Through a Glass Darkly

The number of historical documents which mention Kumeyaay baskets is overwhelming. The challenge is to extract significant, relevant conclusions from these documents, at best a tripartite task: 1) ferreting out the locations where documents have been deposited, 2) sifting through the source documents to locate data while understanding which data may be important, and 3) understanding how the documents relate to each other and to past and current practices and attitudes of cultural insiders and outsiders.

Each basket, like a text, reveals its secrets to those who can observe and interpret them. The extraction task is repeated with each basket, to bring the history of individual baskets and their makers alive. Careful examination reveals details of manufacture which reflect specific human processes in time and space.

To data for this article was uncovered in the archives and collections of the following institutions: the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum and the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley; the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; the Huntington Free Library, Bronx, NY; the San Diego Museum of Man, San Diego, CA; the Riverside Municipal Museum, Riverside, CA; the San Diego Historical Society archives, San Diego, CA; and the Southwest Museum, Highland Park, CA. A brief resume of the contents of the more important archival collections as they pertain to Kumeyaay basketry follows, to help the reader understand the interconnectedness of each collection.

The San Diego Historical Society research archive contains paper and photographs only, including some of the writings of Edward H. , an entrepreneur from the area, who was a store and resort owner, a dedicated photographer and a collector of Indian-made objects. The archive contains many photographs of people referred to in the archives of other collections.

The National Archives, Pacific Southwest Region in Laguna Niguel, CA is another rich source of information on behaviors and attitudes surrounding basketmaking over an even more broad span of time, from about 1918 until 1943. Contained in the Mission Indian Agency records, the Central Classified Files 1920 - 1950, and the New Central Classified Files 1920 - 1953, are the desk records and files of the Mission Indian superintendents; census rolls from 1922 for the 28 reservations under the ’s jurisdiction; acts of legislation which prohibit and otherwise restrict the rights of Indians to burn off their land; inquiries from businessmen wanting quickly constructed, cheap basketry perfume-bottle covers and bread baskets; the results of an inquiry by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to ascertain the names of the best Mission Indian basketmakers and other artisans of the era; an inventory of purchases of baskets and objects from reservation people in Alta California between 1931 and 1937; the annual income reports for reservations in 1939 and 1940; and a record of the incomes from different crafts and traditional economic strategies. Remarkably, in these files rests an original label from the linen thread used in the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association project mentioned frequently in materials in other archives.

The Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley owns baskets and other objects referred to in the correspondence from Alfred Louis Kroeber to anthropologist Constance Goddard DuBois.

Although the Bancroft LIBRARY at the University of California, Berkeley and the Huntington Library in San Marino are not major sources of information about Kumeyaay basketry, specifically, they provide clear evidence of the Mexican, and subsequently, American political and social climate which surrounded and engulfed Indian people. This climate is so important the remainder of this chapter focuses there; it underpins any historically informed theory which may be developed.

The San Diego Museum of Man houses two albums of photographs taken by DuBois which put faces to the names mentioned in the two teachers’ letters now housed at the Huntington Free Library in the Bronx, NY. One contains the only known photograph of a type of fabric art called drawn work, learned by Kumeyaay women nearly a hundred years before from Spanish women.

The archives of the Huntington Free Library, Bronx, NY house the correspondence to and writings of Constance Goddard DuBois. A popular fiction writer cum anthropologist, DuBois left her Connecticut home for many summers to work among the Kumeyaay. Between 1900 and 1909, she corresponded with a host of anthropology notables, including Alfred L. , David P. Barrows, Clark Wissler, Otis Tufton Mason, and C. Hart Merriam, but the most relevant body of letters in the collection are from two government teachers, Mary (Maria) Watkins at Mesa Grande Indian Reservation and Mamie Robinson at Campo Indian Reservation. The letters are packed with information about basketry because these teachers bought baskets and sent them to Connecticut for DuBois to sell during the winters. DuBois found east-coast museums, themselves in the midst of a collecting frenzy, a good market for Kumeyaay cultural materials. She gave public lectures, charging admission and selling baskets and other artifacts to the audience. She used this money to pay the Kumeyaay women for their baskets and to provide rations” of $3.00 per month for the aged, disabled, and indigent of Mesa Grande and Campo Reservations.

During these nine years, first Mary Watkins and then Mamie Robinson supplied a continual stream of Kumeyaay baskets, dance regalia, blankets, skirts, and other lightweight material culture objects forced into sale by deteriorated economic conditions in Kumeyaay villages on and off reservations. In all, more than 100 pieces of correspondence place basketmaking firmly in its cultural context and more than twenty drafts of articles written by Du Bois deal extensively with basketmaking and the basketmakers, providing details found no where else. The letters also document the activities of the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association among the Indian people of Southern California between 1900 and 1908. All letters from Mary Watkins and Mamie Robinson referred to in this chapter are from this collection unless otherwise noted.

DuBois was the woman to whom most of the letters are addressed. She authored the majority of the papers in the collection in seasonal alternation with her ethnologic and collecting work among the Kumeyaay between 1897 and 1909. Like Watkins and Robinson her desire to work with the Kumeyaay people was precipitated by her commitment to the Episcopalian ideal of Christ-like behavior among the poor.

There were certainly poor Indian people much closer to Connecticut than the Kumeyaay. In fact, the Episcopalians worked extensive missions among the Oneida in New York and Ojibwa in Minnesota beginning in 1890 (NAPSR, New Central Classified Files, 1920-1953. Box 65: 967). It is probable that the settlement of DuBois’ sister and brother-in-law in Chula Vista, now a suburb of San Diego, figured largely in her choice. Although the circumstances of her first trip to Mesa Grande remain obscure, she appears to have come by train to visit her sister, whose husband was employed by the railroad, headquartered at the time in National City. On a side trip to the local mountains DuBois first met a people largely unknown to Easterners, living in miserable poverty, ill health, and hunger. DuBois would spend the next twelve years of her life rallying support for the Indians of Southern California. The papers in the collection document the cyclical nature of the writings. They illustrate and document not only the increasing involvement of DuBois in the lives of the Kumeyaay, but of the growth of a bond of affection between DuBois and Watkins. After their first meeting in 1900, Mary Watkins predicted the long-lasting position of advocacy DuBois would maintain over the years

Tuesday’s mail brought the letter so full of interest to me and mine. How little I knew that day as I stood talking in the road that through you, rather than through the Government, all my longings, my hopes would be realized. And I think that you did not think on this mountain waited the work that will make so many better and happier. But God’s hand leads surely (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 3/13/1900).

During the long Connecticut winters between 1900 and 1908 DuBois produced a steady stream of material for publication in the popular and academic press, hoping to make the Kumeyaay more visible to a nation in a basket collecting craze. She was a popular romance novelist in her day, and wrote A Soul in Bronze (1900; 1907a), a novel featuring a college educated Southern California Indian hero ultimately jailed for a murder he did not commit. In love with the White heroine, and realizing his love must remain unrequited, the hero chooses to remain in jail to help other Indian prisoners, rather than to live in the White world without her. Mary Watkins wrote of her enthusiasm for the book, “I am sure that A Soul in Bronze will be a success. Even Mrs. Stone[1] who does not like Indians is very much interested and pleased.”

DuBois also wrote continually about Kumeyaay religious and philosophical beliefs and practices for the publications of the University of California, Department of Anthropology and for the Smithsonian Institution. She maintained a regular correspondence with A. L. Kroeber in Berkeley regarding the publications.

She petitioned Government and elected officials urging them to act in the best interest of the Indian people by restoring their human rights, their land-use rights, and by conferring ownership of their traditional lands to them. She worked assiduously to prevent the misery and slow death suffered by so many Kumeyaay as a result of Congressional action or conversely, the refusal of Congress to act.

DuBois, Watkins and Robinson provide an insight which is unique in several ways. Most notable is their documentation of details other historians apparently didn’t find worth recording. They detailed the impoverished lives and agonizing starvation deaths of people considered in Eurocentric academic circles to be “without history.” Their viewpoint is uniquely feminine in an era when women had not yet shown in any numbers in academic and sociological publishing. Watkins and Robinson have provided a multilevel nonjudgmental comparison of various economic strategies practiced by Kumeyaay people in that era. They document minute details of daily life that male anthropologists were denied knowledge of, didn’t notice, or disregarded.

It is important to restate Eric Wolf’s point that history is made up of meaningless and meaningful human interactions (1982: 6), “the final result was itself only the contested outcome of many contradictory relationships.” No historic event or condition ever occurs in and of itself. The occurrence is always influenced by the events surrounding it. Everything affects everything else. A static historical tableau is not an adequate means for understanding the “basket craze” which swept the country in the early 1900s or how the expansion of the railroad affected that craze and ultimately the lives of individual Indian people in San Diego County.

The combined picture which can be pieced together from documents in these several repositories is quite complex and rich in detail, even though it comprises only a few frames in the motion picture of thousands of years of basketry praxis. The last two hundred years of basketmaking is like a blink of the eye when compared to more than 10,000 years of archaeologically documented basketmaking history. The archaic history of basketmaking comprises by far the greatest part of Kumeyaay basketmaking history. This article looks at the time when enormous change challenged the survival of an ancient artistic tradition and paradoxically assured its preservation: the years between the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the beginning of World War II.

The Kumeyaay, Kamia, Luiseño, Cupeño, and Cahuilla people once formed the major population of San Diego County. The political boundaries of San Diego County, as established by the men framing the California State Constitution in 1849, spread from the Pacific Ocean on the west, eastward to the Arizona border, north to Los Angeles County, and south to the new border between Baja California, Mexico and Alta or American California.

To understand the political structure of California in 1848 we must look to the establishment of the first Europhone^{^[2]} colonies here. The Californias, the northern half of which was ceded to the United States by Mexico under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were a part of the spoils of war Spain surrendered to Mexico at the close of the Mexican War of Independence in 1821. Russia and England wanted to exploit the rich resources of the Pacific Coast but the Spaniards preempted their claims by establishing permanent colonies in San Diego and Monterey, Alta California by 1777. For one-hundred and fifty years California remained on the extensive list of Spanish colonies.

The tipai and ipai peoples, named the Diegueño by the Spanish in 1776, and today known by the name, Kumeyaay,^{^[3]} had endured the process of Missionization under which the Spaniards made extensive use of forced Indian labor. The Spanish believed they were sent by God to save the souls of the Indians, thereby raising them out of their state of ignorance and savagery. This was nearly equivalent to extinction.

The Spanish were able to capitalize upon well established systems of intensive gardening and harvesting natural foods developed before the arrival of outsiders. Chief Patencio of Palm Springs indicated this while talking about a flash flood which ripped through Chino Canyon in the mid 1860s

There was good land there and my people raised fine crops from garden seed. But now it is all washed away. The great gorge that must be crossed to reach the hotspring was all good land at the time that I speak of. Smooth and level. Some of the creek was good land, too...All the harvest they had raised was gone, and all the good land, it was gone, too. Where the grass was green for the animals, and the soil was good to raise things to eat for the people, there were only piles of great rocks and washed-out gorges. My people never tried to raise anything there any more.

It may be assumed from the 1860s date that farming was introduced by the Spanish or Mexicans but Cahuilla mythology offers us another clue. Patencio retold part of the creation story (Patencio 1943: 24 - 25), how Mukat gave food to his people, “My teeth will be your corn; the melons [pumpkins] are my heart...beans, which were the fingers of Mo-cot.” Pumpkins, beans, and corn must be grown, they are not wild crops. The position of corn, beans, and melons in the order of creation and their preHispanic names, indicate that at least the Cahuilla were gardening before the arrival of the Spanish.

Although the evidence among the Kumeyaay is less plentiful it is notable that there are PreHispanic words for the act of planting and for seeds to be planted. It is also well established that when Alarcón met the Yuma, the ancestors of the Kumeyaay, in 1540 they were already growing beans, corn, squash, and gourds (Kroeber 1965 [1925]: 803). Shipek reported (1993: 381) that the elders told her that

Corn, beans and squash were grown in mountain and desert locations beneath running springs, beside wet meadows, or in places where summer rainfall runoff would spread through the fields. Some Kumeyaay went to the New River if the Colorado had overflowed into it that year. There they cooperated to build levees, and diversion dams, and to clear fields for planting.

In the preceding generations Kumeyaay families frequently went to camps to gather and store food together, whole lineages joining to share in the bounty. When the harvest demanded that gatherers remain in camp for an extended period of time, the whole family went, unless danger or infirmity prevented the travel. Some foods, particularly agave hearts, because of the brute force required to harvest the plants, the dangerous spines, and the acid juice, were harvested by the men and strongest boys alone. Then the small children remained in home camps with the women and eldest family members.

These practices began long before the Spanish opened the first Mission in Alta California. In their time of domination, the Spaniards forced their own idea of appropriate family structure on the Indian people under the thrall of the Mission, forcing men and women to live apart. They frequently required the men and strongest boys to travel long distances, not to gather acorns or agave, but to haul materials necessary for establishing the Spanish occupation of Kumeyaay homelands as seen in the following account. Margaret Langdon published a portion of a 1961 interview^{^[4]} with Richard Nejo in News From Native California (Winter 2000) in which he said

At that time there were a lot of Indians down here and they made them work building those churches. And they farmed all that land around the Mission there, corn and beans, some of that is still there. Those Missions were built by the Indians and the timber was brought from Volcan on their shoulders. It took about fifty men to bring one down, and those timber were about a hundred feet long; and they brought them down...Up that canyon they built a canal. They brought the water down in the canal that was about two feet wide, I guess, and about three feet deep. And the bricks were about fourteen inches thick. They built it clear to the Mission to irrigate the crops.

Syphilis, measles and other contagious diseases ran rampant in the missions, leaving most Indian people who went there, dead. Slowly, the Spanish found that the missions could not produce the wealth hoped for by the Crown because they could not establish a stable Indian labor population. State support of the missions was soon cut off, but this had little long-term significance because California was to become a territory of the new Mexican Republic subsequent to the War for Independence.

The fledgling Mexican government, remembering its Indian roots, conferred the rights of citizenship to all Indian people in 1821 (Phillips 1981: 61). In 1829, the first Mexican governor, José Maria Echeandia ordered Indian children removed from servitude in Mexican homes and returned to the homes of their parents (Shoup and Milliken 1999: 85). It is telling that in spite of the recognition the new Mexican government gave Indian people by conferring them with citizenship, Kumeyaay people were murdered wholesale by government soldiers (McGrew 1922: 86). An account of the lives of the Kumeyaay under the rule of Echeandia, in the late 1820s is given in McGrew (1922: 32)

The old governor had some trouble with the Indians, and kept his troops busy much of the time in keeping them scared away from the port. The California soldiers brought in the ears of their victims to show what the day’s work had been. On one occasion a lieutenant is said to have brought in twenty pairs of ears from Indians slain in this section.

Another example of the schizophrenic attitude of Mexican Governor Echeandia, engendered by the need for laborers, came when a smallpox epidemic hit Northern California in 1829. Coincidentally, a party of American traders and trappers headed by Sylvester Pattie were languishing under arrest in San Diego (Caughey 1938: 258). They bargained for their release by asserting that they had a large hidden supply of vaccine

[J. O.] Pattie let it be known that he had a supply of [smallpox] vaccine, and the Governor soon contracted with him to vaccinate the Californians, officials, soldiers, settlers, padres, and Mission Indians. He toured California in his capacity as “Surgeon General to his Excellency, the Governor of California” inoculating one thousand in San Diego, four thousand at San Juan Capistrano, two thousand in Los Angeles, and lesser numbers elsewhere to make a grand total of twenty-two thousand.

It is highly unlikely that Pattie had any doses, much less twenty-two thousand doses of the vaccine; he had straggled half-dead into Baja California, and had been in jail for months. Still, his words point out that Echeandia would have vaccinated the Indian population at that time; they by far outnumbered the Mexicans and were desperately needed for abor. This stands in stark contrast to the Americans who turned a blind eye, forty years later, when smallpox epidemics swept through the California Indian and Americanized Mexican population.

The Mexican reign of terror was to be short lived, however; the U. S. declared war against Mexico in 1845 and an occupation force of U. S. Marines seized San Diego. The war between Mexico and the U. S. provided a bright moment in the lives of Indian people who hoped they might again one day be free (HFL, CGD papers, reel 3: c. 1903)

While the cannon were booming at the famous battle of San Pasqual old Angela sat weaving the circles in this worn basket. She sat on the mountains overlooking the valley watching the hated white man and the yet more hated Mexicans murder each other. She said, ‘They will all be dead and we shall be free.’ She was almost a hundred years old when she died and saw her land swallowed up by the gringo.

In the end, the U. S. and Mexico divided Kumeyaay homelands between themselves. When Alta California was accessioned by the United States, the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stipulated specifically, among other things, 1) Indian people be provided for by distributing to them the land which had once comprised the Mission system and 2) all Mexican citizens could choose to become American citizens or they could remain citizens of Mexico.

When the dust of the Mexican-American War settled, the State and Federal Government stood mute as the Mission lands were occupied by Anglophones and Indian people were driven east and south (Forbes 1969: 61) instead of being treated like citizens of any country. Katherine Saubel recollects some things she heard about that time (Dozier 1998:135)

...the Anglos took over. They were just as bad as the Spanish. They were just there to destroy the Indians.

That’s when we really became, you might say, beggars, because we had no place to hunt, no place to gather any more. We were just held down to the different areas. Sometimes to areas where we didn’t even belong -- we were moved around by whoever was in power. It was really a trauma for my people. They became so, how would you say...They were always hungry now, they were always in a sad situation. I guess they had to live with what little they could get just to survive. But they were really destroyed.

By 1847, American control of California had been firmly established; the title of Military Governor shifted from General Stephen Watts Kearney, to a man whom Hurtado (1988: 92 - 93) indicated rose rapidly in the ranks of the military during the Black Hawk War, Colonel Richard Barnes Mason. Mason appointed Jesse B. Hunter, Captain of Company B of the Mormon Battalion, as the first Indian subagent of Southern California^{^[5]}.

A bit more needs to be said here about Mason and his role in enforcing United States federal Indian Policy; this is a very important point. President Andrew Jackson believed total removal and eventual annihilation of Indian people was the only path to what he called their “civilization.” The Black Hawk War was a series of military actions directed against the Sac and Fox Indian people of Illinois and Wisconsin implementing this policy of removal to reservations. Mason became, in effect, an enforcer of the United States Federal Indian Removal Policy established between 1820 and 1850. For Indian people, the Black Hawk War marked the beginning of the tradition of the Long Walk, a military enforced march of masses of Indian people to some distant location, typically west of the Mississippi River, usually in the dead of winter. Every Long Walk resulted in deaths from exposure, malnutrition, and drowning of more than fifty percent of those forced to march at gun point. The survivors were forever marked by grief, trauma, and the results of prolonged malnutrition, ie, blindness, osteoporosis, depression and the like.^{^[6]}

The last such Long Walk occurred in Southern California in May of 1903, when the Cupeño and Kumeyaay people were removed from Warner’s Valley and moved south to the Luiseño reservation at Pala. Although the death rate here was lower, it was significant that many of the old people went into the hills to die rather than to be dispossessed of their homes and moved to the territory of their rivals.

When Mason was made the second Military Governor of California, he brought with him the genocidal impulses which had won him many rapid promotions during the Black Hawk War. It was no coincidence that Mason, himself a Southerner, would appoint a man who knew the slave laws of the South to manage Southern California Indian affairs.

As a result of the rapid-fire destructive changes forced upon the Southern California Indian population, Kumeyaay culture, in 1848, was still in the throes of upheaval. Labor for the ranchos was as serious a problem for the Americans as it had been for the Spaniards and Mexicans. The entire population of San Diego County in the first official federal census in 1849 (McGrew 1922: 69) was 798 people. This number, of course, excludes hundreds and perhaps thousands of Indian people, who were not counted in the census. Six hundred and fifty of those 798 people lived in the city of San Diego. This left 148 nonindigenous people to master the thousands of square miles of San Diego County the United States had claimed as spoils of the War with Mexico.

The Spanish had established the prototype for California Indian labor by exploitation at the Missions. The Mexicans picked up, more or less, where the Spaniards left off, even though they freed Indian children from servitude in Mexican homes. They had cities to build, not just missions, and this took a great deal of labor. The Americans, in their turn, would try to force Southern California Indians to build their empire by imposing Southern slave laws upon the population and inventing a few new ones of their own. Hurtado (1988: 92) observed that like Mason, Hunter was from a wealthy Virginia family and had every opportunity, in his youth, to see how the labor of the population of black slaves was managed in the American South. Hunter issued a series of orders which restrained Indian people from gathering together, except of course as laborers for the nonIndian population. He also ordered Indian people to carry passports with them when they traveled away from their reservation. This law was still in effect as late as 1885 when it was used arbitrarily, to control Indian behavior. At age 80, Richard Nejo (Langdon 2000) reminisced about the arrest of a man he knew who went, as was usual at the end of summer, to harvest his daughter and son-in-law’s wheat crop. His failure to obtain the permission of the Indian agent was the charge levied against him

...every year he’d go over there and help harvest the wheat. Well, he went away this time...he come back by the agent’s house... the agent arrested him for going out of the reservation without permission...

The man was sentenced to chop thirty cords of wood, presumably for a White American not his own family, and he spent thirty days in jail.

The need for labor spawned blatant violations of Indian human rights. Indian people had long been captured in raids by Mexican slavers who supplied the Ranchos with cheap labor (Forbes 1969: 56) during the Mexican period. Under the Americans they fared no better. An 1850 - 1860s slave market in Los Angeles did a brisk business (Hurtado 1988: 75, 92). Local laws laid traps for the legal enslavement of Indian people; any Indian considered idle, at best an arbitrary judgment, was subject to arrest and a fine (Carrico 1987: 39 - 41). Any adult Indian who could not pay a fine or a citation would have his debt purchased by a citizen with capital. The citizen then owned the labor of the Indian until the debt was paid off (Caughey 1952: 51). An argument that the slave market was in Los Angeles and not San Diego ignores the fact that as much as two-thirds of the labor force in Los Angeles came from the San Diego area (Phillips 1981: 35).

Indian people could be jailed and held indefinitely without having charges filed against them; they were not allowed to post bail even if they had the money. They were not guaranteed the right to a speedy trial nor an attorney nor any other concession from the court because California Indian people were denied the rights of citizenship guaranteed them in 1848 by the government of the United States.

It was even easier to control the labor of Indian children who were routinely kidnapped and presented as orphaned (Carrico 1987: 39). Even families of modest means could acquire an Indian servant or two as virtually any Indian child could be removed from their home by a White citizen who had only to show the courts how it would benefit the Indian child to live in the White home. The children worked in exchange for room and board, frequently until they reached the age of majority (Carrico 1987: 41), and although some were well enough treated, the record shows that some were beaten and otherwise abused. All of them had their right to liberty violated and were deprived of their most valued and valuable resource, their families. In response to the labor shortage, these actions by Indian subagent Hunter steadily attacked the human rights of Southern California Indian people to a degree which was genocidal in effect if not intent.

Indian agents, too, profited personally from Indian labor. They were Presidential appointees and many saw their agency as a management mechanism for controlling Indian labor, not as a position from which to advocate for Indian rights. Cave J. Couts, a prominent San Diego citizen, and nephew of the Secretary of the United States Treasury, used both his 1851 marriage into the wealthy and powerful Bandini family and his 1853 appointment as Indian Subagent of San Diego County to better his own social and economic position. As a wedding present, Abel Sterns gave his sister-in-law, Ysadora Bandini, 2,000 acres of land once attached to the Mission San Luis Rey. Two Indian men, Andreas and José Manuel, had been deeded the land in 1845 by the Mexican government (Phillips 1981: 37). When the Anglophone Americans took over, Sterns, was able to preempt the Indians’ land claims. Couts used his appointment as Indian Subagent to force Indians to build Rancho Guajome for him, rounding them up as if they were part of the livestock included in the land holdings (McGrew 1922: 86).

...At that time there was a great number of Indians in and around San Luis Rey, and it was an easy matter for Colonel Couts, as he was an Indian agent, to command the services of enough laborers to do his work. It was not long before the result of the patient labor of 300 Indians took the form of an immense adobe house, built in a square, containing twenty rooms, a fine court-yard in the center, well filled with orange and lemon trees and every variety of flower; immense barns, stables, sheds, and corrals were added, after extensive quarters for the servants were built; then to finish the whole a neat chapel was built and formally dedicated to the worship of God. His military training enabled him to control and manage the Indians, as only he could.

Notice that the housing for the servants, mostly Indian people, was built only after the house of the Couts family and the stables, sheds and corrals for livestock were built, most probably a true scale for assessment of Indian social position in the mid 1850s.

Between 1855 and 1866 Couts was indicted for the murders of no fewer than six Indians and one "Negro workman." He was acquitted on each charge because of a technicality: in the case of a man he beat to death with his whip, because of an accusation, after his conviction, that one grand juror was an "alien" and therefore not eligible to sit on a jury. Once the verdict was invalidated, Couts could not be retried on the same charge of murder. At another time, the district attorney had failed to post his bond of office (Moyer 1969: 71). No one batted an eye at the possibility that the Indian subagent, the official of the U.S. Government, had murdered his wards.

For those Indian people who avoided enslavement by finding paid employment, the picture was not much brighter. Carrico (1989: 29) states that in 1853

Whites hired at least 100 Indians to help divert the San Diego River from its original flood channel through Old Town. The Indians received $15.00 per month, tent housing, and some basic food stuffs. In contrast, White laborers received $60.00 per month on the same job.

B. D. Wilson, federal Sub-Agent for Indian affairs in Southern California, wrote in his 1852 report (21)

If it be true that they [Indian men] cannot do half the work a white man can, ‘tis equally true that custom at best never allows them more than half the wages of the latter, and, generally, much less than half. The common pay of an Indian farm hand is from eight to ten dollars per month; and one dollar per day the highest in the towns -- but few pay so much. No white man here, whether American, Sonoran, or Californian, will work for such wages, nor anything like it.

Indian people who wanted to avoid the many forms of forced servitude or enslavement were compelled to leave the coastal and valley areas and seek refuge in the more mountainous regions of their traditional territory (Shipek 1991: 26). The invisibility provided them by removal into the hills was a double edged sword. It allowed the Kumeyaay, to a certain extent, to avoid contact with outsiders, sparing them usurpation and likely murder, but invisibility could not save them from the trials and suffering ahead of them.

In 1850 the state legislature effectively eliminated the ability of those who fled to the mountains to hunt by prohibiting burning, traditionally used to drive small game; it also outlawed the sale or transfer of guns into Indian hands (Carrico 1987: 42 - 44). By 1859 most Southern California Indian people were dead from starvation, disease, and murder. A few were relocated and hungry. The remaining Indians were not so much employed, as enslaved to the Americans, who imagined themselves to be wresting paradise from wilderness.

The period between 1860 and 1875 dealt a further series of terrible blows to southern California Indian people. Drought and overgrazing ravaged the landscape, changes in federal Indian policy reduced the Indian population to wards of the government, and waves of disease and slow starvation swept through Indian communities.

New epidemics, especially smallpox, raged through Alta California, in some cases depopulating whole villages. It is difficult for a 21st century American to understand the terror and horror associated with this disease before the wide availability of vaccine. People were contagious before they showed serious symptoms, causing a high contagion rate and public pandemonium. High fevers and convulsions were not uncommon; painful, weeping pustules were accompanied by delirium and followed by a tortured death.

As a little girl, Dee Alvarez (personal communication 1991) heard an elder female relative tell how she had narrowly escaped her own death. The elder had contracted the smallpox; those who could have nursed her back to health were either dead or ill themselves. Her fever rose until she became delirious. With no one to care for her, she wandered out into the desert and collapsed under a shrub. As she neared death, a stranger, a White passer-by, rescued her and helped her slowly return to health. Dee sat pensively for a long moment, then added, “I wonder how many were never found.” Alvino Siva, sitting near her, swore a letter exists which verifies that the Government knew the blankets given out in Southern California to the Cahuilla in 1861 by the U. S. Army were infected with smallpox. Epidemic years saw starvation, too, as more food in the field return to the earth unharvested because the large number of people needed to gather and prepare labor-intensive seed foods were themselves sick or dying or were caring for the sick or dying.

A second blow was dealt by a combination of drought and stock ranching. Livestock grazing began in 1776, when Juan Bautista de Anza, opened the way for the overland importation of animals from Sonora, Mexico. The Cahuilla people from Coyote Canyon remember that winter as one of starvation, because the 3,500 head of stock de Anza moved through the Canyon ate the plants the Cahuilla relied upon for food. The deaths of the Cahuilla of Coyote Canyon during the winter of 1776 were the harbingers of the multiple hardships and deaths stock ranching would visit on Indian people in Southern Alta California from that time on.

Each acre grazed by livestock was one more made unavailable to Indian people for harvesting plants and animals for food, medicine, and other uses. The forage needed by indigenous large game animals was cleared away and the numbers declined. Mesquite trees, long a staple food source for Indian people, was a favored food of cattle and horses. Immature oaks were another favorite food for stock; these they prevented from producing acorns, the most heavily relied upon food for California Indian people. Deer grass, a critical element in basketmaking was another favorite food of range herds. Each reduction of the traditional Indian food, medicine, and materials supply meant an increased reliance on European economies.

Europhone colonies were established with stock ranching in mind. Indian people tended large herds of cattle under the rule of the Spanish Missions; the hides and tallow were harvested for shipment to Mexico and points east. “Vast numbers of horses” roamed and tens of thousands of sheep were raised for their wool (Cleland 1929: 7, 8) at the Missions. Cleland (1929: 6) says that by 1800 more than 100,000 cattle descended from those brought by de Anza ranged free in California.

In San Diego, Don Pio Pico began stocking Rancho Jamul with horses and cattle as soon as he received the Mexican grant in 1829. Cleland reported 162,000 horned cattle, 13,700 horses, and 127,000 sheep, goats, and pigs, ranging at San Diego, San Luis Rey, and San Juan Capistrano (1929: 11) in 1834. This count does not include the European introduced animal populations outside of these three tiny Mission holdings. A drought in 1856 transformed the decline of the endemic plant and animal populations into a death sentence for Indian people (Carrico 1989:60). The next twenty-years was to be a sequence of starving times caused by drought and compounded by overgrazing.

The drought of 1860 - 1861 (see Table 3.1) and the resultant barren hillsides caused the starvation of between one-half and three-fourths of the cattle in Southern California. Caughey (1938: 315) estimates that by 1863 the number of cattle in Southern California had risen to between 300,000 and 400,000. Then came another year of drought; by the end of January 1864, barely three inches of rain had fallen. The open range animals, in search for diminishing forage, roamed farther and ate plants formerly passed over, reducing the landscape to a few shrubs stripped to the heartwood.

Each of the droughts of the 1860s was followed by severe flash flooding. The land could not absorb the intense downpours and much soil was washed away because of the enormous volume of water and because the plant cover had been removed and the roots no longer held the soil. Chief Patencio (1943: 57), a Cahuilla from the Palm Springs area, tells about this process

...such a storm was not remembered among the Indians. The floods began roaring down the canyons. My people had only time to catch up their children and rush up the mountain side to save their lives. When the water from the cloud-burst had passed on, everything had gone with it. The homes of my people and all they had were gone for ever.

Reliance on traditional subsistence patterns, even for those Indian people who lived far from the urban centers, was further limited by overgrazing compounded by these violent rains.

The drought broke in January of 1866. The following four years allowed the herds to swell again, this time far beyond the predrought numbers of animals. Rainfall in those years was consistently two to five inches above the twenty-year average, allowing some regrowth of the overgrazed landscape, but competition from naturalized European plants further limited regrowth.

A fair example of this repopulation can be seen at Monserratte Rancho granted to Ysidro María Alvarado by Pio Pico in 1846. Alvarado started small; by the time of his death from smallpox in 1863, his personal property amounted to "180 steers, twenty cows, 100 sheep, and fifty horses.” In 1869, under the direction of Ysidro's son, Tomás, the animal count at Monserratte had burgeoned to 3,000 cattle, 13,000 sheep, and 300 horses (Moyer 1969: 100).

The most terrible drought of all was yet to come, however. It began slowly in January 1870 and by February 1873 fewer than sixteen inches of rain had fallen in San Diego County, far below the annual average of about 9 inches. The starving herds decimated the native landscape of bunch grasses (such as deer grass), annuals, and shrubs which would never recover from this assault.

(Recorded in 100ths of an inch as reported in the National Climatic Data Center data sets.)

The result was an increasing Indian dependency on a cash economy at a time when cash was as scarce as food. The plant and animal communities which provided subsistence in Archaic times were devastated by herds of cattle, horses, sheep, goats and pigs making it impossible for Indian communities to gather and process the diversity of seed foods needed to form a complete diet. Some crops grew several days walk from home.

The non-Indian human population swelled during this era, too. A total county population of 798 in 1849 documented more than 80 percent of the Europhone population residing in the City of San Diego (McGrew 1922: 69). The 1870 census recorded 4,951 Anglophone people residing in the County and between 2,300 and 3,000 or more than 50 percent of the population living in the City (McGrew 1922: 126). In the twenty-one years between 1849 and 1870 the rural population jumped from 150 Americans to more than 2,700. The soaring Anglophone population put additional pressure on the beleaguered native people and the resources of the land. Joseph Hill confirms that these were White immigrants and not simply Indians who had never before been counted.

Hill (1927: 155 - 156) relates details from an 1875 report of the United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs which explains how San Diego County’s Indian population of 2,692 (Carrico 1987: 35) had lost the right to occupy their traditional homelands. The citation bears repeating as it describes most succinctly, the plight of the Indian people.

For the past eight years Southern California has been filling up by emigration; Spanish and Mexican grants have been ‘determined’ in such a way as to cover choice tracts wherever found; large ranches have been cut up and the desirable portions of public domain pre-empted; and thus all available agricultural lands have been seized or occupied by individual owners, who, in conformity of the law, have become possessed of the lands on which the remnants of a few thousand Mission Indians are making their homes in San Diego and San Bernardino counties. So long as the pre-emptors and purchasers did not require the lands for use or sale, the Indians were allowed to remain undisturbed and in blissful ignorance of the fact that the place they called home had by law passed into to the ownership of another. Of late, under the increasing demands for these lands, writs of ejectment are being procured by which the Indians are forcibly dispossessed and turned adrift in poverty and wretchedness.

Indians all over Southern California were in constant danger of being murdered. Edward H. Davis wrote DuBois of an Indian skull he had strapped to the saddle of his horse as he rode more than thirty miles through the hills on his way home. He wrote that the Indian to whom the skull belonged, was sixty or seventy years old when he had been shot through the head by soldiers fifty years earlier (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1:5/18/1905). The date suggests these would have been American soldiers, but no further information is given.

Some Americans citizens did not bother to use the courts to take over Indian land, and opted for a more brutal route, preferring the quick action of the gun. Such was the case in the 1875 McCain Massacre. In an unprovoked action, a man identified as McCain, and his fellow vigilantes murdered fifteen tipai men, women, and children living at Jacumba. Jacumba was abandoned by the surviving Indians who fled south of the Mexican border (Carrico 1987: 89). McCain and his group immediately took over the land for grazing their animals.

This dispossession was possible in part because of the developing federal position that Indian nations were not sovereign, first espoused by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in his 1831 decision that the Creek Indian nation was not a sovereign entity in its dealings with the State of Georgia. The policy developed slowly, although in general, Indian people were regarded as wards of the federal government after 1855. The last treaty between nations was made between the Shoshone and the United States in 1863, but in 1871 an appropriation act passed through congress which stipulated

...hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or owner with whom the United States may contract by treaty.

A move forward in the effort to restore lands to San Diego County Indian people was made by President Ulysses S. Grant when in January 1870 he created Pala and San Pasqual Indian Reservations by Executive Order, an order nullified a year later (Carrico 1989: 63 - 65). Regardless, Southern California Indian people were to remain wards of the government, denied their civil and human rights until they were assimilated into White society; only then could they become American citizens with full rights under the law (Phillips 1981: 64).

The United States government, perhaps motivated by the McCain Massacre and the advocacy of Indian reformers finally took limited action on behalf of the Indian people of San Diego County by establishing reservations of 53,000 acres between December 27, 1875 and May 1876. These reservations included Santa Isabel, Pala, Agua Caliente, Sycuan, Iñaja, Cosmit, Potrero, Cahuilla, and Capitan Grande (Carrico 1987: 84 - 85).

The Kumeyaay found themselves confined to their reservations or pushed across the U. S.-Mexican border. The traditional resources and the large range each lineage needed to sustain its people had become off limits, for the most part. The fear of the law and arrest often prevented men from leaving the reservation to gather foods. The man jailed for thirty days, in the story told by Richard Nejo, wasn’t free to gather food for his family, and in fact was jailed for harvesting wheat; it is likely that this changed his attitude about future harvesting ventures.

The Kumeyaay attempt to preserve the native plant population was being lost acre by acre. Reliance on a wide diversity of species was a key element in the thousands of years of successful Kumeyaay occupation. It was a system which recognized the cyclical nature of food availability. Black Oak, Quercus kelloggii, only bears a reliable crop of acorns every other year, and in any year a severe hail storm or a late freeze might reduce acorn harvesting to salvage work. Sometimes, herds of bighorn sheep would ruin a stand of agave or yuccas. Without a diversity of plants to rely on, starvation was a certainty.

We know that ruination of land by European stock severely reduced the diversity of species; we can see how this affected the lives of Kumeyaay individuals, Santo Lopez and his wife, Owas Hilmawa. At the turn of the twentieth century, they were in contention with a man named Bob McCain^{^[7]} over a piece of land he occupied near Campo. Santo was determined to reclaim title to his land from Mc Cain despite the fact that Mc Cain had allowed the devastation of the native plant community by permitting sheep to roam every where.

Mc Cain rented his land out to a sheep man and those sheep cleaned out every thing before Sant got his receipt. So he has had to work out side for farmers.

The land could not provide Santo and Owas a living, so they had to go elsewhere to earn money so they could buy food. The herders had such little regard for the land rights of Indian people that if Owas’ brother had not fired his gun over the heads of the sheep in defense of their gardens, another sheep man would have driven his animals through the traditional vegetable gardens that Santo’s wife, Owas, and her brothers tended at their father's house (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 8/19/1907) near Manzanita, destroying them.

Their access to traditional foods and raw materials thus limited, the Kumeyaay were forced into increasing dependence on a cash economy. There were very few stores in Kumeyaay country at the turn of the century, but they supplied sugar, beans, salt, flour, pans, tools, needles, cloth, tobacco, and coffee, to those who had cash or anything of cash value to trade.

Cash was to be the secret to survival. Because cash was difficult to come by for most Indian people after the Americans established themselves, it became essential for Indian people to develop a diverse panoply of strategies which generated cash or eliminated its need. These strategies included a combination of old and new ways, each useful in its own turn. Relying on traditional foods like acorns and pine nuts, creating articles of material culture like baskets and arrows for sale, selling resources like timber and heirlooms, hiring out for wages, and intensive vegetable gardening were responsive, interchangeable strategies designed to generate cash or supplant its need.

This separation of families was amplified during the American period from 1848 on. The remoteness of the reservations preempted the possibility of much work near home then, as it does today. Many men sought work in the Colorado River drainage; more went north and west to the valley grasslands to work as vaqueros, herding livestock as their forefathers had done for the Spaniards and Mexicans. A few found positions as house staff and domestic servants at the ranchos and in the houses of the town folk. A very few found day jobs at nearby Ranchos, but they were the exception. Although the matter awaits further research, many Southern California Indian people know of some girl or woman employed as a prostitute during these hard times. Few Indian men ever attained any social, political, or economic status in Europhone eyes.^{^[8]}

The rest labored for various expansionist and Empire building enterprises, laying railroads, building highways, damming and diverting rivers, and working in the tourmaline mines of Julian. This need to leave the reservation for work persists until today and can be seen in the example of Laguna Reservation, a very remote and high altitude village which in 1900 had not yet been noticed by the Europhones. Although the land has remained in family hands, Maria Alto’s son, Tom Lucas, had to move away from the homestead to earn a living by 1930. Interestingly, he worked for a road paving company and labored building San Diego’s highways for thirty years.

By the mid 1890s a few social and religious organizations made an effort to fill the gaps left by the Government’s betrayal of its San Diego County wards and the ruthless and brutal treatment of Indian people by many American settlers. Although the government provided teachers at Mesa Grande and Campo, it provided little else. The Episcopalians and the Quakers were among the first Protestant churches to send missionaries to see to the spiritual and physical welfare of California Indian people. Mrs. Mary (Maria) Watkins, the Government teacher at Mesa Grande, was a participant in the plan the Episcopal Church adopted for Indian welfare before the turn of the century. Across the country, programs were sponsored by individual congregations to promote Indian education and economic independence at a time when Indian children could not, as a rule, attend public schools and Indian individuals could not, ironically, own unallotted land.^{^[9]} Watkins, a Government teacher and apparently an Episcopalian, arrived at Mesa Grande Reservation sometime before 1897. She was a volunteer social worker, too, reading and writing letters for the blind and illiterate, sewing yards of calico and flannel into undershirts and petticoats for the old and indigent. Her social work was supported by the Los Angeles congregation of Episcopal Bishop, Joseph H. Johnson. She wrote about her religious convictions and her attempt to follow a Christ-like life, dispensing food, flannel under-wear, and human compassion to those in her charge

If I could tell you of all my life here you would see almost a miraculous assistance. I pray and the answer comes. It is true in the smallest as well as in more important matters. I do wish to live so near a Christ life that my faith can help my poor people. All other wants seem lost in this great want of my heart. May God, our Father, bless you as you have helped me in my work. I do love you (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 3/13/1900).

On May 30, 1900, Mary Watkins reported a rare event, work near home, the kind of public works essential to empire building: “A new road is to be made here, and it will give several hundred dollars to the men. That will be a great help...” In 1900, at Mesa Grande, Manzanita, Campo, and other Kumeyaay reservations the old, infirm, and indigent were near starvation, deprived of their normal mode of subsistence -- this despite the fact that some families benefited from the roads project. Watkins wrote to DuBois in 1900, saying they were in the third year of drought. The plight of the Indian poor was generally unacknowledged by the government and the public, although the desperate condition of most American Indian people was a common fact of knowledge to both government electees and to the public at large; at least to those who had read Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor and Ramona. For many there was no help; a less hardened mind would balk trying to imagine the suffering of the people. Watkins wrote

The poor little old woman in San José has gone. Help came too late. Although she was truly very old she would probably have stayed longer had not food been so scarce. Her grandson was here today and told me about it. I sent a clean gown for her burial (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 12/12/1900).

Miss Mamie Robinson came to Campo Reservation soon after the turn of the century. She, too espoused Watkins’ ideas and her work was partially sponsored by Johnson’s congregation in Los Angeles. The women taught school as government employees and saw to the general welfare of the elderly and invalid as Episcopalians. Through their combined efforts, many deaths from hunger and exposure were prevented, although the suffering continued all around San Diego County, as Watkins told DuBois in her letter of January 1902

...six inches of snow fell today and there is a foot in Volcan Cañon. Think of the suffering of those miserable children. You remember the house away up in the crevice of the mt. under the fir trees. The old man died with hunger and six children were sent away to the Mission [San Diego de Alcala] to escape a like fate. I sent $3.00 of your money to the old woman at San José. She had nothing and was suffering...(HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/24/1900).

Help was not forthcoming from the Government (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 12/19/1901)

I forgot to tell you that the Agent went over this reserve and was astonished at the poverty, the lack of land etc. He said. ‘Shut your eyes to the wood cutting. Let the poor wretches have a chance.’ So the wagon runs loaded every hour of daylight. What would they have done without it [wagon] and the wood.

That morning I had given Narciso an order for $2.50 worth [of groceries] as they had eaten herbs or some thing queer for three days. ‘It was bad for my stomach,’ he said earnestly, ‘to eat nothing.’...Andres’ ration money I gave to the little dried up old woman at San José. Her name is Maria Lechuza. Patricio, her great-grandson is certainly a model of filial affection. I have never seen such kind eyes, nor heard a voice of such exceeding sweetness. He tends the little creature as tenderly as a mother cares for a baby...

Amidst the hardships, there was one bright economic spot in the decade, a buying and collecting frenzy called the basket craze. This was a phenomenal time (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/30/1900). Hungry for entertainment, crowds in the East flocked to massive exhibitions staged by museums in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, San Francisco and every other large city; P. T. Barnum’s first success was the museum he opened at this time. These exhibitions were object-rich attempts to recreate the sights and sounds of foreign cultures.

Individual collectors were hungry for baskets at this time as well. Competition was fierce. Personal wars occurred in which collectors would race to be the first to get to the reservations and would fight to get Indian women to sell them their baskets.

Mr. Brackett, the merchant here went to Agua Caliente and bought up all the baskets that I ordered made. He went into the houses and of course they took his price. He doubles his profit and it is too bad (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/24/1900).

Indian women were being paid as much as $8.00 dollars for a basket which might have sold for $4.00 or less before the craze (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/24/1900). Once the $8.00 basket reached the city it would be sold for double the price (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/24/1900).

Kumeyaay Indian women made the most of the money the basket craze brought them. They bought food, clothes and tools, but the money was spent on more long-range survival plans, too, on resisting the changes forced upon them. One basketmaker from Laguna Reservation, Maria Alto, used the money and the American system in 1902 to secure her land rights; she traveled to the Office of the Clerk of San Diego County, a two-day ride on horseback, to file a Homestead Claim for the village her ancestors occupied (Lucas 1999).

Despite the basket craze, the need for cash was still being met by using strategies which took men far from home, and resulted in the splitting of families for extended periods of time. This required the exploitation of new resources, or the exploitation of the old resources in a new way; Indian people turned to take advantage of new opportunities which arose. Depending on the work, employment meant not being able to return home for weeks and sometimes for months. One opportunity cost was time to gather and prepare traditional foods. Mamie Robinson described Santo Lopez’ circumstances when he went to work on the Colorado River^{^[10]}

...and he does not know when he will be able to come back. They will be thro’ their work in two weeks but Sant doesn’t think they will be able to cross [the river] then. He wrote up to me telling me to tell the people not to attempt to come there for work (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 12/16/1906).

In the spring of 1904, a new source of income was to be introduced; Bishop Johnson had secured the money for the salary for a bobbin-lace teacher at Mesa Grande. She would teach the Indian women to make bobbin-lace and supply them with the proper pins and thread. Sophie Miller was the first teacher; she would buy any lace the Kumeyaay women made and send it east to the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association who marketed to garment manufacturers eager to buy the hand-made lace. Lace was lightweight, and could be easily and inexpensively sent by post. The first month Miller reported more than $25.00 worth of lace sent to New York (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/18/1904). For the next fourteen years, lace making was added to the list of economic survival strategies.

The teachers show that basketmaking was interspersed with alternate income generating strategies like making lace, working as laborers or vaqueros, harvesting traditional foods, tending vegetable gardens and field crops, and keeping cattle and honey bees. Seven years later the enthusiasm Watkins had expressed at the idea of Indian people with cash incomes, in May of 1900, was lost to Mamie Robinson. She wrote to DuBois on October 23 of 1907 (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1) about the direct effect of railroad building on basketmaking, “Very little basketmaking going on. Plenty of work for the men. More drinking than ever before, this simply because there has been more money.” This statement sums up the chief motivation for making baskets after 1850: cash money.

With cash, Indian people could fill the needs once satisfied by the economic system the had developed over thousands of years. Mrs. Ascencion Norte (1935), for example requested the return of her baskets, which had never been paid for, from John W. Dady. She based her plea for their return on her need for cash to feed and clothe the children under her care.

It appears that basketry was preserved for the same reason it is continued today, south of the Baja California border. It operates as a component of a diverse economic strategy, as it has for a thousands of years. However, the economic function of the basket has changed. Innovation changed the way basketmaking brought resources into the community. Originally used as tools which procured unprocessed foods (acorn, piñon nuts, salvia seed, chia seed), women found a new use for this old tool, now baskets were exchanged for a harvest of processed foods (sugar, flour, beans, coffee) and a variety of other consumer goods by generating cash. Once a harvester of seed crops, the baskets made between1890 and 1910 had the potential to harvest cash, cash which had become essential to life.

Times seemed to be continually hard for a majority of Kumeyaay and other Southern California Indians. One or another of the varied strategies employed to survive was bound to fail every year. Oaks bore a good crop only every two years. The European-style gardens could become a total loss at any time. San Ignacio’s gardeners experienced a year of loss in 1904 as recorded by Ella Collins (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/25/1904),^{^[11]}

I am afraid they are almost in want, for the year has been so very dry that they will not raise a pound of hay or grain. All their gardens are dead but they are trying to dig wells and get water to irrigate their gardens, and they will plant them over but it is very late to get much garden grown now.

The families with women who made baskets were more financially secure than families where the art of basketmaking could not be incorporated into the arsenal of cash securing strategies. Each period of heavy basketmaking coincided with extreme climatic conditions which mitigated against traditional food-gathering and modern gardening practices. Year after year, the letters paint the same dun-colored landscape of poverty despite the use of multiple strategies. Santo Lopez wrote to DuBois (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 3/1/07) in the spring of 1907, while discussing buying bee hives, “I think I need the money more than the hives, for I have no money for anything.” Mamie Robinson wrote to DuBois (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 8/19/1907) in August of 1907 that although the weather was hot, there was still starvation to be fended off

Glad of the $10.00 as Mr. McArthur wrote me that he has heard nothing of the [government] appropriation for the subsistence of the aged and sick. There are 5 that we have been carrying thro’ July and Aug. with your help and some money I had here belonging to Col. Lockwood. I don’t know what we should have done for they had not a soul to depend upon. One is a blind man who has a wife and four children, a new baby being born in July. She, the wife, makes baskets and gardens - does all she can do. (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 8/1/1900).

A survival ration of food for one person for a month cost three dollars, at least that was the amount given as a monthly ration by the government teacher, Mary Watkins (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 1/30/1902).

In such a climate of hand-to-mouth poverty, basketmaking was an economic ace-in-the-hole, especially during the basket craze, which lasted from the turn of the century until the supply was exhausted, about 1910. DuBois was able to exploit the basket craze and she wrote in an undated essay, around 1906 (HFL, CGD papers, reel 3: 1906), of the economic impact of basketmaking in concrete terms

Basketry existing now almost entirely as a means of livelihood has become necessarily somewhat degraded from its earlier perfection, but in the Campo-Manzanita region almost no baskets were made for sale until I supplied the earliest market for the product, selling for benefit of the destitute makers a thousand dollars worth of baskets in four years.

The market for hand crafted goods was to be of particular concern on a continuing basis in other arenas, too. DuBois relates that drawn work, a kind of handwork in which the threads of a linen fabric are removed so that the vacant spaces create a decorative pattern, was taught to the Indian women by the Spanish more than 100 years before. Watkins and Mrs. Hall, the wife of the government teacher at La Jolla Reservation, in cooperation with DuBois and her sister tried to develop a market for the work. They bought drawn-work linens from the Indian women and furnished them with fabric and thread to continue production. It was a tough market and in 1900 David P. Barrows wrote DuBois on the subject (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 7/18/1900)

The Mexican drawn work has been brought in so largely as rather to drive out that made by the Indians. The natives of certain towns of Mexico seem to make a better and cheaper article that is coming to be sold very largely, as you have doubtless noticed.

None the less the Indian women kept working. DuBois lamented, in 1906, the problems of the hand workers thus, “...they are too poor to purchase the necessary linen and they require intelligent supervision to enable them to place their products on the market.” The distance from the market mirrored the distance from the supply source.

One Episcopalian woman took her responsibility to the Indian poor seriously; the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association served a number of reservations among the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes and the Mohawk of New York. In an attempt to bring more money to the reservations, the La Jolla, and Santa Ysabel Reservations in 1902.^{^[12]} The mission of the organization was two pronged. The first goal was to provide Indian women with materials and instruction in lace making. At the beginning of the 20th century, all “real” lace was made by hand-twisting threads of linen in decorative patterns; it had been mechanized in England in the 19th century but the quality was inferior to the handmade original. The second goal was to serve as agents in the sale of the work to the garment industry of New York City. The Association would buy the lace from the workers and then resell it. Any profit was pumped back into the program by hiring new teachers and providing an uninterrupted supply of materials. Several photographs in the collection of the San Diego Historical Society depict lace on the bonnets of babies in Mesa Grande and Santa Ysabel (86:15752-4; 86:15900-1394), presumably made by Indian women or girls.

By the fall of 1904 Francis LaChappa, a Kumeyaay woman from Mesa Grande, had learned the art well enough to go to Campo as a lace making teacher and a White woman was found to accompany her and to teach the three Rs. Edward H. Davis, a store keeper from Mesa Grande, wrote to DuBois (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/18/1905) of the success of the venture

The girls are doing splendid work and a school of 14 pupils is now in operation under Francis La Chappa, maestra. Whole families are moving to Campo, so to have their children receive the benefit of school.

Eventually the Mission Indian Agency would employ a government lace teacher who taught at Pala and Malki Reservations. Already trained in Western style handwork generations earlier, the women learned lace making instantly .

The problem of the remoteness of the reservations manifested itself in the creation of a secondary market for the goods, that is, someone had to get the baskets, lace, drawn work, vegetables, or honey off the remote mountain sides where they had very limited value and into population centers where an attractive price could be obtained. Davis (SDHS, Box 2, Envelope 17) recorded a story about the exploitation inevitable when a secondary, distant market is important. The publisher of the Indian Philanthropist remains obscure:

A woman in govt. employ after bartering for five weeks she succeeded in obtaining an Ind. basket for $5.00 for which $30 was asked by the Ind. woman. While counting on the basket she had adv. a small amt. from time to time to enable the woman to get food with and thereby get her in debt. Another woman had taken a fancy to the basket & intended buying it but the first woman warned her off as she had adv. money & told her to keep off. A cast off hat & some old clothes were put in as part payment. The basket was beautifully made - a large basket which took 6 months to make. She bought another basket for $2.50. She came to a good hotel on govt pay on a vacation and met some Eastern tourists who were Ind. lovers and as she was a good talker and had lived among the Inds. This interested them very much. Finally she brought out her Ind. baskets which were admired very much. She did not want to sell the baskets until at the earnest solicitation of (an) the Eastern man she sold the two baskets one for $75 & the other for $25. The large one she said had taken over 6 months to make, with great patience and care and it was represented that the poor Indians got the benefit of the money.

The income from baskets was not enough to keep the wolf from every Kumeyaay door. Robinson’s letter (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1) to DuBois of September 20,1907 relates the still desperate plight of the sick and indigent Indian people, “No money yet for the subsistence of the old people.” Baskets again fill in the gaps, “I have a number of baskets, not any choice ones.”

Without the baskets, however, wide spread starvation would have prevailed. A letter from Robinson to DuBois in early October, complained that the government funds for the old people had still not come, and thanked DuBois for sending her monthly allotment of $10.00 and for sending $25.00 from sales of baskets (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 10/6/1907).

Those traditional food sources which could still be exploited were. One of the few native plants not destroyed by overgrazing was the piñon pine. In October 1907, Sant had gone to gather piñon nuts, some 15 miles east of Jacumba. The harvest had been a good one, and Indian people from all of the surrounding areas had gone to share in the bounty, to practice a common economic strategy (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 10/6/1907).

The economic value of baskets is undeniable, especially if we look at the basketmaking of a woman who did not particularly care to make baskets although she could and did when circumstances compelled. Such a woman was Owas, the wife of Santo Lopez. Although no details of her background are recorded, it was said by her husband, according to Mamie Robinson (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 12/1/1907), that Owas did not like to sit still long enough to do that kind of work, and that she did not like to do basketmaking. She wasn’t lazy. She went to work during the winter of 1907 - 1908 as a laundress for the workers building the railroad that was used to dump ore-cars of boulders into the breach in the flank of the Colorado River, and during the spring, summer and early fall, she tended a garden of tomatoes, beans, greens, and corn at her father’s house. In fact, she chose the laundry of the laborers over basketmaking when both were apparently possible.

By March 1908, the breach in the River had been sealed and wages on the railroad had been cut in half. Forced back to work she didn’t care for, Owas made another basket. Sant agreed to bring it and another to Mamie Robinson

He asked me to say he would soon send you two baskets, Owas made one and one was given to him. He wants them to go toward paying that $20 [he borrowed to purchase bees and hives].

The decade ended with many of the most vulnerable Southern California Indian people mired in grinding poverty, hunger, and cold. Although women like Owas Lopez didn’t know it, the basket craze was about to come to a screeching halt. But the decade had also brought the women a new strategy to be added to the arsenal of economic skills, lace making.

During the first 40 years of the 20th century, Kumeyaay Indian women continued their multifaceted economic survival strategies. They alternately gardened, gathered piñon nuts and acorn, and hired out their labor. With less frequency, they produced drawn work and baskets, and with increasing frequency, they made lace.

A variety of factors brought the basket craze to a halt by about 1912. Advances in the entertainment industry and the introduction of the automobile moved the crowds away from the museum spectacular. A medium sized basket took three months to make and Indian women were not able to produce new baskets in large enough numbers to sustain the craze indefinitely. In addition, the collectors preferred “old baskets” when they could find them; C. Hart Merriam wrote to Mary Watkins in the fall of 1902 only to find out that the old ones had already been sold (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 12/12/1902). Davis (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 5/18/1905) noticed their absence, too.

About the Indian things I cannot give you any encouragement as I have very few if any duplicates, as all of the Rancheros are drained of the old belongings by collectors and visitors, except some hechicero things[13] still in use and buried away or hidden and not to be bought at any price.

By 1910 most California baskets and even the protected hechicero things were in collections. In the absence of baskets, lace making became very important. Mrs. Grace Lachusa of Mesa Grande was explicit, in a 1933 letter to John W. Dady, Superintendent of the Mission Indian Agency (NAPSR, New Central Classified Files, 1920-1953. Box 65: 967), about the value of lace making for her family

Who could be more interested in this work than me for I know what good it has done. In fact my parents couldn’t of never kept us seven children together if it hadn’t been for the lace work. There wasn’t much work here then for my father and my mother was sick. He tried to wrestle a living out of farming these dry hills as he couldn’t go away for work and leave us all alone, so we made the living for many months with our lace work.

An undated brochure from the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association, also found in the desk records of Dady, sums the economic impact up this way

The practical side of what the work is today is found in improved homes, additions to houses, the purchase of farm implements and animals, and the many comforts which never could have been enjoyed on the slender incomes from the land alone. A store-keeper once remarked that he would have to go out of business if the women did not have their lace money, and not long ago several of the workers, with a good deal of pride, pointed to “lace pigs,” “lace cows,” “ lace houses,” etc.

Making bobbin lace was so profitable it came to replace basketmaking for a few years, at least at Mesa Grande Reservation. The end of the basket craze among collectors and institutions meant falling basket prices which made making lace more profitable.

Lace making required only a fraction of the time needed to make baskets. A huge amount of labor is hidden within each basket, for a woman does not just cut sticks and weave them. Every hour spent in stitching a coiled basket means another hour spent securing and preparing the materials. The Belgian linen thread used in lace making needed no preparation. The negligible cost of the linen aside, women could produce income faster by making lace than by making baskets. Lace making supplanted basketmaking after the end of the craze. Mesa Grande Reservation women under the direction of the Sybil Carter lace teacher, Grace Dycke, sent $1,484.85 worth of lace to New York between October 1917 and April 1918.^{^[14]} In comparison to baskets, which earned $1,000.00 over four years, lace making was a windfall.

According to Mission Indian Agency records (NAPSR, New Central Classified Files, 1920-1953. Box 65: 967), Mrs. Lachusa, an outstanding lace maker, learned the skill at the age of eight and by age twelve she was assisting the teacher. Within a year she went to New York to work as a lace-making teacher; there she stayed for fourteen years. In 1922 she returned to Mesa Grande Reservation. At the height of the depression she worked with Superintendent John W. Dady of the Mission Indian Agency to revive lace making. In a letter to him she recalled her own experience as a ace-making teacher

I did all my own blueprinting and making of the patterns and the Co. furnished all the material and I measured the lace and paid the women here soon as they finished it. Mostly yard lace was made a few tried the small doilies. The yard lace was all the way from 10 ¢ a yard to $10.00 a yard. The main thing is to find a ready sale for the lace, so after they finish some they can get some cash.

Fewer girls wanted to learn basketmaking, but many wanted to learn lace making. Lace making was an innovation which relied upon factory-made threads. Lace was stylish and didn’t require the long trips to gather materials that basketmaking did. The problem of a ready local market had been solved with the growth of Los Angeles. A Cupeño elder, Nadine Nelson, recalled her aunt traveling to fairs in Sacramento to sell her lace (personal communication Spring 2000). Lace making became profitable as Indian women found a direct market for their work and California filled with White people, but events half a world away were to bring lace making in Southern California to a standstill.

Basketmaking was an ideal industry for families denied normal access to the economic system because the process did not require the outlay of any cash. All of the tools and materials had been developed before the introduction of a capitalist economy and therefore were not dependent upon such a system. Drawn work and lace making were different. Even though drawn work depended upon the acquisition of linen yardage, some women were still able to produce this needlework for sale (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 3/19/1902). Lace making depended upon the import of rust-proof steel pins and Belgian linen thread, a completely uniform, small-diameter thread. There were no contemporaneous local substitutes for these materials. Cash was required to buy the imports. Precontact “fabrics” used in Southern California were cloaks made of strips of rabbit skin interwoven with milkweed or Indian hemp cordage, skirts of shredded bast fibers, and mats made of pierced rushes threaded together on four or five rows of cordage. Despite the fact that the twisting of threads in making lace was very similar to the twisting of cordage in making nets, lace required the strength of steel pins holding it under tension as it was twisted; net making did not require this. There is no doubt that Kumeyaay people were capable of making very fine threads from native plants, namely, Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) and milkweed (Asclepias sp.). Like deer grass (Muhlenbergia rigens), by 1900 they had been grazed near to oblivion and were unavailable in sufficient amounts for thread making. ^{^[15]} Mrs. Lachusa recalled in September 1933

All the thread was imported thread mostly from Belgium and France and the B. B. pins from England...so we tried some American thread the Barbours F. D. A. thread; which I think can be gotten in Los Angeles, but can’t say where. May be it could be found from some of these traveling sales men.

Then in 1918 commercial cargo ships ceased Atlantic Ocean crossings due to World War I, the dependence on outside supply doomed the lace-making industry. A letter dated June 17, 1918 from Olivia M. Cutting, President of the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association, to Cato Sells, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington DC, predicts the failure of the Association

With regard to the thread situation, I may say that it is serious if not critical. It is practically impossible to enlarge our present supply to any appreciable extent and what we have is far from desirable.

The choice of some Indian women to sell their lace directly, instead of through the Association, assured its withdrawal from Southern California. The Association relied upon the profit it made by selling lace to pay teachers’ salaries and buy thread and pins, which it gave, without charge, to the Indian lacemakers. Superintendent of Soboba School, Harry E. Wadsworth, received a letter from Ellen Lawrence, the government lace teacher at Pala and Malki Reservations regarding the status of the lace-making funds. She wrote that from July 1, 1917 until June 24, 1918 she had paid out only $79.92 to women for lace. She noted that some women were selling their laces at fairs and elsewhere and were giving her no account of how much revenue had been received from lace making. The school girls, she said, were making lace and keeping it.

As the supply of linen and pins dwindled, some lace-making programs were slated for closure. Because of the small dollar amount of lace being passed through Lawrence’s hands, Commissioner Sells ordered the position of government lace teacher abolished, saying that between October 1916 and October 1917 only $39.00 worth of lace had been sold to the Association and that in the subsequent year the amount had fallen to $20.44. He added that he hoped the women would continue lace making on their own (NAPSR, MIA file 967: 5/4/1918). The Sybil Carter Association followed the Government’s lead and formally withdrew from Southern California around 1924 (NAPSR, MIA file 967: 1/25/1930).

Basketmaking had declined as an income producing activity due to the end of the basket craze and to the rise of lace making which had replaced basketry for the younger girls. When materials for making lace ran out, it was forgotten for nearly ten years; exportable home products almost disappeared as a source of income generation. It is difficult to establish, from the historic record, who launched the attempt to revive lace making on the reservations in 1930. The earliest mention of a revival discovered in the records is a letter from Mrs. Grace Lachusa (NAPSR, MIA file 967: 1/14/1930); it reads like a response to an inquiry by Charles L. Ellis, superintendent of the Mission Indian Agency, as she enclosed papers from the pins and threads used. Ellis wrote to Mrs. Charles Wallcott of Washington, D. C. in 1930 for help in reestablishing the lace industry.

Both Ed Davis and Ellis, Superintendent of the Mission Indian Agency, agree that 1930 was a terrible economic year, not only because of the crash of the stock market in distant New York the previous fall, but because Southern California had not emerged from what Ellis called the worst and longest drought in recorded history (NAPSR, MIA file 967: 1/25/1930 ). The National Climatic Data Center recorded 5.5” of rain in San Diego County in 1928 and 4.14” of rain in 1929; nine to ten inches was the norm (see Table 2.1). This meant no acorns and many hungry people. The drought broke by dumping a record amount of snow on the mountains and deserts. The cumulative total meant hardship for the entire community. Davis (SDHS, EHD papers, Box 2, Env 39) wrote in 1931

We next went to Henry Long near the school. We found him, his wife, and a child. He said his father and other child would return soon. I looked through the house and found about ½ pound of beans in an olla. No flour. No acorns. There are no acorns. The acorn crop failed in 1930 so no Inds. had acorn meal. We next drove about a mile and a half and turned up a hill and stopped near a good sized native hut...Here we found a family of five, Tomas Osway & wife Anita & three children. I examined the house and found a few tortillas & few beans.

Prompted by the hardship she saw around her Lachusa wrote C. J. Rhoads, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who in turn wrote to Ellis directing him to try to restart the project. Ellis left office soon after, but not before he had predicted the failure of the revival attempt.

...[Indian women] are eager and desirous of reviving the industry, but the main difficulty to overcome is lack of market or demand for the lace. Also, the Indians are unable to find in the stores of San Diego or Los Angeles the imported thread or pins required for lace-making (NAPSR, MIA file 967: 1/16/1931).

Ellis continued his efforts, requesting all of the teachers, farm agents, social workers, and others in the field service under his supervision, to submit lists of crafts people who lived in the different areas under his jurisdiction. Ironically, this was to be the first step in rebuilding the basketry industry in Southern California. Since lace making had come to replace basketmaking, the number of basketmakers had dwindled.

Resumption of the lace making on the mountain reservations like Mesa Grande and Volcan would afford the Indian women an outlet for their home labor which they do not now have except to the very few old women who make baskets (NAPSR, MIA file 967: 1/14/1930).

Records show that by 1933 John W. Dady had become Superintendent of the Mission Indian Agency. Initially, he pursued the revival of the lace industry with enthusiasm. He wrote to Lachusa for samples of thread and pins. He wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D. C. requesting funds to hire a lace-making teacher and a basketmaking teacher. He wrote Bullock’s Department Store in October of 1933 to see if they were interested in supplying thread and buying lace. Nothing came of the inquiries and Dady, stymied by a lack of suitable materials, lost all enthusiasm for the lace-making project by 1935.

He shifted his focus to securing funds to hire a basketmaking teacher, and widened the search for Indian basketmakers by consulting the U.S. Licensed Indian Trader, R. Bruce Cregar. Lace making was nearly forgotten as basketmaking resurged again after the hiatus of the 1920s. Today, no one makes lace. Few elders remember seeing lace around the house, and even fewer remember anyone twisting threads into lace.^{^[16]}

The economic efficacy of basketmaking between the years 1920 and 1930 is not easy to measure, given the dearth of records which remain from the period and the abandonment of the art by the young women. But it undoubtedly endured since when the records pick up the basketmaking element again in the early 1930s, women were still making fine baskets. The average age of the basketmakers now, however, was over fifty. At Temecula in 1934 the youngest “good” basketmaker, Cenciona Gomez, was 53 and the eldest, Michela Quileg, was 98; more than half of the women were over 65. At Pala it was the same, the youngest, Rosinda Nolasquez, was 41 and the eldest, Rafaela Owlinguish, was 77; half the women were over 50.

Despite the increasing average age of the basketmakers and the diminishing number of young basketmakers, Cregar collected many baskets in the 1930s. These he would enter in Indian Fairs like the Indian Ceremonial which began in Gallup, New Mexico in 1922. California Indian women had long competed at Indian and County fairs, for the title of finest basketmaker, and the cash prize which accompanied each title. Indian women in northern and central California competed annually between 1916 and 1929 at the Yosemite Indian Field Days. There Lucy Telles and others sold their own baskets at top prices and also collected their prize money (Bates and Lee 1990: 92-112). During the 1930s, a Cahuilla basketmaker named Candelaria Saubel^{^[17]} consistently was the grand prize winner for baskets at the Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, New Mexico with several baskets a diameter larger than 51 cm. Records indicate that even though Cregar purchased the baskets from the women and then entered them in the competition, he apparently returned the prize money to the makers. He, of course, kept any profit from the secondary sale of the basket. Gallup is many miles from San Diego County and one scenario indicates that without Cregar, the Kumeyaay women would not have profited from any prize money because of the prohibitive cost of travel to New Mexico; any prize money would have been spent on transportation. Perhaps, though, if the women had been able to command the same prices that Cregar obtained from resale of the baskets, plus the prize money, they would have profited more by traveling to Gallup, than they did by staying home

By November 1935, Indian Agent Dady had received $500.00 funding for a basketmaking program from the Office of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and authorized social worker Esther Adamson to hire basketmaking teachers at Mesa Grande, Volcan, and Los Coyotes Reservations. No record has been found which gives the names of the teachers but she spent $257 dollars for teachers’ salaries. The remaining $243.00 was sent to J. K. Hall in Banning to use for teachers at Morongo Reservation.^{^[18]}

Cash was scarce in 1934, the depth of the depression. Dady encouraged a handful of Indian women in March of 1934 to exhibit baskets in an show of domestic arts and home economics sponsored by the Washington Office of Indian Affairs. The baskets were to be taken on consignment for sale. On behalf of his mother, Mrs. Ascencion (Cinciona) Norte of Banning, Riverside County, Mr. George Norte lent two baskets. The Nortes spent the next year fighting for the return of baskets or the $16.50 purchase price from the Office of Indian Affairs through Dady. Mr. Norte wrote [none of the spelling or punctuation altered]:

My mother asked my about the basket I left there a few months back in your letter stated that if I wanted in back I was welcome to get it back that you could not except anything from no one. and to leve it to for a exhibit so I did and now I want it because I’m not at work, I need all what I can get. So this is the only way mother and I make our living (NAPSR, MIA files, box 961:10/3/1934).

The Nortes were not the only family in such a situation. Esther Adamson, Social Worker for the Mission Indian Agency also wrote to John W. Dady about the return of the unsold $7.00 basket of Mrs. Pedro (Carmelita) LaChappa of Campo Reservation

She [Mrs. LaChappa] called my attention to the fact that she and her children needed shoes and clothing and that she had hoped that this money would provide them. Mrs. LaChappa is very diligent, always working on baskets or something and is finding it very hard to find a buyer for them.

I should like very much to feel that I have not made the situation more difficult for her by this long delayed program. I am sure that the letter you write to Washington will be more tactful than this (NAPSR, MIA files, box 961: 3/16/35).

These baskets were solicited by the United States Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, Washington and forwarded on for exhibition in what Dady refers to as the “World’s Fair.”^{^[19]} Basketmakers, Maria Tobac and Susanna Aguello from La Jolla Reservation and Mrs. Cayatas Welmas from Pala Reservation had baskets on loan to the exhibition which totaled $41.00 in value, but apparently these baskets were sold during the exhibition and the money was sent back to the three women. The outstanding Norte baskets were finally returned in the middle of May 1935; no disposition of the LaChappa basket is recorded.

Dady petitioned the newly created Indian Arts and Crafts Board in 1938 for funds to hire Candelaria Chino Saubel as the basketmaking teacher at Morongo Reservation in Banning. He received a reply from Paul Fickinger, Associate Director for Education at the Office of Indian Affairs who said there were no funds available for such education, but that Dady should contact Mary Stewart, Superintendent of Indian Education for the State of California to attach funds given to the State in payment for education services for California Indians. Fickinger, to his credit, went back to the Indian Arts and Crafts Board to see if they might release funding. The response was a polite no. Mary Stewart, however, made time to see Dady late in the summer of 1938. No official record of the meeting remains, but still surviving are the official Mission Indian Agency records of the amount of money brought in by Indian basketmakers on Southern California reservations in 1939 and 1940 (NAPSR MIA records; Box 691). The following table shows basketry income (cash/noncash) by reservation for those two years. It is difficult to tell what prompted women to return to basketmaking, even though it was a slow return, but it is certain that basketmakers were trying hard to generate income in these difficult times. An important point is that women at Pauma, Manzanita, and San Pasqual Reservations who sold no baskets in 1939, sold $50.00 worth in 1940.

Overall, the amount of reported revenue raised from basketmaking in 1939, $285.00, grew to $565.00 in 1940. Rincon Reservation’s basket income declined sixty per cent, and both Pala and Pechanga Reservation equaled their 1939 production. Every other reservation increased its basket income an average eighty per cent at each location.

Archival records end here in 1940. The thread of the history of basketmaking is broken in several places. The beginning is mostly obscured by time, but in a few places ancient basket fragments remain to speak for everything else which has been lost. The century of documentation which exists is tantalizing. It shows in crystalline detail exactly how basketmaking was an integral element in the tapestry of Kumeyaay life. Still, there are thousands of missing names and dates, most of which can not be recovered, and a thousand baskets scattered to collections around the globe by the winds of change. They will never go home, nor even be completely inventoried, despite the noteworthy efforts of Tom Blackburn and Travis Hudson (1990) to document the holdings of foreign museums.

^{^[1]} Mrs. Stone was apparently a White resident of the Mesa Grande area.

^{^[2]} The term Europhone is borrowed from Wolf and refers to those whose mother tongue is an European language; an Anglophone is an English speaker. These “phone” categories distinguish English speaking Californians from Spanish speaking Californians, or Hispanophones.

^{^[3]} The Spanish spelling of Kumeyaay is Kumiai.

^{^[4]} Richard Nejo, of the Mesa Grande Reservation was born in 1881. He was interviewed by Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Raymond Gastil, from the University of Oregon in August of 1961. When Professor Gastil retired he donated his notes to Dr. Margaret Langdon, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego.

^{^[5]} Hunter’s appointment predated B. D. Wilson’s October 1852 appointment as Indian Subagent of Southern California by five years.

^{^[6]} Like the famed Bataan death march of World War II, in which captive U. S. soldiers were forced at Japanese gun point to march the length of the Bataan Peninsula in the Phillippines; the oldest, the youngest, the infirm, and the unlucky rarely survived.

^{^[7]} No relationship between this McCain and the Mc Cain of the Massacre has yet been established.

^{^[8]} Juan Antonio was the exception to this pattern; many Whites felt a debt of gratitude to this Cahuilla leader who was held in high esteem by Americans for leading the force of Indian men who captured, Antonio Garra, the renegade leader of what the papers of the day called an Indian uprising. According to his descendants, Juan Antonio feared the mass murder of Indians in Southern California by vigilantes if Garra remained free after the attack on Warner’s Rancho in which one White American was killed. He and his Cahuilla supporters captured Garra and his coconspirators and brought them to the jail in San Diego. Garra and two others were publicly executed in 1851 by firing squad in the square in Old Town, San Diego.

^{^[9]} The Kumeyaay were largely unaffected by the Dawes Allotment Act of 1886, an act of Congress designed to remove the land designated as reservations from Indian hands. It dissolved Indian sovereignty and gave individual Indians control over parcels of reservation land. Phillips (1981: 65) speculated that the reason only 11 of 28 reservations in San Diego County were allotted was because of the uneven nature of the parcels. Some would have no water at all, some no soil, others would be washed away by winter storms, others would freeze hard every winter, and still others would bake in the relentless summer sun; these would provide no living at all, even to the most resourceful landowner.

^{^[10]} In 1906, word spread like wildfire, that labor was desperately needed on the Colorado River and high wages were being paid. It seems an American entrepreneur saw an opportunity to irrigate the desert with Colorado River water. His crews, in attempting to create a canal, breached the western flank of the riverbed. Soon seasonal flooding backed by torrential unremitting rains widened the breach until at last the entire Colorado River poured through the opening, filling the long dry Salton Sink until it was 17 miles wide and 47 miles long. Word must have gone out quickly that the crazy capitalists had run the River out of its banks because Sant Lopez crossed the Colorado and went to work while the breach was widening. The December torrents which tore the River’s bank wide open made it impossible for him to cross back over to return home until the floods subsided.

^{^[11]} She adds a note about the Cupeños who were forcibly removed from Warner’s Hot Spring to Pala the year before: The Indians who were removed from Warner’s Rancho are having a hard time. Crops are a failure, and they are homesick. The white folks who have been to Warner’s hot springs complain that they have not been as well treated as they used to be, by the Indians

^{^[12]} The students in Mesa Grande worked under the direction of Miss Sophie Miller. A photograph of her students was taken by Ed Davis and is housed in the San Diego Historical Society (19101-49).

^{^[13]} Hechicero is the name of the performer of a ceremony involving the sacred plant, toloache (Datura meteloides), recorded in some detail by DuBois.

^{^[14]} According to the records of the Mission Indian Agency housed in the National Archives in Laguna Niguel, California.

^{^[15]} Lest one think that Indian hemp, Apocynum, or milkweed, Asclepias, is unsuited to the job, or that Indian hands were unsuited to the task, I point to the collection of the U. S. National Museum which houses a finely twined bag which was more than 100 years old when collected in 1907. The bag was full of seeds when given to old Andreas many years before by his father (Mason 1972 [1902]:487-488).

^{^[16]} A parallel situation presented itself to the Kumeyaay of San José de la Zorra. In the 1980s they sold the baskets they were using to prepare meals for their families because there was no money and outsiders were offering cash for the work baskets.

^{^[17]} Candelaria Chino Saubel was the mother-in-law of Cahuilla elder Katherine Siva Saubel, wife of Mariano Stephen Saubel.

^{^[18]} Malki Reservation was renamed in honor of John Morongo.

^{^[19]} Dady’s World’s Fair does not correspond to any event known specifically as THE World’s Fair and was most probably a smaller fair.

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	July	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total
1853	50	20	152	25	210	5	0	21	0	0	128	177	788
1854	99	256	188	89	18	1	7	136	9	27	4	329	1163
1855	197	359	130	152	6	0	0	4	0	11	215	41	1115
1856	127	186	159	217	29	0	0	0	7	0	122	130	977
1857	26	176	0	4	8	3	0	2	1	49	216	130	615
1858	152	44	124	17	0	19	0	4	10	47	28	310	755
1859	0	189	20	36	17	0	2	0	0	18	149	179	610
1860	72	149	15	65	4	5	14	0	0	0	288	299	911
1861	82	79	5	4	0	19	0	0	159	5	119	320	792
1862	556	139	97	105	16	48	11	0	0	89	5	93	1159
1863	32	109	33	13	2	0	0	0	36	0	73	4	302
1864	4	250	20	1	125	1	11	0	0	4	241	104	761
1865	128	300	0	56	0	1	129	0	0	2	52	84	752
1866	505	343	147	11	9	0	0	10	0	0	24	182	1231
1867	132	85	788	48	4	0	0	30	0	34	45	306	1472
1868	337	163	73	120	15	0	51	0	5	0	200	152	1116
1869	288	188	198	53	33	0	5	0	0	5	232	94	1096
Average	164
1870	54	77	33	20	28	0	4	7	0	154	18	42	437
1871	52	135	1	70	34	0	0	0	0	0	133	139	564
1872	99	163	46	26	12	0	0	18	0	0	0	143	507
1873	44	421	11	10	3	0	0	195	0	0	77	546	1307
Average	145	182	107	54	27	5	11	20	11	21	113	181	878

Reservation	1939	1940	Total
Campo	25/00	40/05	65/05
La Jolla	30/10	75/20	105/30
Manzanita		15/0	15/00
Mesa Grande	40/05	70/10	110/15
Pala	50/10	50/10	100/20
Pauma		15/05	15/05
Pechanga	15/00	15/10	30/10
Rincon	25/05	15/05	40/10
San Pasqual		20/00	20/00
Santa Ysabel	35/10	75/50	110/60
Soboba	25/00	40/20	65/20
Total	245/40	430/135	675/175