Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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In North America, several tribes held captives as hostages for payment (pawnage) or imposed slavery on tribal members who committed crimes. The Creeks of Georgia and the Comanches of Texas were notorious “slavers” and slave traders, the Comanches often trading Sioux, Navajo, and Apache women and children to Mexicans as slave laborers and domestic servants. Fishing villages like the Yurok of northern California were acknowledged slaveholders. The Haida and Tlingit were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave traders, and in the Pacific Northwest as many as one-fourth of the indigenous populations were slaves.⁶ By the early nineteenth century Indian slavery and the slave trade extended from the Great Lakes and Canada through the Greater Southwest, including southern California.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century one of the more established slave trade routes ran from the Los Angeles area in southern California, through the Mojave district on the Colorado River, on to Zuni or Durango, to the Spanish community of Santa Fé. This had been an Indian trading trail in the pre-Spanish Southwest. At the end of the Spanish colonial era it involved Ute Indians capturing Paiutes or purchasing Paiute children from their parents, and trading them to the Mojaves for horses from California and Sonora. The Mojaves would exchange their captives at markets in northern Mexico and Alta California. Some of the horses and Paiute slaves would also be exchanged for Navajo blankets, ceramics, and buffalo skins from Santa Fé. Horses that sold for $10 each in California might fetch as much as $500 in Missouri, while young female Paiutes could bring as much as $250 in the Santa Fé market. The Utes practically depopulated Nevada and Utah of their Paiute population, with any remaining Paiutes, or “Diggers” as the locals called them, enslaved by first the Mountain Men and trappers, and later Mormon settlers. All had access to the slave trade along the Old Spanish Trail.⁷