Indians and Indian agents : the origins of the reservation system in California, 1849-1852

Describing the Indians of California as full participants in the events shaping their destiny in the wake of the 1849 gold rush, Phillips (history, U. of Colorado-Boulder) narrates how they negotiated large portions in the interior of the state as reservations in turn for letting the miners dig unimpeded. He also challenges the claim that the reservations failed, documenting how they functioned perfectly well for two years until the state of California succeeded in getting the treaties rejected as usurping states' rights. This is the second in his three-volume series chronicling relations between natives and intruders in California. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or. The Gold Rush of 1849 drastically changed the lives of the Indians of the interior of California as white gold-seekers poured into the region. Some Indians fought the intruders, and when conflicts escalated, the federal government sent three agents to California to settle disputes. The agents negotiated with the Indians a series of treaties that set aside large portions of the interior as reservations. Considering these activities a usurpation of states' rights, the government of California vehemently opposed the ratification of the treaties. Subsequently, in mid-1852, the U.S. Senate rejected the treaties, and the first superintendent of California Indian affairs was dispatched to the state. . In this book, George Harwood Phillips challenges the conventional interpretation of this period, which holds that the Indians offered weak and fragmented resistance to the miners, that they meekly submitted to the dictates of the Indian agents, that the reservations established by the agents never functioned, and that the superintendent himself singlehandedly invented the reservation system. Phillips argues that Indian resistance was stiff and concerted, that the Indians doggedly negotiated with the agents, that some of the reservations established by the agents functioned for more than two years, and that the superintendent merely expanded upon the agents' accomplishments.