An Indian Outbreak
State Senator Juan Jóse Warner [if the name confuses you remember that this was a time when Mexico "owned" Indian Southern California and men used Spanish names even, as in this case, when the man was an American named John Joseph Warner who was living in Mexico] obtained ownership of the San Felipe Valley, located in the northeastern corner of San Diego County, in an 1844 abandonment sale. He tried to turn it into a working Rancho but by the fall of 1847 he was feeling the pressure of growing discontent and hunger in the Indian communities located in the Valley. He wrote a fear-filled letter to California’s military governor pleading for help to stop the raids on the herds. Starving Indians, who had been cut off from their local food supply and watched the livestock of the Europhones decimate their gardens, began to raid the cattle herds of the Mexicans and Americans. The Indian raids on Southern California herds continued to escalate; Indian people starved and were murdered as the struggle for resources escalated year by year as the hunger increased. California achieved American statehood in 1850 but that did nothing to solve the problem of starvation in the Native community and one year later the situation reached the boiling point.
The American government of California denied all Indians the rights granted to White citizens. It further imposed the Jim Crow laws of slavery upon Indian people and then when it demanded heavy taxes based on Indian livestock holdings, rage exploded in Indian communities. A natural Indian leader emerged, Mission-educated, Diegueño, Antonio Garra. With little effort Garra convinced the Cupeño and Diegueño peoples that the solution to their plight was to drive out or kill all non-Indians.
On November 20, 1851 a Cupeño man alerted Mrs. Warner to an intended attack upon the Rancho and begged her to remove her family from the Valley. The family fled. At 2 a.m. on the 21st, the threat became a reality as 100 Indian men, under the command of Garra, surrounded the Rancho. Warner and two of his employees fired on the Indians. When the ammunition ran out and Warner abandoned his property one of his employees and four Indians were believed to be dead. The Warner’s house was ransacked, the out-buildings were burnt, and the animals were driven off. Martial law was declared. Four more Americans were killed during the following week. The San Diego Herald of the 27th of November reported, “The dark war cloud that has so long hovered over us, has burst, spreading terror and dismay throughout this wide-spread and thinly-populated country.”
Major Fitzgerald and his band of volunteers retaliated quickly, burning the village of Agua Caliente and tracking Garra to his mountain fastness. Colonel Agostin (?) Haraszthy arrested suspected conspirator, Anglo shopkeeper Bill Marshall, but the troops couldn’t capture Garra even though an entire company pursued him.
Meanwhile Cahuilla leader, Juan Antonio was afraid the Americans would retaliate against Garra by the wholesale slaughter of Southern California Indian people. So he did what the troops had failed to do, he and his men captured Garra and five co-conspirators, delivering them to the jail in Los Angeles. It is also likely that long-standing tensions between the Cahuilla and the Diegueno fueled Juan Antonio's desire to hunt Garra and turn him over to the authorities.
Marshall and one co-conspirator were tried in San Diego, found guilty and hanged in mid-December 1851. Garra and the others were tried, found guilty, and executed in Old Town San Diego by a firing squad on Christmas morning the same year.
Today, Warner's Hot Springs is a trendy spa for the rich folks or those who want to live like they are rich for a bit. Indian people were forced to leave their homes of 5,000 years by Government troops in 1903 to make way for the development projects of the Warner family.
Note on enslavement of Native Californians after the United States declared war on Mexico and seized San Diego: Despite the guarantees that Indian people would be granted the same rights as every other American citizen outlined in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Indians were denied State citizenship, voting rights, and more important still, the right to testify in court. These acts effectively removed all legal redress for Native peoples and left them at the mercy of others, even those who would sexually assault, kidnap, and/or murder them (although it is fair to say that no woman or child of that time, whatever their race, was protected from sexual assault).
Despite entering the union as a free state in 1850, the California legislature rapidly enacted the "1850 Indian Law," and a series of laws legalizing Indian slavery. There was a slave market in Los Angeles, near current day Olvera Street, until 1858 where Indian people, Africans, African Americans, and mulattos (mixed-race people) were sold to the highest bidder. The 1850 Indian Law sanctioned an indenturing system similar to the system of Mexican peonage (a kind of slavery that is prettied up by being called "forced servitude" or "forced indeture") that was a widespread practice throughout California and other places in the Americas where Europeans, particularly the Spanish, had seized power prior to 1850.
All levels of state, county and local governments participated in this ugly practice that evolved into a heartless policy of killing Indian parents and kidnapping and indenturing the victims' children. But killing the parents wasn't necessary, all a White man or woman had to do was to tell the judge that they wanted any Indian child and that child was removed from his or her home and was sent to live in the home of the White person. No one ever checked on the welfare of these kidnapped Indian children and they never saw their families unless they could escape or they were freed as adults. Indian youth could be enslaved by the cruel act to the age of 30 for males and 25 for females. This barbarous law was finally repealed four years after President Lincoln's emancipation proclamation in 1863. [http://www.nahc.ca.gov/califindian.html]