An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

Sea to Shining Sea 129

many days until I found a way to escape; but I was tracked and they
caught me like a fox." He was fastened to the stage and beaten to
unconsciousness.
California Indigenous peoples resisted this totalitarian order.
These insurgent actions are also recorded in official records and
diaries, but they seem to have interested few historians until the
civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, when California Indigenous
peoples began to do their own research. They found that no mission
escaped uprising from within or attacks from outside by communi­
ties of the imprisoned along with escapees. Guerrilla forces of up to
two thousand formed. Without this resistance, there would be no
descendants of the California Native peoples of the area colonized
by the Spanish. 21
Under the protection of the US Army, beginning in 1848, gold
seekers from all over the world brought death, torture, rape, star­
vation, and disease to the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral ter­
ritories included the sought-after goldfields north and east of San
Francisco. As Alejandro Murguia describes it, unlike the Native
peoples for whom gold was irrelevant, the forty-niners "hungered
for gold with a sickness":

They would do anything for it. They left families, homes, ev­

erything behind; they sailed for eight months aboard leaky,

smelly ships to reach California; others, captains and sailors,

jumped ship at San Francisco, leaving a fleet of abandoned

brigs, barks, and schooners to rot by the piers. They slaugh­

tered all the game they could find and so muddied the rivers

and creeks with silt that the once plentiful salmon couldn't

survive. The herds of elk and deer, the food source for Native

Americans, were practically wiped out in one summer. The

miners cheated and killed each other in the gold fields.^22

In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement extermi­
nated more than one hundred thousand California Native people
in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by
187 0-quite possibly the most extreme demographic disaster of all
time. 23 Here too, against impossible odds, the Indigenous resisted