Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

The most picturesque of all the Mission Indians' hiding-places which we saw was that on the Carmel River, a few miles from the San Carlos Mission. Except by help of a guide it cannot be found. A faint trail turning off from the road in the river-bottom leads down to the river's edge. You follow it into the river and across, supposing it a ford. On the opposite bank there is no trail, no sign of one. Whether it is that the Indians purposely always go ashore at different points of the bank, so as to leave no trail; or whether they so seldom go out, except on foot, that the trail has faded away, I do not know. But certainly, if we had had no guide, we should have turned back, sure we were wrong. A few rods up from the river-bank, a stealthy narrow footpath appeared; through willow copses, sunk in meadow grasses, across shingly bits of alder-walled beach it creeps, till it comes out in a lovely spot,—half basin, half rocky knoll,—where, tucked away in nooks and hollows, are the little Indian houses, eight or ten of them, some of adobe, some of the tule-reeds: small patches of corn, barley, potatoes, and hay; and each little front yard fenced in by palings, with roses, sweet-peas, poppies, and mignonette growing inside. In the first house we reached, a woman was living alone. She was so alarmed at the sight of us that she shook. There could not be a more pitiful comment on the state of perpetual distrust and alarm in which the poor creatures live, than this woman's face and behavior. We tried in vain to reassure her; we bought all the lace she had to sell, chatted with her about it, and asked her to show us how it was made. Even then she was so terrified that although she willingly took down her lace-frame to sew a few stitches for us to see, her hands still trembled. In another house we found an old woman evidently past eighty, without glasses working button-holes in fine thread. Her daughter-in-law—a beautiful half-breed, with a still more beautiful baby in her arms—asked the old woman, for us, how old she was. She laughed merrily at the silly question. "She never thought about it," she said; "it was written down once in a book at the Mission, but the book was lost."

There was not a man in the village. They were all away at work, farming or fishing. This little handful of people are living on land to which they have no shadow of title, and from which they may be driven any day,—these Carmel Mission lands having been rented out, by their present owner, in great dairy farms. The parish priest of Monterey told me much of the pitiable condition of these remnants of the San Carlos Indians. He can do little or nothing for them, though their condition makes his heart ache daily. In that half-foreign English which is always so much more eloquent a language than the English-speaking peoples use, he said: "They have their homes there only by the patience of the thief; it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow." The phrase is worth preserving: it embodies so much history,—history of two races.

In Mr. Wilson's report are many eloquent and strong paragraphs, bearing on the question of the Indians' right to the lands they had under cultivation at the time of the secularization. He says:—

"It is not natural rights I speak of, nor merely possessory rights, but rights acquired and contracts made,—acquired and made when the laws of the Indies had force here, and never assailed by any laws or executive acts since, till 1834 and 1846; and impregnable to these.... No past maladministration of laws can be suffered to destroy their true intent, while the victims of the maladministration live to complain, and the rewards of wrong have not been consumed."

Of Mr. Wilson's report in 1852, of Mr. Ames's report in 1873, and of the various other reports called for by the Government from time to time, nothing came, except the occasional setting off of reservations by executive orders, which, if the lands reserved were worth anything, were speedily revoked at the bidding of California politicians. There are still some reservations left, chiefly of desert and mountainous lands, which nobody wants, and on which the Indians could not live.

The last report made to the Indian Bureau by their present agent closes in the following words:—

"The necessity of providing suitable lands for them in the form of one or more reservations has been pressed on the attention of the Department in my former reports; and I now, for the third and perhaps the last time, emphasize that necessity by saying that whether Government will immediately heed the pleas that have been made in behalf of these people or not, it must sooner or later deal with this question in a practical way, or else see a population of over three thousand Indians become homeless wanderers in a desert region."

I have shown a few glimpses of the homes, of the industry, the patience, the long-suffering of the people who are in this immediate danger of being driven out from their last footholds of refuge, "homeless wanderers in a desert."

If the United States Government does not take steps to avert this danger, to give them lands and protect them in their rights, the chapter of the history of the Mission Indians will be the blackest one in the black record of our dealings with the Indian race.

It must be done speedily if at all, for there is only a small remnant left to be saved. These are in their present homes "only on the patience of the thief; and it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow."