5000carrillo

THE FIVE THOUSAND MORNINGS OF THE CARRILLOS

Any progress on saving the Carrillo Adobe? Nope; as of this writing (2022) what walls still exist continue to melt like very slowly thawing snow. The last restoration effort remains the shed roof put over the place thirty years ago, paid for by the Carrillo family and other donors. We should also be thankful the chainlink fence was finally repaired in 2012 after a homeless camp was found to be stealing original timbers from the building to use for firewood and tent poles.

Although it’s destined to be a park someday (right, city hall?) its future rests with the San Jose developer who owns the land and intends to build 162 condos next to it. That project is now called the “Creekside Village Townhomes” and a development plan was filed in 2020 (PDF) complete with blueprints, architectural sections, landscaping, elevation setbacks, chosen paint colors, streetlight designs and all the other trimmings a city would expect for a major housing development. The site plans only specify an outline for a “Future Carrillo Adobe Park” next door.

Devil’s advocate: Why should we even care if those ruins are preserved? We’ve been telling ourselves the same tale about the place for 150 years and frankly, it’s not all that interesting. The widow Carrillo arrives with her many children and they build the adobe. After the family moves out, a group of Americans use it for a store. Before long those fellows dash off to establish Santa Rosa and the adobe becomes a barn, a warehouse, a prune drying shed and other uninteresting things. A joke plaque could read: “On this spot nothing happened.”

It’s tragic we have allowed the adobe to fall into shambles, but it’s just as bad (or worse, in my opinion) that we have allowed its history to be scraped down to those bare bones, shorn of anything having to do with the Carrillos or how their lives were entwined with a significant period of history. Why has this happened?

Part of the reason is because researchers find few primary sources available; there were no memoirs written by or about the founding Carrillo family. Some of the Carrillo children were illiterate (at least in english) which would help explain why there are so few letters written by family members.1

There are good accounts of visits to the adobe from two english-speaking travelers (discussed below), but other than that the only contemporary accounts are incidental comments made by a U.S. government agent and others passing through the territory.

Such a dearth of original material is somewhat understandable; it was a long time ago – these were events from the 1840s plus a couple of years on either side of that decade. Less forgivable is that later journalists and historians had almost no interest in recording the family’s personal account while they were alive. Many of the founding Carrillo family lived into the late 19th century (two into the 20th), yet there are only a couple known newspaper interviews, both transcribed below for the first time. There’s more than a whiff of racism in that fact, as the Democrat newspaper in Santa Rosa eagerly printed anything having to with non-Hispanics whom they recognized as “pioneers.” The paper even venerated a flagpole because it once waved the Bear Flag over the town of Sonoma, although it turned out that wasn’t even the original pole.

And for the record, that indifference continued into modern times, ending only when Eric Stanley’s 1999 Master’s Thesis made the point that the adobe was historically significant not only because it was such an old building, but also because of the cultural importance of the Carrillo family living there. His writing was later expanded and incorporated into the Roop/Wick Archaeological Study.

That document is the definitive work on all things related to the adobe, detailing also the periods before and after the Carrillo years. It presents a broad picture tracing how they navigated through some very challenging times, including after matriarch Doña María died and the strongly knit family finally crumbled apart – “change happens gradually at first, then all at once,” as Ernest Hemingway famously (but never actually) said.

What follows covers the period from their arrival in the county to when the adobe was sold to the Americans. Those were mainly happy times, when for about five thousand mornings their great herds of cattle and semi-wild horses grazed on the unfenced Santa Rosa plain, puffing clouds of steam in the cool early hours. An upcoming chapter will cover the later years of Marta and Julio, the only children who remained in Santa Rosa and struggled to make their ways in a strange, and often cruel, new world.


THE CARRILLO CHILDREN

Although I have made my best effort to verify dates, some sources present conflicting data. Please leave a comment if corrections are needed.

*
JOSEFA   Josefa Maria Antonia 1810–1893
m. Henry Delano Fitch 1829
*
RAMONA   Maria Ramona de la Luz 1812–1886
m. Jose Antonio Romualdo Pacheco 1826
m. John Charles Wilson 1835
*
LUZ   Maria de la Luz Eustaquia 1814–1894
m. Salvador Vallejo 1840
*
FRANCISCA   Maria Felipa Benicia 1815–1891
m. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo 1832
*
JOHN   Juan Bautista 1817–1841
*
JOAQUIN   Jose Joaquin Victor 1819–1899
m. 1849
m. 1875
“Sebastopol Joaquin” Profiled here
*
RAMON   Jose Ramon 1821–1864
m. 1847
Profiled here (partially)
*
DOLORES   Jose de los Dolores 1823–1844
Died at age 21, buried in Santa Clara
*
JULIO   Julio Maria Tomas 1824–1889
m. 1842
m. 1862
Profiled in upcoming chapter
*
MARTA   Maria Marta 1826-1905
m. Jose Joaquin Maria Victor Carrillo Montano 1855
*
JUANA   Juana de Jesus 1829–1901
m. David Patrick Mallagh 1851
*
FELICIDAD   Maria Felicidad de la Angustias 1833–1856
m. Victor Ramon Castro of Rancho San Pablo 1853

“I have seen Doña María Ygnacia robed in a neat calico dress of a French texture, with a broad-brim straw hat made by one of her Indian women, mounted on a horse which had been broken to saddle by some of her sons expressly for her use,” wrote a traveler of the family matriarch.2 Such a fine, cinematic introduction to Doña María, who was only 44 when she arrived in Sonoma County, mother to twelve surviving children.

Although this was not long after the Carrillos moved into their adobe in 1839, the family already had created a rancho imposing by any measures. Indian laborers managed by Doña María planted and tended fields of wheat, corn, beans and other crops along with vegetables. Teenager Ramón and another son were wrangling about 3,000 head of cattle and as many as 1,500 horses according to that same early visitor.

It was a remarkable turnaround for the family, considering the death of Doña María’s soldier husband had left them in dire straits four years (or so) past. The story usually goes that she was encouraged by a priest and her son-in-law, General Vallejo, to relocate to Sonoma County, so in the summer or fall of 1837 they trundled 700 miles from San Diego on oxcarts. But in one of the overlooked articles, “Sonoma Valley Before the Gringoes Came,” Marta told the writer they came up by sea – which certainly makes more sense, considering she was bringing along nine children ages four to 23.3

It’s also commonly said they lived for a year or so with the Vallejos before scouting out places to settle. It’s certainly possible some of the younger kids stayed that long overall, but a decision on the location was quickly made. In January 1838, son-in-law General Mariano Vallejo granted her a land grant of nearly 9,000 acres. Prior to that a “log house” had already built on Santa Rosa Creek about a half-mile upstream of the adobe site, Julio said in the interview transcribed below.

Nor was there much question about precisely where the Carrillos were going to live. There was already a heavy-duty stone foundation built some ten years earlier (“the marks where the buildings stood were plainly discernible,” Julio said) which greatly facilitated construction of the adobe. Whether the abandoned footings were intended for a full-scale mission, a satellite “asistencia” – or maybe a military outpost – is an unsettled question. (EDIT: The particular foundation Julio referred to was near the site of the village of Hukabetawi, described below, not the other pre-existing foundation on which the Carrillo Adobe was built.)

Having a ready-to-use building foundation was a great advantage, but General Vallejo probably would have urged the Carrillos to settle in the Santa Rosa area anyway. The secularization of the missions created an ongoing headache for Vallejo, as mission properties were supposed to be given to Indians who had lived and worked there. The missionaries tried to skirt the law by creating popup colonies on land they claimed belonged to the church because. Vallejo evicted them from the Petaluma area with a promise to turn all of Santa Rosa into Mission Indian lands, but granting the entire acreage to the Carrillos was an endrun to the padre’s gamesmanship.4

But catastrophe struck before adobe construction could begin. In late 1837 a soldier caught smallpox while on a trading mission at Fort Ross. Vallejo and other Californios were vaccinated and he ordered Sem-Yeto (Chief Solano) and other Indians in his immediate circle vaccinated as well, while trying to prevent an epidemic by quarantining the rest of the Indians living nearby. It did little good; in May 1838 Vallejo sent a notice to all parts of Alta California warning smallpox was raging in the North Bay. He later estimated the disease claimed some 70,000 Indians in the region and Gov. Alvarado said 200-300k were killed “as far as the slopes of Mount Shasta.” A Californio historian wrote at the time they “died daily like bugs.”

oldvillages(“Old villages” c. 1800. After the 1838-1839 smallpox epidemic only a few remained. Source: “The Ethno-Geography of the Pomo and Neighboring Indians,” Samuel Barrett, 1908. Art by Jeff Elliott)

By the time the Carrillos moved into the adobe in 1839 the world had turned upside down. In the before-times, the Pomo tribelet in the Santa Rosa area (called the Gualomi in mission records) had an established village known as Hukabetawi – where W Third St. meets N Dutton Ave. – as well as another at the site of Santa Rosa city hall. With so many deaths happening so fast, essential family and community links shattered. Like Sebastopol and Dry Creek, Santa Rosa was now a refugee camp mixing people who often didn’t know each other, with Mission Indians next to those who saw the Californios as no better than the missionaries who treated them like slaves.

The chaos of an epidemic ripping through the area surely put adobe construction on hold for most of 1838, although the vaccinated Carrillo boys probably got the jump on cattle and horse ranching. Farming may also have started by the local Pomo, as smallpox did not reach here until later in the year. In fact, I suspect the Indians who Vallejo initially sent “far away” to quarantine were told to go to Santa Rosa and start work on his mother-in-law’s house, as they had recent construction experience in building Vallejo’s own adobe home. Similarly, Salvador Vallejo – brother of the General and soon to marry a Carrillo daughter in 1840 – is credited with supervising the work and possibly the layout of the Carrillo adobe.

The Carrillo children surely looked back upon the 1840s as the best years of their lives. They were young and strapping; the boys in their early twenties or close to it, the girls starting their teens. The rancho prospered and the new adobe gave everyone plenty of room (what is seen today is just the east wing of the adobe; a north wing collapsed in 1944).

The decade was not without its sorrows. Two of Doña María’s sons died as adults; Juan Bautista was age 24, supposedly due to accidental food poisoning by the Carrillo family cook. Dolores was 21 and possibly died while a soldier. Doña María Ignacia Lopez de Carrillo died on February 28, 1849, and her will is partially transcribed below.

There was also the crisis of 1846. The Bear Flag Revolt caused a few weeks of panic because rumors spread Americans were going to kill all Californios in their sleep – while the Americans feared the Californios were planning same. Worse, the family was defenseless because their protectors, Salvador and Mariano Vallejo were being held prisoner; Julio Carrillo would soon be a captive of the Bears as well. Ramón formed a militia to protect the ranchos from possible attacks and there are questions over whether some critical events played out at the adobe, topics discussed here.

The Carrillo rancho also became a social hub for neighboring Californios. Another visitor described young men hanging around, waiting for an opportunity to race and chase down wild horses in the Carrillo’s substantial herd:


…In front of the house there was a courtyard of considerable extent, and part of this was sheltered by a porch. Here, when the “vaccaros” [sic] having nothing to call them to the field, they pass the day, looking like retainers of a rude court. A dozen wild, vicious little horses, with rough wooden saddles on their backs, stand ever ready for work; whilst lounging about, the vaccaros smoke, play the guitar, or twist up a new “riata” of hide or horse-hair…

The writer continued that after an afternoon nap they mounted up and “…away they all go in a cloud of dust, splashing through the river, waving their lassos round their heads with a wild shout, and disappearing from the sight almost as soon as mounted. The vaccaro wants at all times to ride furiously, and the little horses eyes are opened wide enough before they receive the second dig of their rider’s iron spurs…”

That colorful passage was written by Frank Marryat, who spent several days with the Carrillos.5 His visit came in 1850, the year following Doña María’s death so we’re sadly denied a description of her. By then, however, the three Carrillo girls were young women of marriageable age, and we’re treated to a memorable description of “Quilp,” there trying to court 24 year-old Marta:


Breakfast over the Spanish guests were introduced; they were all fine dashing looking fellows, with the exception of one, a short stout man; from the first moment of our meeting war was tacitly declared between us and this gentleman; we found that he was a suitor for the hand of the eldest sister, who, by the way owned a part of the ranche, and I suppose he imagined it was our intention to contest this prize with him; for he commenced at once to show his disapprobation of our presence; we called this fellow Quilp…

QUILP
QUILP
Ramón took the writer on an antelope hunt (!) and when they returned to the adobe Quilp was still hanging around, doing his best to impress Marta he was a great catch: “…he would sit down on a stool in the porch, and throwing one leg over the other, would twang the old guitar and accompany it with a Spanish hymn to the Virgin, which being delivered in a dismal falsetto, bore much resemblance to the noise of a wheelbarrow that requires greasing and was about as musical.” (I urge you to read his whole section about the Carrillos. It’s 22 short pages and is great fun.)

Doña María’s ambitious plans for her rancho required a large, year-round workforce, and according to the 1884 Robert Thompson history, “it is said that at the time of the occupation of the valley by Señora Carrillo there were three thousand Indians living in the neighborhood of [Santa Rosa].” That estimate probably came from Julio – Thompson had interviewed him in 1872.6 The number is likely an exaggeration, but even if just half that many were here it was far larger than the estimated pre-smallpox population of the original villages in the area, which shows the scope of the Indian diaspora after the epidemic.

By most accounts the Carrillos got along particularly well with their Indian workers. The former Mission Indians would have settled in to rancho peonage easily, being used to field and domestic work in exchange for food and clothing. Traditionalist Indians were accommodated by the rancho having a temazcal (sweat lodge) and those converted to Catholicism must have been exceptionally pleased when at age 13, Marta stood as a godparent at the baptism of an Indian child, which was unusual and not just because of her youth.

William Heath Davis, that traveler who visited the Carrillos early on, worried that among them were several hundred “unchristianized” Indians which might pose a threat to the family.7 Doña María told him “she had perfect confidence in her raw help because she treated them so well,” that she kept them well-fed and could speak their language. Julio likewise told historian Thompson the Indians were “…our faithful servants and with their help we were enabled to till our immense fields and drive to pasture our countless thousands of cattle.”

But in her later “Gringos” interview (below), Marta told the writer “occasionally there was a mutiny” which Doña María herself suppressed using her riata/lasso “with the Indians when they were disposed to be ugly.” There is no description of what was done with the protesting Indians once they were roped, but from the context it’s apparent punishment followed.

After Doña María died, this ad hoc Indian refugee community would also fade away quickly. There would be no more livestock, no more crops to tend. There would be no more Carrillos to serve and no more vaqueros and suitors hanging about. There would only be the Americanos, and nobody was sure of how to deal with them.

Around the Twelfth Night of Christmas – a significant holy day in the Mexican Catholic calendar – Doña María saw the shadows of death creeping towards her and wrote a will (partially transcribed below). She would live less than two more months.

Doña María was thoughtful and fair about dividing the lands amongst her children. Three of the eldest daughters – Josefa, Ramona, and Francisca – received no bequests because they were married with their own households. She affirmed Luz already had been given land between Santa Rosa Creek and “the swamp” (huh?) and asked all of the children to regard Luz as the new family matriarch. Although she and husband Salvador Vallejo had their own adobe in Napa, they seemingly spent much of their time at the General’s adobe, judging from biographies.

The three unmarried daughters shared the adobe and land bordered on the south by “El Potrero” creek (eh?) and “the limits of Santa Rosa,” which I’m guessing is approximately E street. The rest of the property belonged jointly to Julio and Ramón. Joaquin – who had his own substantial land grant on the west side of the Laguna – was left a share of the livestock.

Following the Bear Flag Revolt, Ramón took part in the Mexican-American War and remained in Southern California, returning here for a year (or so) after his mother’s death. That was when he met Frank Marryat and settled his affairs with the family, apparently never to return. He sold his interest in the land to Julio for two dollars and Mariano Vallejo gave him $16,672 (over a half-million today) which was presumably for all/most of the Carrillo livestock. Was it a coincidence that sale happened on September 9, 1850 – the day California became part of the United States?

Although there was no more ranching, some farming continued at least through the following year. U.S. Indian Agent George Gibbs came through and described conditions: “…The slovenly modes of cultivation in use, comparatively unproductive as they are, have yet the merit of requiring little or no expenditure of money in wages; the Indians receiving a bare support beyond what they can steal, and then only during the summer.”8 Once Doña María was gone, it seemed the Carrillo’s relationship with the Indians quickly frayed.

Nor was that the only change during 1851 that would have saddened Doña María. Juana married David Mallagh, who with a business partner turned the front part of the family adobe into a general store. They also opened a tavern they called “Santa Rosa House” in the adobe. Then later that year Marta, 25 years old and unmarried, gave birth to her son Agobar. The name of the father was never mentioned.

The next year Alonzo Meacham arrived and bought the store (whether the tavern was included is not known).9 Meacham petitioned the government to open a post office there under the name “Santa Rosa;” historian Robert Thompson quipped, “Mr. M. is entitled to the gratitude of posterity that he did not call the post office Mallaghsville, Buchanansburg, or some other stupid name of like derivation.”

Also in 1852 the Carrillos began selling off their inheritance. Julio sold seventy acres to Meacham, which would become the east side of old Santa Rosa (E street to the middle of Courthouse Square). The situation with the three youngest sisters was more complex, as Doña María had left her other portion of the rancho to them jointly. Felicidad owned 337½ acres outright; Marta co-owned portions with Juana and Luz. It was the deed shared with Luz that became a later scandal.

According to the “Gringos” article found below, one day Marta was surprised to receive an eviction notice because her 1,600 acres had been sold. Shown the new deed, Marta – who could neither read nor write – discovered her name had been forged, and the person who did it was Salvador Vallejo, Luz’ husband. Not wishing to cause a family disgrace, she kept quiet at the time and went to live with one of her brothers. That story has been often retold by history writers since.

None of that is true. County records (Book H:115) show that on May 21, 1852, she indeed signed the deed of sale with an “X” and it was properly witnessed. Luz also signed with a mark while Salvador wrote his full name.

marta deed

This is not to say that Salvador might have cheated her in some other way – such as not giving her a complete share of the proceeds – but the document was not forged. The writer of the 1900 newspaper article must have misunderstood (there was certainly plenty of other villainy in Salvador Vallejo’s life she might have mentioned).

The Carrillo family was also about to lose ownership of the adobe. An old friend of Meacham’s became his partner, before he decided he wanted to be a farmer instead and sold his share to another guy and his nephew. The new partnership called Hoen & Co. turned it into a major trading post. Wrote historian Thompson: “That summer of 1853 business was lively at the “old adobe;” all the freighting was done by pack-mules and it was a purchasing point for settlers up the Russian River valley, and as far north as Clear lake. Trains of pack mules might be seen at all hours either loading or uploading freight…”

Juana and husband David apparently still lived there, and when a smallpox epidemic passed through Santa Rosa their child (Helena Felicidad) died. That loss might have been the reason the Mallaghs decided to sell the adobe and move to San Luis Obispo, where older sister Ramona lived.

They had always rented that front part of the building with the store for $25/mo. Marta – the last unmarried daughter – was living with one of her brothers (according to “Gringos”) and once the Mallaghs were gone there would be no one from the family remaining. With the rest of the adobe vacant, the new owner demanded Hoen & Co. rent the whole place for $300 per month.

Hoen and his partners refused to even negotiate with Walkinshaw, the new landlord.10 Instead, they went to Meacham, who had bought those seventy acres from Julio a year earlier. Paying Alonzo $12/acre, they set up shop over there and added a new line of business: Selling real estate.

Thus sometime, probably in the early autumn of 1853, came a morning when the Carrillo adobe was no longer anyone’s home. There was no smoke seen rising from the chimney, no smell of fresh tortillas in the kitchen, no shutters open to invite the sun. All was quiet and still, except for the distant pounding of many hammers driving nails a mile further to the west.

NOTE ON THE TITLE IMAGE: Some Carrillo family members on Ancestry and FaceBook have asserted this young woman is Marta Carrillo. It is probably not her or any of her sisters, but it is impossible to prove either way. (EDIT: Eric Stanley has corrected me that the set of images likely did include some of Doña María’s daughters.) It came from a set of daguerreotypes purchased decades ago by an out-of-state collector at an estate sale. The background image is a photograph from the Sonoma County Museum collection titled, “Fountaingrove with hills surrounding Santa Rosa” and has been slightly tinted here for effect.marta from ancestry


1 Some of the children could not even write their names, yet others were literate in spanish and maybe english. In 1864 the Democrat published a well-written english language letter from Julio, while Ramón and Francisca strategized via letters during the 1846 Bear Flag revolt in spanish. Doña María corresponded with son-in-law Henry Fitch. I have not seen copies of any of these documents, so some/all may have been dictated.

2 Seventy-five Years in California by William Heath Davis; 1929, J. Howell, pp. 25-26. This passage did not appear in the original form of the book, Sixty Years in California published in 1889. The entire section reads: “Doña María Ygnacia was ambitious, and cultivated large fields of wheat, barley, oats, corn, beans, peas, Jantejas [sic – he meant Lentejas/lentils], and vegetables of every variety. I have eaten from water- and musk melon of a hot summer day in the broad corridor of the homelike adobe dwelling. I have seen Doña María Ygnacia robed in a neat calico dress of a French texture, with a broad-brim straw hat made by one of her Indian women, mounted on a horse which had been broken to saddle by some of her sons expressly for her use, ride over the hacienda and direct the gentiles in sowing and planting seed and in harvesting the same. She supervised the farming herself, but the management of the stock and rodeos was left to her son José Ramon and his brother. José Ramon inherited his mother‘s gift. Although she was the mother of eleven grown daughters and sons, she was well preserved and still looked handsome with all the charms of her younger days. She was of medium height, with all the graceful movements so characteristic of her race.”

3 “‘Sonoma Valley Before the Gringoes Came,’ written for the Sunday Bulletin, March 11, 1900”: undated and anonymous, 7 typewritten pp. Gaye LeBaron Collection, Sonoma State University Library

4 The Creekside Village Archaeological Testing Program, Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California by William Roop, Emily Wick, 2008; pp. 75, 278-280, 285-286

5 Mountains and Molehills, Or, Recollections of a Burnt Journal by Frank Marryat; 1855. pp. 61-82

6 “Narrative of Julio Carrillo as given by him to by Robert A. Thompson editor Santa Rosa Democrat”; 1872. Bancroft Library, UC/Berkeley (READ). The eleven page manuscript is mostly political remarks and gossip from the late 1840s, but has passages about the rancho and Indians, although not the est. 3,000 population. It shows Julio was quite an articulate speaker in english.

7 Davis op. cit.

8 Roop/Wick op. cit. pp. 287-288. Gibbs’ report reflects his barely concealed contempt for the Californios as well as their use of Indian labor.

9 The common story told about Alonzo Meacham held that he was a shopkeeper burned out by the great San Francisco fire of May, 1851. Classified ads in the Alta California show he was first an auctioneer and then had a company selling building stone until September of that year.

10 Robert F. Walkinshaw lived in Santa Clara and had no other interests in Santa Rosa – he was never mentioned in any of the papers as coming through the area. But a few years earlier he was a controversial figure. In April 1847 he was the sailing captain of the Schooner William, which arrived in San Francisco Bay with a valuable cargo of mining equipment from Mexico, including gunpowder, intended to be used at a mercury mine near San Jose. As this was during the Mexican-American War, the ship was seized by the Americans. The schooner was flying an English flag and in Admiralty Court hearings it was claimed the tools were owned by a British firm. Walkinshaw was a Mexican citizen and members of the firm had lived in Mexico for many years but were still British subjects. Although the judge conceded the vessel and cargo were property of a business based in a neutral country, everything coming from an enemy nation must be taken from its owners as being spoils of war. Military governor of California Richard Mason, however, stepped in and ordered the ship and its cargo released.

 

sources
 

SONOMA VALLEY BEFORE THE GRINGOES CAME
(Written for the Sunday Bulletin, March 11, 1900)

Santa Rosa, March 3. – Old and feeble and bent with age, in a little cottage on Fourth street in this city, lives Marta Carrillo, daughter of the remarkable woman whose indomitable energy and intrepid courage blazed the pathway for civilization in this fair valley of the Santa Rosa.

Marta has lived here seventy years. Many changes have occurred in that time – changes swift and wonderful, to Marta, swifter and more wonderful with each passing year – each one leaving the old lady a little more bewildered than did the last. And the one change which Dona Marta cannot understand at all, and, indeed, one which she makes no pretense of understanding, is the sad, stern change in her own condition that bespeaks the fallen fortunes of the house of Carrillo.

Time has passed quickly with Dona Marta, and to her it seems not so very long ago that all this country about here, including the site where now stands the city of Santa Rosa, belonged to her mother, to her brother and to herself. The memory of those old days is to her fresher than those of more recent and less pleasant times. She recalls distinctly the day when her mother’s residence, the old adobe house, now crumbling to decay on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, was the only dwelling in this section, and when the cattle of the Carrillos wandered over leagues upon leagues of this land, which is now parceled out among “the Gringos,” with only a single acre of it left in the possession of a Carrillo.

All Marta’s brothers and sisters are dead. All died comparatively poor. But the name of the family is inseparately interwoven with the early history of this State; one of Marta’s sisters was the wife of General M. G. Vallejo, Military Governor of Alta California; another sister was the mother of Governor Romualdo Pacheco, while a third married Colonel Salvador Vallejo, brother of the general of that name.

In the year of 1826 Father Ventura, one of the founders of the Mission of New San Francisco, or Sonoma, returned to San Diego after spending three years among the Indians of Northern California. Among his friends in the southern settlement were the family of Colonel Joaquin Carrillo. The colonel had died during the absence of the good padre, leaving a rather small estate to his widow and her nine children. When the estate had dwindled, in the course of three years, to an amount so small that the family could subsist upon it only with great economy, Father Ventura bethought him of the beautiful and fertile country, far to the north, where a home might be built and land in any quantity obtained for the taking. The priest urged the widow of his friend to go to this new country far to and north of the Sonoma Mission, picturing its beauties, its adoptability to cultivation, the docility of the natives, who, he said, could be employed at farming and herding. He bade her place her trust in God and the saints, take her family, go to the country he described, and she would be blessed.

And so Dona Maria Ignacia Lopez, the widow of Colonel Carrillo, with her four girls and five boys, set sail for San Francisco. The family reached Sonoma, where they found the young commander, Vallejo, in charge with a few Mexican soldiers. Dona Maria and her children remained in Sonoma several months. During that time two courtships were in progress, and before the widow left the shelter of the settlement her daughter, Frances Benicia, was wedded to Commandant M. G. Vallejo, while the latter’s brother, Salvador, at that time a captain, espoused Lus, another daughter of Dona Maria.

At that time the country lying west of Sonoma was very little known, except that near the Coast. Nevertheless, Dona Maria determined to follow the advice of Father Ventura and seek a home for herself and children in the then almost unknown land that bordered on the Mission of New San Francisco.

With a band of cattle, a few horses and an ox team, they set out, accompanied by an Indian guide. After two days’ travel they reached a spot that appeared to be suitable for their purpose, and there laid the foundation for what afterward became famous as the Rancho de Cabeza de santa Rosa. The first step was to construct a dwelling. Dona Maria designed the structure and assisted her sons in making the mud bricks and, after they had been dried in the sun, in plastering them together. The result of their labor still stands near Santa Rosa, though the old adobe is now used for a barn and is crumbling away through lack of repairs.

Dona Maria’s executive ability, so unusual in the women of her race, made her the dominant, ruling spirit of the rancho to the very day of her death. It was not long after her first occupation of the land before she had gathered about her a large number of Indians. These she set to work to till the land, to herd cattle, to thresh grain and to do the general work of the place. The Indians were tractable, as a rule, but occasionally there was a mutiny, and during troublesome times the bravery of the pioneer woman is said to have been greater than that of her sons. In those days firearms were exceedingly scarce. The principal weapon was the “rista,” or lasso, which was used against man or beast with equally good (or bad) effect. The long rope with the noosed end was the chief argument employed by Dona Maria with the Indians when they were disposed to be ugly, and though she often faced great odds, it is not of record that the lady was ever worsted in an encounter.

As the years passed the cattle increased in number until they could be counted by thousands. The boys and girls grew to manhood and womanhood. Juanita married Don Pacheco; Marta, the youngest, was as yet unmarried.

In 1840 Dona Maria applied to the Mexican Governor, Manuel Jimeno, at Monterey, for a title to her land. She was given a grant of two “sitios” (leagues) under the caption of “El Rancho de Cabeza de Santa Rosa.” About the same time her son, Joaquin, applied for and received title to the grant known as the “Laguna de Santa Rosa,” consisting of three sitios, adjoining the land of his mother. This made an area of fifteen square miles of land, owned by mother and son.

All went well with the Carrillos until the death of Dona Maria, about 1848. Then the trouble began. The heirs had a disagreement over the division of her estate, which was finally settled, however, principally by the method of the strong arm. Then the Americans began to arrive in large numbers. They cultivated the Mexican habit of gambling, but usually to the disadvantage of the Mexican.

Once divided among the children of Dona Maria, the great estate passed rapidly into other hands. In one way and another the property was disposed of to the Americans, who soon overran the country until not an inch of the original grants was left in the possession of the Carrillo family.

About 1855 Dona Marta married her cousin, Joaquin Carrillo. Their early married life was one or many hardships and privations until the husband by hard work had accumulated a little fortune of three or four thousand dollars. Then they purchased the acre of ground in Santa Rose whereon they now live with their daughter and two little grandchildren.

A few years prior to her marriage, Marta was still in possession of a portion of her share of her mother’s estate. This consisted of 1600 acres lying between Santa Rosa creek and Matanzas creek. These boundaries would now include a goodly chunk of the city of Santa Rosa. One day Dona Marta was served with a notice of ejectment. When she protested she was shown what purported to be a deed to the property, signed by herself. They told her that her brother-in-law, Salvador Vallejo, had effected the sale and he had been paid the purchase price. This was all news to Marta, for, while she could ride a bronco or throw the riata with skill and grace, she had never been taught to write and could not even scribble her own name. But she would not bring disgrace on the family by making complaint, so the purchaser of a magnificent property at one-hundredth part of its value was permitted to take possession, and little Marta, robbed of her birthright, went to live with one of her brothers. The brothers were equally unfortunate; within a few years they, too, had lost their possessions. A few years more and all the children of Dona Maria were dead – all except Marta. But in the meantime love had come into her life and smoothed over the rough places and abided with her through all the years of trouble that followed. And, though lands and cattle and retainers are hers no longer, Dona Marta is happy in the little cottage on the little acre of ground – all that is left of the once vast domain of the Carrillos.

– manuscript copy courtesy the Gaye LeBaron collection, Sonoma State University

 

 

LAST WILL OF MARIA YGNACIA LOPEZ CARRILLO (excerpt)

…I declare that I was lawfully married to Don Joaquin Carrillo (now deceased), in which marriage we begot our legitimate children, Josefa, Ramona, Maria de la Luz, Francisco, Joaquin, Ramon, Juan, Dolores, Julio, Marta, Juana, and Felicidad.

I declare as my executors my sons Jose Ramon, Joaquin, or Julio. I declare as legitimate heirs of the property that I actually possess my daughter, Maria de la Luz, Jose Ramon, Joaquin, Julio, Maria Marta, Juana de Jesus, Maria Felicidad de las Augustias. – (The exception of Josefa, Ramona, and Francisca, who have come to have no share in the property willed.) I declare that the property which I actually possess and which belongs to me is derived from the personal labor of my sons and daughters mentioned in the above clause. – I declare the land that my daughter Luz actually possesses, and its boundaries, are the Santa Rosa Creek, above, almost as far as the limits of the swamp which belongs to me; and the width shall be the swamp, above, along the edge of the surrounding hills. –

I command that my house in which I now live be given up, with all its appurtenances, incomes, outlets, furniture, gardens, fences, and cultivated lands to Marta, Juana, and Felicidad; I declare the limits to be the Santa Rosa Creek, below, as far as the junction of the creeks on the North; and on the South, the creek known by the name of El Potrero as far as the limits of Santa Rosa on the East. –

I command that the rest of my property be divided in equal parts between my children already mentioned; my son Joaquin, having received some cattle on his account, shall have these deducted from his inheritance. – (I bequest to Julio the house and lot in Sonoma without this being counted in the remainder of my property.)

I command that the rest of my lands be divided in equal parts between Jose Ramon and Julio. I entrust my daughter Luz with my family, for her protection, as well as my own sons and daughters, they may look on her as sent by their mother. I entrust my sons not to be unmindful of assisting their sisters in all the emergencies necessary to pass through life, as the sisters may assist their brothers to the best of their ability…

Sonoma, January 6, 1849
Maria Ignacia Lopez

– Translated by Brian McGinty, The Carrillos of San Diego: A Historic Spanish Family of California (part four): The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4; December, 1957, pg. 375-376

 

 

THE OLDEST INHABITANT.

What He Has Experienced in the Past — What He Thinks of the Future — No Failure of Crops for a Period of Forty Years.

Knowing the deep interest felt in the matter of the rainfall, we have interviewed an actual oldest inhabitant, in the person of Julio Carrillo, and give our readers the benefit of his experience extending over a period of forty years, from 1837 to 1877:

When did you first come to Sonoma county, Julio?

In 1837. In the fall of that year my family built a log house on Santa Rosa creek about half a mile above the old adobe now owned by Mr. Hahman. The adobe was commenced in 1838-9.

What is your recollection of the seasons? What years were notably dry?

I remember that the winter of 1838-9 was much the same as this — the nights were cold and frosty. The first rain fell in the month of February.

Did you have any rain in March?

We had some rain in March, but think there was none after that.

Did you have in a crop?

Oh, yes; we had planted wheat, corn, beans and peas.

Did the crop mature?

Yes; we had a fair crop. There was plenty of grass and no loss of stock in this part of the country.

What is your recollection of the following winter?

In 1839-10 there was a good deal of rain. I saw snow for the first time in my life that year, on the Petaluma and Cotate [sic] hill. (The latter is now called Taylor Mountain.) There was no snow in the valley. I had come up from San Diego and having never seen snow, I rode out to the hills to take a closer look.

How were the crops that year?

We had a good crop.

How about the next season?

In 1840-41 we had a great deal of rain and snow on the mountains. In February, 1841, there came a tremendous fall of rain. I had gone from the adobe house, where I then lived, to Sonoma, and could not get back. Sonoma valley was entirely flooded; the water came up to the town. The whole of Santa Rosa valley was flooded. That year a mill that Capt. Cooper was building at the mouth of the laguna, and had nearly completed, was entirely washed away. That was the heaviest rainfall I remember.

Were there any other notable seasons within your recollection, either remarkably dry or wet?

There was but little rain in 1843-4, but we made good crops of wheat, corn and peas.

How about the following seasons?

There was nothing remarkable until the wet winter of 1849-50.

The next very dry winters were 1862-3 and 1863-4, when, as everybody knows, we had more than average crops here, owing to the late spring rains.

What do you think of the prospect this season?

I think it will be a dry year, but it does not follow that we will have a failure of the crop. It makes but little difference about rains now if we have them in the spring, and without spring rains you cannot have a crop, no matter how heavy the rainfall in the winter months. That is my experience. Without spring rains we are gone up; but we have never failed since I have been here in having enough rain to mature a crop.

– Sonoma Democrat, January 13 1877

Read More

FINDING ISHI

Ishi could not have made his debut at a better time if he had planned it.

The autumn of 1911 was probably the pinnacle of the era of progress, at least in California. Women were poised to win the right to vote; it seemed that almost every day new aviation records were being set; ads were appearing for the upcoming 1912 automobile models, faster, bigger and cheaper; everyone went to the theaters to catch the latest movies and had a telephone at home – having a personal phone number to share (or not) was now indelibly part of your identity.

Progress particularly meant it was time to put the Wild West in the rear view mirror. The Americans of 1911 saw themselves far removed from that mythological age of resolute cowboys and gunslingin’ outlaws. Sure, it’s too bad the Indians got kind of a raw deal but some of them were hostile sometimes and anyway, it was a long time ago. Americans certainly didn’t like to be reminded that some of the bad stuff that happened in the past was still happening. When a band of Shoshone Indians accused of murder were tracked down and massacred by a posse in Nevada earlier that year it received scant coverage outside of that area of the state; just a few years earlier, such a story of derring-do would have made headlines all over the West Coast and probably nationally. Indians being shot to death, including women and children, no longer seemed the modern thing to read about in the morning paper. Not in America.

Then one late August morning near Oroville, an old Gold Rush town 70 miles due north of Sacramento, a man was found in the corral of a slaughterhouse, cornered against the fence by guard dogs. He was emaciated, middle-aged and wearing little more than rags. He spoke no English or Spanish or any of the Indian languages known by the second and third generation Indians around town. By all appearances he was an authentic “wild Indian” with little or no contact with Western civilization.

The scientists at UC/Berkeley could not wait to get their hands on him and put him on display.

(RIGHT: Front page story in San Francisco Call, August 31, 1911)

American anthropology was still a very young field in 1911, just beginning to challenge judgmental Eurocentric views that “primitive” cultures were unworthy except as precursors of “advanced” ones and every aspect of a culture could be traced to some underlying cause. A rising star in the new science was Alfred Kroeber, the 35 year old curator of UC/Berkeley’s Museum of Anthropology quickly learning how to shake hands at receptions for university benefactors.

Kroeber and the other anthropologists in California knew they were racing against time. In the six decades since statehood, most of California’s Indian population had been wiped out and there were few surviving Indians who had ever lived in the traditional manner or were fluent speakers in their ancestral languages. Researchers were collecting everything they could from the fast disappearing people – baskets, blankets, pottery, tools and other objects; songs and stories were recorded on Edison cylinders, words and grammars collected in dictionaries. Sometimes their zealous pursuit of science went far too far. An infamous field ethnologist working for the Smithsonian was so obsessed with collecting a word list from a particular dying speaker that he requested the Indian be given a shot of morphine to “pep him up” in order to “get him so he can talk before he dies.”

Finding an “uncontaminated man” was the Holy Grail for these researchers. Three years earlier in 1908, a pair of surveyors had stumbled upon a camp of four Indians in the canyons near Oroville, and Kroeber sent his protégé graduate student, Thomas Waterman, to investigate. From the blankets, arrows and other possessions stolen by the surveyors he could tell the story was no hoax, but there was no idea where the person(s) who made the items could be found.

When Kroeber saw the 1911 newspaper stories about the man who was supposedly the “last of the wildest Indian tribe” he immediately dispatched Waterman back to Oroville, sending the local sheriff a telegram reading in part, “HOLD INDIAN TILL ARRIVAL PROFESSOR STATE UNIVERSITY WHO WILL TAKE CHARGE AND BE RESPONSIBLE FOR HIM. MATTER IMPORTANT ACCOUNT ABORIGINAL HISTORY.”

Waterman arrived to find a man bewildered and beleaguered. Although he was being held in the county jail, he had become the town’s exotic pet; thousands had stopped by to gawk and shove things at him to see how he would react. Look, he’s trying to peel a tomato! Isn’t it funny? Look, he’s eating a banana peel! The sheriff handed him an unloaded revolver as a test, apparently to see if he’d try to shoot him with it. Two photographers were taking pictures to make into postcards, trying to find a good “lo, the poor Indian” type of pose. Take off your shirt, please. Now, look proud.

In the jailhouse Waterman determined the man spoke the Yana language, albeit a dialect unknown to the academics. Kroeber knew someone who spoke another version of Yana and hoped he could translate. They were able to communicate but with difficulty; even though they came from regions only about fifty miles apart, the distance between their languages has been likened to Spanish and Portugese. The translator’s name was Sam Batwi (Ba’twi). After Kroeber obtained tenuous approval from the special agent for Indian affairs, the Oroville sheriff was told to release the “wild Yana” to Waterman, adding “the ethnologists would take good care of him.”

And thus just a week after he was found in the corral, the last survivor of the family group called “Yahi” stepped off the train in San Francisco and met Alfred Kroeber. Reporters were already clamoring for information about the wild man of Oroville; what was his name? Kroeber told them to call him “Ishi,” which was the Yana-Yahi word for “man.” In Ishi’s culture one’s name was a very personal thing and never spoken by the person him/herself – it was how others addressed you. Perhaps the anthropologists might have learned his true name had there been the opportunity for him to be introduced by someone who knew him, but he was the last Yahi. So.

Even before Waterman left Oroville, there was debate on what the museum should do with Ishi once they had the rights to him (so to speak). “If this fellow don’t die before we get him to the museum, or some other unheard-of thing occur, why can’t we put him in a case, and have him make arrows,” Waterman wrote Kroeber. “Good exhibit for the public.” There is apparently similar unpublished correspondence between the university and Washington D.C. regarding Ishi’s value as an exhibition object.

Ishi went on display at the museum about six weeks after his arrival in San Francisco. (Waterman suggested again that he should be in a glass case, but that idea was rejected.) Except for a few weeks in 1914, he would spend every Sunday afternoon showing as many as a thousand of the curious how he made fire or chipped an arrowhead. And since he was officially the assistant janitor at the museum, he got to clean up the place after they left.

Ishi was a hit, and because of him the newly opened Museum of Anthropology was a success as well, with crowds and school trips coming back year after year. Some of his continuing celebrity was undoubtedly due to all the free publicity; reporters loved writing about Ishi. And who can blame them? He was an affable man with a gentle charm and it didn’t hurt that he was also photogenic; contrast the photo in the newspaper story above with the detail shown to the right. In the earlier photo he seemed to want to crawl out of his skin and vanish. In the picture taken just five weeks later he was smiling, relaxed, and looked a bit like 1940s Hollywood hearthrob Stewart Grainger (that’s Alfred Kroeber over his left shoulder).

Nearly everything that appeared in those papers about Ishi was complete nonsense. They couldn’t get past the simplistic view that he was a “Stone Age Man,” a Fred Flintstone or Alley Oop come to life, and there were indeed cartoons that portrayed him as a caveman. That first December in San Francisco there was a story titled “The Only Man in America Who Knows No Christmas” with an illustration of a puzzled Ishi watching Santa gliding through the woods with sleigh and reindeer. A reoccurring storyline in the papers claimed Ishi was in love or soon to be married (headline: “Ishi Loses Heart to ‘Blond Squaw'”). Actresses could get their pictures in the paper by flirting with him. At the end of this article are a few examples.

A reporter from the San Francisco Call took Ishi, Sam Batwi and others to the theater and absurdly wrote that Ishi believed an entertainer must be “the great medicine goddess of the palefaces.” When she began singing, the paper claimed “Ishi half rose and hung over the edge of the box in his excitement. He was breathing hard and his eyes were glittering.” The fiction continued with a tour de force of lurid racist imagery of a dark-skinned man as an animalistic savage lusting after a white woman:

Slowly Ishi rose to his feet. He fixed on the lady an unwinking gaze of such intensity as to draw her attention away from a row of Johnnies to whom she had been warbling. Her eyes met those of the wild man. She faced him bravely and with dazzling white arms held out toward the thunderstruck worshiper, sand to him the words of “Have You Ever Loved Another Little Girl?”

The cold sweat was standing out on Ishi’s forehead. His face was drawn. His fingers, grasping the crimson hangings, trembled visibly and his first cigar, which he had been puffing with pretended sangfroid, now slowly grew cold and dropped from between his teeth. Professors Kroeber and Waterman, studying these unusual emotions in the interests of psychology, now leaned toward him, ready to grab the wild man before he could leap to the stage…the broad shouldered Indian, who was leaning out of the box above it, half crouching, as if for a spring.

       
MORE ABOUT ISHI

This article tells only covers a small portion of Ishi’s story. Nearly a century after his death he continues to be a subject of academic and popular interest, but surprisingly little info is available on the Internet except for a thin Wikipedia page. Here are some resources about his life:

A must-see documentary on his story is the hourlong Ishi: The Last Yahi which aired on PBS’ American Experience in 1992 and was nominated for a well-deserved Emmy. For a shorter introduction, there is a (mostly accurate) 10-minute student video worth a look.

Theodora Kroeber (discussed in the article) wrote two well-received books in the 1960s about Ishi which have never been out of print: “Ishi in Two Worlds” and “Ishi: Last of His Tribe“, a fictionalized account of his life for young adult readers (the latter was made into a 1978 TV movie that is best avoided). She did not know or even meet Ishi, writing decades after his death and working from her late husband’s notes.

Besides period newspapers, all material in this article is drawn from “Ishi in Two Worlds” and two recent books: “Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last ‘wild’ Indian” which is a good recount of Ishi’s life along with the recent struggle to reclaim his brain from the warehouse shelf of the Smithsonian Institution. But highest recommendations go to “Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America,” which highlights the conflicting views of the famous anthropologist and his “uncontaminated man.” This book provides the clearest explanations of how Ishi saw his strange new world and offers revealing details about how others treated him.

Ishi also has been the subject of novels, poems, plays and movies, with some of his stories being turned into children’ books. Educator Richard Burrill has also written six books on Ishi which represent over fifteen years of anthropological and historical research. You can watch how-to videos on making arrows and arrowheads using Ishi’s techniques. There is an annual Ishi Gathering and Seminar near his homeland and new scholarship continues to emerge, guided by Alfred Kroeber’s descendants.

None of that happened. Ishi paid little attention to the performers that evening, focusing his attention upon the hundreds of people in the audience – he was astonished because he had never before seen so many in one place.

Tellingly, Theodora Kroeber, Alfred’s second wife (see sidebar) passed over the incident quickly in the non-fiction biography of Ishi. This probably reveals the museum people realized that as guardian, Kroeber clearly flubbed in giving a hack journalist the opportunity to spin pornographic falsehoods about his charge (just a few years later the same reporter, Grant Wallace, would be shown to be clearly nuts by claiming he was in telepathic contact with space aliens). Likely with damage control in mind it was arranged that in the same edition of that newspaper Alfred Kroeber would present his own article about Ishi.

There the anthropologist made a point he would repeatedly use when introducing Ishi to an audience: “there is nothing undeveloped about him; he has the mind of a man and is a man in every sense.” It was appropriate at the time for Kroeber to explicitly say this because many still embraced the racist notions that anyone not of European descent was potentially sub-human or a missing link – only a few years earlier, Congolese pygmy Ota Benga had been exhibited at the Monkey House of the Bronx zoo.

Regrettably, Kroeber didn’t stop there, and his article was just as troublesome in its own way as Wallace’s fictional tale of sexual desire. Ishi doesn’t understand nine-tenths of what goes on around him, Kroeber wrote, can’t be taught English or learn to count. “His attitude toward everything about his is just like that of a puppy. He is interested in everything and never questions orders. He comes running when you call him, and if you were to tell him to stand in the corner of stand on his head, if he were able he would do it without hesitation.” What humanity he giveth with one hand he taketh with the other; Kroeber was describing Ishi as if he were a remarkable pet, capable of mimicry and performing tricks on command but not able to develop.

Kroeber was proved wrong on all counts. Ishi learned quickly; he mastered an English vocabulary of several hundred words – let’s drop your average 50 year-old American into China from that era and see how well he could communicate after a couple of years. Ishi could navigate the Bay Area trolley and ferry system on his own, and understood numbers perfectly well but used a base-5 system very different from the Western world. He was also not docile; he expressed his dislike for Sam Batwi, whom he regarded as a “phony” Indian, an acquiescent Uncle Tom. He complained about the taste of city tapwater and particularly about the materials Kroeber required him to use. Although Theodora’s book states “obsidian was Ishi’s favorite material for demonstration at the museum” he clearly preferred making arrowheads from glass. A friend would drive him to the city dump where he could hunt for old Bromo-Seltzer bottles which were a distinctive cobalt blue. Yet Alfred Kroeber insisted he exclusively use obsidian because it was “authentic.”

Authenticity was Kroeber’s byword. He shunned anything and everything related to what he called the “bastard cultures” of non-traditional Indians; Native American culture ended, in his view, once its people began adapting to survive. It was one thing to view anthropology as pure science, but Kroeber went farther and trivialized the genocide that followed the Gold Rush, which he called  the “little history of pitiful events” in his landmark book, “Handbook of the Indians of California.” Make no mistake: Alfred Kroeber was one of the greatest scientists of his day, but he was studying living people in such a narrow way that it could be said to be inhuman. It was like a historian trying to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln’s family without mentioning the uncomfortable business about the Civil War.

The irony is rich: Kroeber’s association with Ishi launched the success of his museum and with it his personal high profile in science and society, but Ishi was an attraction because his people had been wiped out or assimilated in a brutal conquest which Kroeber viewed as unimportant.

No book on Ishi indicates when (or if) he began speaking about his personal struggle, and no newspapers of his time mentioned described what had happened (see above, re: Morning papers, massacres not appropriate in). Today his history is well documented. There were an estimated 400 Yahi pre-contact. By the time Ishi was about ten in 1870 only a dozen or so were left, most of the others killed in two massacres by Indian hunters during his childhood. Ishi’s family and the few others began their decades of concealment that lasted until the surveyors stumbled upon them. By then, it was just Ishi and the “long together five.”

Amazingly, the only account of his time during those four decades came from the Press Democrat a few months after Ishi walked out of the wilderness. A version of the story went over the newswire, but is transcribed in full here for the first time.

(RIGHT: Jacob and Norah Harbin Turner. Photo courtesy of Helen (Turner) Carlisle of Chico, California and Richard Burrill)

Jacob and Norah Turner, who were now living near Santa Rosa, had a place 25 miles outside of Red Bluff in 1878 1873. They were known to be friendly to Indians in the area and had in fact hired a young Sam Batwi for a time. They slowly got to know the reclusive Yahi survivors which included Ishi, his mother, wife, two daughters and a son. There were then seven of them left in all.

The Turners knew them when Ishi’s son was shot and killed by a rancher who was angry because someone had raided his cabin. Later, they saw Ishi and his wife mourn after they lost their daughters when “two white hunters came along and either enticed or forced the girls to go with them.”

Ishi’s mother died after the surveyors found their camp in 1908 and the other two, apparently his sister and an old man, fled separately, never to be seen again. Ishi was alone and without any of his tools or other belongings, all of them having been taken by the surveyors as souvenirs.

Ishi developed tuberculosis and in the spring of 1916, after four-plus years in the modern world, it was clear he didn’t have long to live (Kroeber’s first wife also died of TB in 1913). Waterman had grown close to him  and at least once Ishi spent weeks living with his family. Kroeber was in New York at the time, and Waterman wrote to him: “…the poor old Indian is dying. The work last summer was too much for him. He was the best friend I had in the world and I killed him by letting Sapir [a language ethnologist] ride him too hard, and by letting him sneak out of lunches.”

Kroeber told Waterman to act as his personal representative to make sure that Yahi death traditions were followed, particularly making sure the body was not defiled by an autopsy: “Please stand by our contingently made outline of action and insist on it as my personal wish. There is no objection to a [death mask]. I do not, however, see that an autopsy would lead to anything of consequence…if there is any talk about the interests of science, say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends.”

But Ishi’s physician insisted and Waterman gave in. An autopsy was performed on his still warm body. All that was learned was that his skull was “small and rather thick.” His brain was removed and sent to the Smithsonian, where it remained until 2000, when his ashes and brain were turned over to those believed to be his closest living descendants.

Having his brain plucked out was the final indignity in a lifetime of cruelties and abuses, and worse because the doctor was Ishi’s friend and knew well the Yahi customs for the dead. Ishi might have wondered why these modern people so often acted as if they simply didn’t know right from wrong. Kroeber later told a friend he never asked Indians about their recent history because he “could not stand all the tears.” If Ishi had ever heard Kroeber make such a remark, he would have probably thought it was a very uncivilized thing for him to say – civilized people would not tell others to keep their stories quiet. But then again, I imagine to his thinking, civilized people also would not put others on display and make them perform.

EARLIEST HISTORY OF ISHI THE UNCONTAMINATED MAN
Story Told by Santa Rosans Who Knew Him Long Ago
Lone and Lorn Yana Indian is Doubtless What He Say He Is–the Sole Survivor of a People That Have Perished

Mr. and Mrs. J. P. Turner, whose home is near the Northwestern Pacific Railway about a mile north of Santa Rosa, knew Ishi in early days. Ishi, “the uncontaminated aboriginee,” whose capture has been told in many a news story, and whose primitive language and primitive ways have been made the subject of study by anthropologists of the University of California and of speculation by many others. Mr. and Mrs. Turner knew not only Ishi but six other members of his tribe, the Yana Indians, and they believe that the captured savage is all that the scientists say he is–the last of his tribe and a primitive man, with as little knowledge of modern civilization as has any man to be found in the world today.

It was in 1873 that the Turners first came into contact with the Yana Indians at a place then called Buck Flat about 25 miles from Red Bluff in Tehama county. Also they knew Sam Batwee, the interpreter who is now with Ishi. Sam Batwee belongs to another tribe, but he knew a great deal of Ishi’s language, although his own tribe and Ishi’s were not friendly. Sam Batwee worked on the Turner ranch two years. The tribe to which Sam Batwee belongs was called the Shaveheads by the settlers in Tehama because the men shaved part of the hair from their heads. They were more enchanted with the whites than were Ishi’s people. Ishi’s tribe was called sometimes Yana, sometimes the Nonsez [usually now spelled Noza, which were actually the Yana from Sam Batwi’s clan -ed]. The two names were used at will and the Turners understood them to mean the same.

Mr. and Mrs. Turner never saw more than seven members of the Yana tribe although for years the whole tribe lived within a mile of the Turner home. The Indians habitations were in caves in the hills, most cleverly concealed, and the Indians themselves were so fearful of the white race, and so skillful, so cunning and so sly in evading them, that they were near neighbors for years before the whites knew it.

There was good reason for the Indians to hide, and for them to dread their discovery by the whites. Upon the occasion of every meeting, the red men suffered at the hands of ruthless marauders who called themselves civilized. Many Indians were murdered in cold blood, their habitations were ravaged, their stores of food destroyed, their women and girls kidnapped and dragged away. So savage was their persecution, so severe their oppression and so pitiful their condition that the Indians came finally to the point where they murdered all their own children–first in order that the infants’ cries might not betray the presence of the camp; second, as the Indian women told Mrs. Turner, because they saw no hope for the remnant of their tribe, and believed that if the children were not killed they would sooner or later starve to death. So the Yana men seized their own babies on the day of birth, swung them by the heels and dashed out their brains against a rock or a tree. That practice, say Mr. and Mrs. Turner, gives the reason why the Ishi is the only one left, of all the once numerous Yana tribe. Before the Yanas were reduced to this extremity they had fought two hard battles with the whites, one in Tehama county and one in Shasta. In each case the Indians were armed with bows and arrows and the whites with rifles. The first of these battles is said to have taken place in 1854, the second in 1867. The Turners lived near the scene of the second conflict, and many unburied bones were there in evidence as late as 1873 and ’74, some entire skeletons lying on the ground almost intact besides many scattered bones.

Mr. Turner’s first view of the Yana Indians came about one day when he saw what he believed to be two little brown bears playing on a hillside about a mile away. He took his rifle and crept closer to them, when he discovered that instead of bears they were two little naked Indian girls. Still concealing himself, he crept very close then showed himself and called to them when they instantly scurried into the thicket as quickly as a pair of frightened quails.

But Turner’s curiosity was aroused and he pursued the little girls and when they had retreated to a creek they could not cross he overtook them. They went home with him and his wife gave them food. They soon recovered from their alarm, but the older Indians were hinting them and easily trailed them to the Turner home. These older Indians were Ishi and a woman. The girls were their children. Thus came about the acquaintance that lasted a long time; the only white acquaintance Ishi ever had. The Indians were alarmed when they saw Turner’s rifles and shotguns standing in a closet and were for retreating at once, but were reassured and prevailed upon to remain.

After this the Indians became rather too friendly, especially the two girls. They wanted to live at the Turner home all the time and the other woman who later came with them, as well as the girls themselves, begged food upon every opportunity. One day the girls were taken with measles, and Mrs. Turner administered a simple herbal remedy of her own compounding that gave them much relief. In return for this, they and the older woman were ever anxious to show their gratitude by helping her with her housework, but their help was worse than a hindrance. The squaw would take the broom from Mrs. Turner and would try to sweep. But she never got anywhere with it; she just swung the broom every way and all ways and did nothing more than to raise all the dust there was in the house without getting any of it past the door.

Sometimes an Indian boy came with the visitors. One day Ishi and the squaw appeared with mourning stripes painted on their faces–streaks of black pitch and red vermillion on foreheads, cheeks and chins. Their son was dead, and by signs they told that he had been shot. The squaw sat in a chair and swayed to and fro and wrung her hands, meanwhile chanting the long-drawn wailing cry, “Ma-loo-oo-oo-ehee! Ma-loo-oo-oo-ehee!” repeated many times.

Not long afterward, Mr. Turner met two stockmen, one of them whom was named Rafe Johnson. Johnson told Turner that he had shot an Indian boy a little while before. “I don’t know whether I killed him or not,” said Johnson. “He was 400 or 500 yards away, across Mill Creek canyon, and I elevated my sights and let him have one. He dropped and I guess I broke one of his legs anyhow if I didn’t kill him. A lot of ’em went down to my cabin while I was away last month and stole everything they could lift. I guess that one will learn to keep away anyhow.”

Their son’s murder was not the last outrage Ishi and his squaw were to suffer at the white man’s hands. When the two girls were nearly grown two white hunters came along and either enticed or forced the girls to go with them and Ishi and his squaw were left childless. Mr. Turner learned afterward that the girls had been abandoned in Red Bluff and that peace officers there had taken the castaways to an Indian reservation in Siskiyou. But he does not believe that Ishi and the squaw ever saw their children again.

Mr. and Mrs. Turner’s daughter Blanche was born at Buck Flat. While she was a little child the Indian girls, some years older often spent hours attending and amusing her. She remembers them playing at see-saw–one of them holding her on a teetering timber while the other rocked it. Also she remembers part of a song the often sang while doing this. There was much of it, but all she remember is this strain which was always repeated three times:

“No anny hoatt-e tuitt! No anny hoatt-e tuitt! No anny hoatt-e tuitt!”

Although the Turners never saw more than seven Yana Indians, these told them that there were twenty left of the tribe. The others were dead–either murdered by the whites or killed in babyhood by their own parents. Poor Ishi is probably what he say he is–the last of his race. The Turners say that although he refused to learn English they could communicate with him tolerably well in the Indian sign language, and that they thought him a man of much intelligence– in fact, a rather superior sort of person although he had but slight opportunity to demonstrate what he was really made of.

Mr. and Mrs. Turner are both well informed on California’s early history–much of which they saw in the making, and part of which their own families helped to make. Mrs. Turner is a daughter of Mat Harbin, who located Harbin Springs, and a grand-daughter of James Harbin, who built the cabin in which the famed and ill-famed Donner party perished. James Harbin himself had been one of that party, but had gone ahead before winter fell, and so had reached the coast unscathed by the disaster that befell those who delayed on the way.

[This paragraph has several factual errors. Mat Harbin (real name which he used later in life: John Madison Harbin) was a drover in the 1844 Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party, which crossed the Sierras two years before the Donner party. They built a cabin which would be later used by the Donner party. Mat’s father, James M. Harbin came to California with his family in 1846, a few months ahead of the Donner party. It was James, not his son Mat, who established the Harbin Hot Springs resort -ed.]

Mrs. Turner is also a sister-in-law of Prof. Ferdinand Kenyon, who was years ago a member of the Pacific Methodist College faculty, and is now a teacher in Fresno. Her family and her husband’s family were intimately associated with some of the most prominent of the pioneers–especially with the late Senator George Hearst.

– Press Democrat, November 9, 1911

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NO KAWANA, NO SPRINGS AT KAWANA SPRINGS

What’s the origin of the name, “Kawana Springs?” It’s far easier to say where it didn’t come from than to pinpoint its source or meaning. For example, if you think “Kawana” is an Indian word, you may be right – except the Indians who coined it were 3,000 miles away.

Let’s start with the simple part: “Springs” is part of the name because it once was a mineral spring resort, with a hotel and bathhouse. A 49er named John S. Taylor had poor luck gold hunting but found his fortune here, homesteading 1,400 acres at the base of that mountain which came to have his name. John was quite the entrepreneur; he planted a large vineyard, raised livestock, and mined a small vein of coal that was discovered on his land. He saw the opportunity to cash in on the harness racing craze and built “Taylor’s Driving Park” at his place, where the 1861 Sonoma County fair was also held. He owned most of the downtown block between Fourth and Fifth streets directly across from Courthouse Square. John Taylor was a rich and interesting guy about whom more should be written.

Taylor also saw $$$ in the stinky creek on his property. Mineral spas and resorts were a big deal on the East Coast and in Europe; people believed the water relieved arthritis and aches if you bathed in the stuff, and even that it could cure kidney disease and other ailments if you drank lots of it. He built a small hotel for guests and when that one burned in 1870, Taylor built a grander, two-story place with hot and cold running boy-does-that-smell-awful.

It’s unclear what ambitions John Taylor held for his mineral water resort. He rarely advertised in the Northern California newspapers (at least, judging from the healthy sample of 19th century papers available online through the Library of Congress) and was leasing the operation out as early as the 1880s. Unlike owners of some other local hot spring retreats he didn’t bottle his “curative” waters for sale. Then there was the potential problem with name confusion: Taylor called his place “White Sulphur Springs,” and when he started there were already “White Sulphur Springs” in Solano (Vallejo) and Napa (St. Helena).

Why was everyone naming their place “White Sulphur Springs?” Because the original W.S.S. in West Virginia was recognized as the standard of excellence for resorts in the latter 19th century. It was the playground for the Washington D.C. elite; presidents took the waters there and Euro royalty, too. “White” apparently was intended to indicate the sulphurous water was clear and not sickly yellow, and it provided an opportunity for other West Virginia hot springs to exploit the name with sound-similars; there were nearby Blue Sulphur Springs, Green Sulphur Springs, Red Sulphur Spring and Salt Sulphur Springs. The water was apparently identical, or nearly so. (A 1870s analysis of Taylor’s water found it contained bicarbonate, iron, magnesia, and, of course, sulphur.)

By the turn of the century, whatever days of sun Taylor’s hotel enjoyed were certainly past. No ads can be found beyond 1899, although we know it remained open because it was still mentioned in the schedules for stage stops. When the 1906 earthquake hit, Taylor’s White Sulphur Springs hadn’t yet opened for the summer season. The hotel and bathhouse apparently escaped without serious damage, but not so the creek – the mineral water stopped flowing after the earth shifted. The place opened again for the 1906-1907 winter season, but that was it.

Come 1910 and the Press Democrat announced a pair of local men were going to reopen the resort, but not as White Sulphur Springs:


It was deemed advisable to change the name of the resort from White Sulphur Springs on account of the fact that there are already two resorts of that name in the state. Luther Burbank was appealed to in the matter of the selection of a name. He chose “Kawana,” and his choice was accepted. The management would have liked to have named the place “Burbank Springs,” but Mr. Burbank preferred not inasmuch as he had declined many offers for the use of his name for other places.

Thus it came to be dubbed “Kawana Sulphur Springs,” the ads shamelessly touting it was “Named by Luther Burbank.” More on Burbank and the Kawana angle in a minute.

The article and ads pointed to a new direction for the spa. It was promoted as the “Headquarters for automobilists and traveling men,” and a clubhouse building was added. The ads also promised “Its waters are unsurpassed,” but without the natural mineral spring working they had to be trucking the water in, or dousing the plain well water with chemicals. Two years later, ads announced “Kawana” (no Sulphur, no Springs mentioned) was under new management.

Kawana-anything disappears from the newspapers until 1927, when a Santa Rosa paper reported the “old Kawana Hotel, at White Sulphur Springs…has been untenanted for several years” as part of a news story about its very interesting recent tenants. It seems a professional bootlegging outfit had gutted the inside of the old hotel and constructed a three-story, 1,400 gallon still for making hootch. Police found the operation only after it was ready to move on, with a hapless steamfitter on the premises to dismantle the enormous rig. Officers were quoted as saying it was the largest bootlegging plant ever found in Northern California.

Old John Taylor was 99 years-old by that time, and the news about his old place must have been quite a shock. He died less than three weeks later and according to Gaye LeBaron’s columns, his daughter, Zana, had the hollowed-out building demolished rather than attempt to repair the heart-breaking damage. In 1931 the ranch became a game reserve stocked with quail, deer and pheasant under a deal with the Sonoma County Sportsmen’s Club. Zana fixed up the old bathhouse and lived there until her death in 1970. The year before, however, she discovered that the 1969 earthquake had jogged loose the creek’s plug, and up to 1,000 gallons/day of mineral water was again filling the creek. An AP wire service story about this appeared in newspapers nationwide. Alas, the water soon again stopped.

Back to Burbank and “Kawana:” Note that the article stated Burbank “chose” the Kawana name “selection,” which strongly implies someone else – the new tenants or John Taylor, probably – gave him a list of possibles after they couldn’t get rights to use “Burbank Springs.” But where did Kawana come from? First, Kawana is a family name in Japan, Hawaii, and elsewhere in the Pacific, and the Taylors had a Hawaiian connection because John Jr. was living there at the time. Maybe John Sr. heard the name and liked it.

Could Kawana be Native American? Some writers have claimed so, explaining it meant “healing waters” or similar. An anthropologist thought it possible it had Native roots, but “it sounded more like a fake Indian word that a PR person would invent.”

If it were an Indian word, it doesn’t come from the Southern Pomo dialect, where kawana means “turtle” (Barrett, 1908) and there are no turtles to be found in that section. And besides, Pomo locations weren’t even named like that; a place would be called something like kawanakawi (turtle-water-place). Further, the “healing waters” nonsense is put to rest by the Taylor Mountain Park master plan, which determined “no sacred sites are known to be located on the property.”

A final option will seem like a stretch, but hear me out. Recall John Taylor named his place White Sulphur Springs after the classy resort in West Virginia. The route taken to reach that famous place in the 19th century was the road known as the Kanawha Turnpike, which followed old Indian trails from Richmond to the Kanawha River Valley. (Believe it or not! Kanawha was considered in 1861 for the name of the new state that would be West Virginia.) Note that Kawana and Kanawha have only the second and third syllables flipped. How likely was it that Taylor would want another name very closely linked to the original resort? And would Taylor have even known about the White Sulphur Springs-Kanawha connection? Of the latter we can be certain: He was born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, which is at its farthest fifty miles from the old Kanawha Turnpike. He must have traveled it at least once during his boyhood, and certainly knew well the Kanawha name.

So there you have it: “Kawana” was a clever variation – or perhaps, the slight misremembering of an 82 year-old man – of a name created by the Piscataway, Delaware, or Shawnee tribes of modern-day West Virginia. Or it’s Hawaiian. Or maybe it was mashed-up mumble of vowel sounds created by a marketing whiz who also dreamed up the phony “healing waters” legend. But this much is certain: You can search every inch around Kawana Springs and not find a single kawana.

Obl. Comstock House connection: Daughter Zana Taylor, who returned to the ranch and remodeled the old bathhouse, was a close friend of Anna May Bell, the young woman who was something of a godchild to Mattie and James Wyatt Oates. The Taylors threw more than one party in Bell’s honor at their home at 512 Mendocino Ave (currently the Trek Bicycle Store). Zana’s many doings at the Oates house can be found in our archives.

Detail of White Sulphur Springs postcard, c.1896. Courtesy Sonoma County Library

UPDATE: There isn’t much left of the old White Sulphur Springs/Kawana resort, so it’s no great loss at the present time (2013) there is no public access to it without special permission. No sign of the hotel remains at all except for a few low stone retaining walls which terraced the grounds, as seen in the1896 postcard above.

The original gazebo, shown at right, still has the cradle-sized fountain basin from which the mineral water bubbled to the surface. The decorative icicles and fish scale shingles are typical of the  Carpenter Gothic style popular in the 1880s. Note the railing is low enough to serve as a seat; those who believed drinking the warm mineral water was healthful would sip as much of it as they could bear over the course of a day.

The bathhouse shown below is believed to have been built in 1876 and is surprisingly small, about 1200 ft. in a “T” floor plan. In front is a raised concrete fountain that probably offered another chance to drink the foul-smelling water before it was piped inside. Not shown to the left of the bathhouse is a stone-lined catchment with a rough pile of cemented stones in the center. The size and shape suggest a hot tub although its original use is unknown. Near the bathhouse is a dilapidated structure that may have been an automobile barn built around the 1930s which will not be preserved.

The county’s plan for the area includes plans to convert the bathhouse into a small visitor center and possibly build a facsimile of the hotel as a bed and breakfast inn/hotel. Plans for the surrounding Taylor Mountain Park include an outdoor classroom/amphitheater, large picnic areas, camping grounds, a dog park, Frisbee golf park, and more.

TO REOPEN SPRINGS NEAR SANTA ROSA
Under Name of “Kawana Springs” the Old White Sulphur Springs Resort to Be Made Popular Place

Under Name of “Kawana Springs,” the well known summer resort known for years as “White Sulphur Springs,” owned by John S. Taylor, and which has been closed for a long time, is to be reopened and an endeavor made to regain the old time popularity the place once had and to add to its attractiveness.

The springs property, with the addition of twenty acres of fine timbered woodland, making the grounds forty acres, instead of twenty, has been taken over by “The Kawana Springs, Incorporated,” headed by M. N. Winans and Thornton P. Preston. Mr. Winans is a well known insurance manager, who has made his home in Santa Rosa for some time, and enjoys an extensive acquaintance throughout the state, and Mr. Preston needs no introduction, as the former proprietor of the Hotels Lebanon and Overton in Santa Rosa, with a legion of friends among the traveling public.

Messrs. Winans and Preston have been negotiating for the acquisition of the Springs property for several weeks and have finally arranged the details. The big hotel building will be refurnished throughout and the grounds will be made most attractive. Another building in close proximity to the hotel will be fitted up as a clubhouse, and the bathhouses will all be remodeled and improved. In fact the gentlemen mean to have everything as neat and comfortable as possible for the accommodation of the large number of patrons they expect to entertain their this summer [sic]. Already they have a good-sized list of applications for accommodations and they expect to be ready to open the Kawana Springs resort on May 2.

Nature has been lavish and the place affords so many possibilities for the spending of a delightful vacation outing there, as well as its offering in the way of medicinal springs whose waters have been found to contain excellent curing qualities for various ailments. The analysis made by Dr. Winslow Anderson shows the Springs to be very valuable in the treatment of kidney diseases.

In addition [illegible microfilm] will also cater to the people of Santa Rosa and their friends by providing an excellent cuisine and other attractions. The Springs are located about two miles from the Court House and are of easy access over a well kept road, just a nice spin in an automobile or drive by carriage.

It was deemed advisable to change the name of the resort from White Sulphur Springs on account of the fact that there are already two resorts of that name in the state. Luther Burbank was appealed to in the matter of the selection of a name. He chose “Kawana,” and his choice was accepted. The management would have liked to have named the place “Burbank Springs,” but Mr. Burbank preferred not inasmuch as he had declined many offers for the use of his name for other places. It is needless to say that everybody wishes Messrs. Winans and Preston the greatest possible success in their big undertaking, and they mean to leave nothing undone to achieve success and make their place deservedly popular. The resort will be open winter and summer.

– Press Democrat, April 13, 1910
KAWANA HOTEL RAIDED: GIVES UP BIG STILL

A plant for the manufacture of illicit liquor, declared to be the largest ever uncovered in the north Bay region, was seized in a raid conducted by County Detective Pemberton and members of the sheriff’s office late Tuesday, when the old Kawana Hotel, at White Sulphur Springs on Taylor mountain, was raided.

A still with 1400-gallon capacity was discovered in the place, along with 50 gallons of “jack,” and boilers, mash tanks, cooling coils and other equipment. Two smaller stills were also taken in the same raid–one with a 250-gallon capacity and the other with a 150-gallon capacity.

George Darnell, 50, the only man at the place, was seized  as operator. Darnell claimed that he was a steamfitter from San Francisco, and had been hired to clean up the works and dismantle the place. The mash tanks bore out his testimony, as they were clean and the still was not in operation.

Threaten Tear Bomb

Darnell at first barricaded himself in the attic and was only forced to come down when the officers threatened to throw tear bombs into his hiding place. Although they had no bombs with them, the ruse worked.

The main still was three stories high, and the seven 200-mash tanks were so connected up that the fermented mash could be pumped directly into the still. The plant was estimated to be worth $10,000.

In the opinion of the officers, the place belonged to a group of wholesale San Francisco bootleggers, who made the pure alcohol in the plant and turned it into gin for the San Francisco trade.

Short Time Only

Officers also believed that the plant was set up for only a short time in each place, a quantity of alcohol made and the plant dismantled and moved to another place before officers found it.

Pemberton has had the place under surveillance for some time, spending several nights in the vicinity in order to make sure of the activities before he staged the raid.

Kawana Springs was a well-known resort in the old days, but has been untenanted for several years, except for two or three short openings by minor companies, who could not make the place pay.

– Santa Rosa Republican, March 2, 1927

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