In the fall of 1854, the English traveler and writer James M. Hutchings learned that the "great men of California" planned to meet in a grand Indian council in Nevada County in early October. Those expected to attend included California's most powerful Democrats: Sitting U.S. Senators William M. Gwin and John B. Weller, Secretary of State James Denver (a former Senator and future California governor), U.S. Army General john E. Wool (commander of the Department of the Pacific), and California Indian Superintendent Thomas Henley, a prominent Nisenan leader, Weymeh – mockingly referred to as the “Digger King,” – and an estimated 500 Indians were also to attend. The removal of Yuba and Nevada County Indians to Nome Lackee Reservation in Colusa (later Tchama) County was “contemplated.” Hutchings and other journalists such as Aaron A. Sargent were eager to witness and document this momentous historical event.

In his classic fictional work Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain created a character, Injun Joe, who has made an indelible imprint on America n popular though Injun Joe personifies the archetypal "half-breed": an outcast with a penchant for drunkenness and violence. In Twain's day, the half-breed was an apt symbol to excite fear, for he was a person living on the margin of white society but uncontrolled by its conventions and therefore unpredictable. Twain’s Injun Joe mirrored the earlier characterization of Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Wurttemberg, who had traveled up the Missouri River in 1823: "Given to immoderate drinking," he wrote, the half-bloods are generally not regarded very highly, but their behavior rather than their color is the reason." Wurttemberg viewed mixed-bloods as a species of frontier people who lived outside the moral restraints of society and were, therefore, dangerous both to Indians and whites . This stereotype of the drunken half-breed has persisted into the present day, in part because it does have some historical basis. As with any stereotype, however, it reveals a cryptic element of truth, while veiling a more complex reality. The stereotype distorts by generalizing, since biracial people were not a unified or uniform group in the past, any more than they are today.

Banning, Cal.: Ushkana Press, 2012, 222 pp., $29

Coinciding with the release of the movie Gidget,1 a new era in surfing was ushered in with the development of the light and durable, polyurethane- foam and fiberglass-covered surfboard. Thousands of Southern California teenagers rushed to enjoy the new-found opportunity at their doorstep and to partake of the radical social identity that went along with surfing.

Red Gentlemen & White Savage,, a first book by David Nichols, is an overview of a very significant and complex subject: the formative era in Ameri­ can Indian policy. The years following the Ameri- can Revolution from 1783 to 1801 were bloody and unstable as thousands of settlers poured across the Appalachian Mountains. In the Old Northwest, a shifting alliance of Woodlands Indian groups, encour­ aged by the British traders still in their forts along the Great Lakes, per­ sistently opposed the settlers moving across the Ohio River in the 1780s and succeeded in winning important military victories in the early 1790s. In the old Southwest, Creeks and Cherokees sought aid from the Spanish in defense of their homelands. On the contested boundaries, both negotiation and force of arms were employed to attain physical and legal right to the soil. A prismatic cast of historical participants were engaged in this power struggle: Revolutionary war veterans with land warrants, land companies, land-speculating politicians, squatters, federal and state officials, Indian groups ranging from friendly to hos­ tile, and the British and Spanish governments. Wartime debt and wide­ spread opposition to enhancing federal power complicated the problem of establishing peace. U.S.-Indian relations, writes Nichols, were "anarchic" (p. 19).

In 184 7, at a ceremony commemorating the founding of St. Louis, eighty-eight-year-old Pierre Chouteau spoke nostalgically of the simplicity and honesty of the creole society of St. Louis's early years, his thoughts carrying him back to "the frontier dawn ofhis pilgrimage, when the first Chouteaus were truly the barons of the river" (p. 204). So concludes William Foley and David Rice's valuable biography of Auguste and Pierre Chouteau. In their study of these complex, long-lived, and remarkable men, whose influence spanned over sixty years in Missouri history, Foley and Rice make a long overdue contribution to the history of the political and economic development of the Mississippi Valley.

The adventurous nature of the sport of surfing and the conditions of its historical development facilitated the creation and sustenance of an indigenous folklore. 1 Surfing legends, tall tales, wonder tales, and fabulates are the genres conspicuous to the folklorist in terms of repeti tion of themes and characterizations; for fantasy and heroism are the leitmotifs of surf-lore. In many of its manifestations, surf-lore is a special interpretation of historical events and personages; it thus provides the folklorist the opportunity to observe the process of legend formation from fabulate and memorate.

Imre Sutton, Professor Emeritus of geography at California State University, Fullerton and a pioneer of indigenous mapping, died of prostate cancer on october 25, 2012. He was 84. He was a teacher and bibliographer, a loving father and husband, an amateur pianist and composer, and an editor and consultant. An energetic and exacting man, he brought his expertise in cartography and environmentalism to bear on Indian policy and law. In the rapidly changing panorama of late twentieth century Indian country, Imre recognized the pivotal importance of Indian land tenure. Imre was nothing less than a visionary to his colleague in Indian Affairs Patrice Kunesh, who has said that Imre “had the sense of changing impulses, particularly around land tenure, the heart and soul of the American Indian identity and history” (personal communication, Dec. 27, 2012).

When the city of San Diego developed its water resources in the early twentieth century, the Indians of the Capitan Grande Reservation (also called “El Capitan”) were an important group of stakeholders. They lived along the San Diego River in the flood zone of the El Capitan Reservoir. The city had purchased their lands in 1919 and 1932 so that the dam could be built. In August 1933, however, a determined group of Indians delayed construction by refusing to permit their graveyard to be disturbed until the Department of the Interior agreed to purchase the Baron Long ranch as their new home. Mayor John Hammond urged John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to buy this “splendid” ranch for the Indians.1 But the stalemate dragged on into the late summer months of 1934 with no resolution in sight. An exasperated official in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) sought legal authority for the Department of the Interior to remove the Indians and their graveyard “with whatever degree of force the situation may require.”2