American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Most students of California Indians in the 1850s have dwelled on the violence that native people endured at the hands of whites. Tribes that were directly in the path of the Gold Rush were most severely affected because miners forced Indians off of valuable mineral and farm lands and commonly killed those who resisted. Even the most docile natives became victims of infectious diseases; tens of thousands of Indians did not survive the decade. The minority who survived often relied on seasonal labor for white ranchers who seldom had compunctions about exploiting Indian workers. Nevertheless, a few native people were able to exert a measure of control in this new world and became fixtures of daily life in California’s mining and agricultural settlements. Thus California Indians became an impoverished racial minority living on the margins of white society. The Nisenan Indians who occupied rich agricultural and gold-bearing lands in central California shared this sorry fate, yet little is known of the details of Nisenan history in the 1850s. The fullest record of Indian life during the Gold Rush ear exists in the correspondence of the Office of Indian Affairs, but federal agents concentrated their vision on the reservations that they administered where only a minority of the state’s Indians lived. For hundreds of small Indian communities a few scattered documentary references constitute a fragmentary record of their adjustments to the new conditions that beset them. Dispersed among the farms and towns of the Sacramento Valley, Nisenans were out of the view of federal Indian agents, so official records seldom mentioned them. As a result, rare documents that describe the Nisenans-like the two John A. Sutter letters printed with this essay-expand our understanding of Indian adaptations to white society and of how farmers and bureaucrats dealt with Indian workers.