlike Californios and Anglos, who were equal opportunity perpetrators, Indians directed virtually all their aggressions at their own people. With the important exception of the destruction of the Irving gang, there is no recorded instance of an Indian killing a Californio or an American during the entire decade of the 1850s. Yet the record overflows with instances of Indians killing Indians. Juan Pelon, a Cahuilla, stabbed and killed Calletano, a Luiseño, during an angry dispute over a card game. The Indian José “took an axe and smote one Salvador,” a fellow Gabrieleño, inflicting a mortal wound. Juan Chapo, a Luiseño, struck and killed a native woman named Anselmo during a “drunken frolic” on Calle de los Negros. The identification of the killers in these cases was the only thing unusual about them. Most Indian perpetrators and victims went unidentified. “On Monday, Justice Mallard held an inquest upon the body of an Indian woman found dead near the new jail,” read a typical report in the Star. The coroner believed she had been killed on Saturday evening, her body lying undiscovered in a ravine for nearly two days. “There were several fresh wounds upon her body and her skull was broken, as if stones had been thrown upon it. A verdict of death by violence was rendered—but, as usual in such cases, all endeavors to discover the murderers have been unsuccessful.” City and county authorities expended very little energy investigating Indian homicides.
The greatest mayhem came during episodes of Indian communal violence. Bitter feelings between the Luiseños and Cahuillas, originating in the wartime violence, led to persistent conflict between members of the two groups, who together made up a majority of the Indian residents of Los Angeles. One evening in April 1851 a large group of Cahuillas went after a smaller group of Luiseños with clubs and stones. Five men were killed on the spot, with five more dying later of their wounds. A few weeks later leaders of the two peoples staged a match of churchurki, better known to Angelenos as peon, a game in which two teams of Indians sat facing each other, singing and drumming, and as the men on one side surreptitiously passed a small white stick from hand to hand, the men on the other side attempted to keep track of it. At a signal from an umpire, the singing stopped and wagering began on which man was holding the stick. A game of peon “produced enormous excitement and extravagant betting,” wrote attorney Joseph Lancaster Brent. “The bystanders took sides, including the women, who were desperate gamblers.” Accompanied by heavy drinking, the matches frequently ended in disputes and fights. This particular event, played on the slope of Fort Moore Hill behind the Plaza church, attracted several hundred Californio and Anglo spectators and went on late into the night, when an affray broke out among the players. Brent awoke to the “awful shrieks and war whoops of the combatants,” and the next morning he and others found the bodies of thirteen men on the hillside. At its next meeting, the city council banned the playing of peon within the city limits.
Several months later, in late October 1851, the Cahuillas held another peon match near the graveyard, outside the city limits at the northern terminus of Calle de Eternidad. Late in the evening a player named Coyote got into a dispute with Guadaloupe Ybarra over the price she was charging for aguardiente at a stand near her casa, resulting in a fight between a group of Cahuillas and Californios. The county sheriff was summoned, and by the time he arrived with an armed posse, a mob of Cahuillas was attempting to torch the Ybarra house. The sheriff ordered his men to fire on the unarmed crowd, and the Indians fled in all directions. The following morning authorities found a number of bullet-riddled bodies. “How many of the Indians were killed is not positively known,” reported the Star. “It is supposed that others must have been conveyed away and secretly buried during the night.” The sheriff arrested twenty-one Cahuillas on charges of riot and attempted arson, and a justice of the peace sentenced them to twenty-five lashes apiece. But before punishment could be meted out, Cahuilla headman Juan Antonio arrived, arranged to have the prisoners released to his custody, and departed with them in a huff. Reports of the deaths of a great many Cahuillas at the hands of the sheriff circulated widely among the Indian communities of southern California.
JUAN ANTONIO had saved Los Angeles from the outlaws terrorizing the county. He had offered assurances of his continued support. Yet he and his people got no respect. Only a few weeks before, southern California Indian leaders including Captain Antonio had been summoned to Rancho Santa Ana del Chino for a treaty conference with “the big men sent by the President.” Congress had authorized the appointment of commissioners to negotiate with the California tribes, who were asked to cede title to their lands in exchange for permanent reservations and promises of perpetual peace and friendship. The commissioners had already signed treaties with many tribes in the northern portion of the state. Captain Antonio and the leaders of the Luiseños dutifully appeared at Chino in mid-July 1851 and waited for most of a week, but the commissioners never appeared. Ranchero Isaac Williams furnished the delegations with plenty of beef, and attempted to mollify them with presents, but they left in bad humor. For Captain Antonio it was another in what he considered a long train of abuses. Angelenos feared the consequences. “Nothing could be worse for this country,” opined the Star, “than a serious disaffection on the part of this tribe towards the inhabitants.” But as it happened, Captain Antonio would once again play a role as savior of the pueblo.
The real threat came from another corner of Indian country. Also present at Chino was Antonio Garra, headman of the Cupeños. Garra, raised at Mission San Luis Rey, impressed the missionaries with his intelligence and his facility for languages, and they placed him in charge of the mission estancia at the hot springs in Valle de San José. The Indians who worked there—Luiseños, Quechans, and Cahuillas—became known as the Cupeños under his leadership. Garra skillfully guided the community through the turmoil of secularization, and they made significant economic progress, raising subsistence crops, grazing cattle, and herding sheep in the grassy valleys of the Santa Rosa Mountains.
Many Cupeños worked for ranchero J. J. Warner, owner of Rancho Valle de San José or Warner’s Ranch, by virtue of a Mexican land grant. Warner, whom everyone knew as Juan Largo, was a harsh taskmaster as well as a covetous neighbor, often encroaching on the Cupeños’ prime grazing land as well as their hot springs, a site with both practical and ceremonial significance for them. Frustration with Warner led Garra to befriend General Kearny when he arrived in December 1846. Garra, wrote the editor of the San Diego Herald, “is regarded by all who know him as a man of energ
y, determination, and bravery. As one of the most outstanding chiefs, his power and influence among the Indians is almost unbounded.”
But the route into southern California along the old Sonora Road crossed through the Cupeño homeland, and during the Gold Rush the people were overrun by Mexicans and Americans who pilfered their crops, slaughtered their livestock, and squatted on their land. Garra appealed to American officers for protection, but very little assistance was forthcoming. The outlook grew even bleaker after the organization of the state government. The legislature explicitly authorized taxing the property of “Christianized” Indians. Los Angeles County made no attempt to tax emancipados, but San Diego County did. Garra was outraged. He believed his people should be exempt from supporting a government that denied them the franchise, barred them from the protections of the law, and refused to provide them with basic government services. When the Cupeños declined to pay, the county sheriff threatened to impound their livestock. Coming on the heels of the aborted negotiations with federal officials, and left with no one to whom he could appeal, Garra concluded that his only remaining recourse was violent resistance.
He had demography on his side, if only he could unite the fractious tribes of southern California. Garra approached Indian leaders in San Diego and Los Angeles Counties and made a special effort to recruit Juan Antonio of the Cahuillas. He dispatched a delegation north to organize among the Chumash and another south to stir up the native peoples of Baja California. He attempted to rouse the Quechans of the Colorado River, who had a long history of resistance to intruders. He also seems to have shared his thinking with a number of Californios who were unhappy with Anglo dominance. Garra proposed a coordinated strike at American centers of power throughout southern California. The uprising would begin with a Quechan attack on Fort Yuma, the American military outpost at the Colorado crossing, with the goal of closing the Sonora Road. The Quechans and the Diegueños (former néofitos of Mission San Diego, also known as the Kumeyaay) would then join in an assault on San Diego, while the Chumash fell on Santa Barbara. Finally, a joint force of Cupeños, Luiseños, and Cahuillas would beseige Los Angeles. Californio supporters were to act as a fifth column.
In early November, Garra and his personal guard traveled east across the desert and joined the Quechans in an assault on Fort Yuma. It was a small garrison, but defended with heavy artillery, and the Quechans quickly lost heart. To humor them, Garra and his men participated in the ambush of a party of sheep herders, killing four or five Americans and stealing several thousand sheep. But when the Quechans fell to quarreling over the spoils, Garra realized the first phase of his plan had failed. Returning home he was greeted with more bad news. The Chumash had declined to join the uprising, having just signed a treaty of peace with the Americans. Moreover, the Luiseños were badly divided. Many sought refuge from the anticipated uprising in San Diego and from those refugees the Americans had caught wind of Garra’s plans. Aside from his own people at Cupa, the only solid support came from their Cahuilla neighbors at the ranchería of Los Coyotes, in the mountains several miles east of Cupa, a community that had experienced a similar disruption of its homeland by migrants. Garra decided to press ahead nevertheless, hoping that forceful action on his part might inspire other Indians.
On Friday evening, November 21, 1851, four invalid Americans bathing at the hot springs near Cupa were murdered in cold blood by Cupeños commanded by Garra’s twenty-year-old son, Antonino. The next target was ranchero J. J. Warner. “On Saturday morning, about sunrise,” Warner later recalled, “I was awoke by the war-whoop.” Looking out he saw twenty or thirty Indians from the ranchería of Los Coyotes, armed with bows and arrows. “The Cahuillas are on us!” his Cupeño servant boy exclaimed. Warner sent the boy out to parlay, but he joined the rebels. Anticipating trouble, Warner had already dispatched his wife and children to San Diego and had taken the precaution of saddling several horses and leaving them tied next to an outbuilding at the back of the house. His only hope was to get to them before the Cahuillas did. Grabbing a revolver, and pulling another servant along behind, he threw open the door and began firing. “I succeeded in killing one, and shortly afterwards shot another while running from my house to the outhouse.” Warner jumped on one of the horses, pulled his servant up behind, and charged off amid a shower of arrows. The Cahuillas declined to pursue him, but instead began methodically plundering and vandalizing Warner’s ranch.
Later that day the Cupeño and Cahuilla attackers rendezvoused at Los Coyotes, where Garra had established his headquarters. They brought along the American William Marshall, who operated a store at Cupa, whose life had been spared because he was married to a Cupeño woman. Garra told Marshall he was counting on the support of several prominent Californios, including the Lugos of San Bernardino, who he said “were in his favor.” That same day he dispatched a runner with a note to José Antonio Estudillo, a wealthy ranchero living in San Diego. “The moment has arrived to strike the blow,” Garra wrote. The mountain Cahuillas had joined his uprising, and he was about to depart for the assault on Los Angeles. “You will arrange with the white people and Indians,” he concluded, “and send me your word.”
Word of the attacks reached San Diego the following evening, followed the next day by Warner himself, who estimated that Garra was in command of a force of four or five hundred men. But, Warner warned, if Juan Antonio’s Cahuillas joined in, that number could jump to several thousand. Even as residents came to terms with that sobering observation, sentries captured the runner carrying Garra’s note to Estudillo. Its contents were made public, which greatly raised Anglo suspicions of Californios. At a mass meeting, Major General Joshua H. Bean of the state militia called for volunteers for an immediate counterattack. “The tocsin of war sounds,” merchant Thomas Whaley, who joined up, wrote to his mother. “We momentarily expect to be attacked by the Indians who under their great chief Antonio Garra are swarming by thousands into the south. The town of San Diego is proclaimed under martial law. Every man is enrolled a soldier.”
Well, not exactly every man. Although Californios supplied horses, mules, and rations for the expedition, none served in the volunteer force, which was a thoroughly Anglo operation. Forty men under the command of Major George B. Fitzgerald of the U.S. Army marched out of San Diego headed for Cupa, leaving the town, which was overflowing with refugee Luiseños and Californios, in the hands of some three dozen armed vigilantes. “The native Californians were backward in volunteering to punish the Indians,” reported the San Diego Herald, apparently referring to their lukewarm support of the campaign. “It was deemed prudent, under the circumstances, to bring them under strict military discipline.”
GARRA’S UPRISING presented the first major challenge for Los Angeles County sheriff James R. Barton, elected the previous September to succeed G. Thompson Burrill, who declined to stand for a second term. Barton, who fought with Alexander Bell and Archibald Gillespie during the late war, enjoyed a reputation as a fearless combatant and an ardent southerner. He was well-known and generally well-liked. It was Sheriff Barton who ordered the slaughter of the unarmed Cahuillas during the October riot at the peon match. Afterward Angelenos had expected trouble from the Cahuillas. But county authorities learned otherwise in a letter from ranchero Isaac Williams. He had spoken with a Mexican who claimed to be the sole survivor of the Quechan attack on the sheep herders at the Colorado crossing. Antonio Garra had spared his life, the man reported, saying that he was rising against the Anglos but did not wish to harm Mexicans or Californios. Los Angeles, Don Julián feared, was in imminent danger of attack by Garra’s pan-Indian army.
Sheriff Barton and two deputies rode east to investigate and returned several days later with General Bean. On Friday evening, November 28, a week after the murder of the Americans at the hot springs, Barton and Bean spoke at a mass meeting in Los Angeles. An Indian uprising had indeed begun, they reported. At San Bernardino, 150 Mormon settlers were holed up in a stockade. Los Angeles was in equ
al or greater danger, said Barton, and he stressed the “urgent necessity for speedy preparations for defense.” Bean called for volunteers to serve under his command. The county government had neither arms nor funds, so the meeting empowered a committee of prominent Angelenos to cooperate with Bean in procuring weapons, ammunition, horses, and equipment, by seizure if necessary. Andrés Pico raised a company of 50 Californio lanceros, and an equal number of Anglos volunteered. But Bean was not optimistic. If the Cahuillas joined the Cupeños, he wrote the governor, they would be capable of mustering a force of several thousand men. “It would strain the energies of this county to their utmost tension to resist so formidable a combination, if it could be resisted at all.”
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