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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This is the California context in which John C. Frémont’s activities and ideas can be judged. First, it must be noted that in the late 1840s, prior to the discovery of gold, Frémont was essentially a tourist and newcomer. His behavior toward the Indian was not any more sophisticated than that of his fellow Oregonians who fought, killed, and raped Indians. Had he stayed only an explorer, his reputation as “the great pathfinder” would have been secure, but his decision to purchase the Mariposa estate transformed the surveyor into an unsuccessful entrepreneur.

The 43,000-acre estate, in the Sierra foothills only 40 miles southwest of Yosemite, had been the favorite hunting ground of the Cauchile Indians. Similar to other white rancheros, his land had been carved out of previous indigenous properties. Like his neighbors, he surrounded himself with de facto Indians slaves that worked his fields, and after the discovery of gold and silver on the Mariposas River, his Sonoran managers administered the Indian mineworkers. One of the prospectors was a black servant named Saunders, whose family was still in slavery, who was working the Mariposa mines for the purpose of working off his purchase price of $1,700.⁶⁰ Generally speaking, while Frémont was generally consistent in his “free soil” views and his opposition to African chattel slavery in the South, he, like many of his contemporaries in the West, had a blind eye when it came to the issue of Indian slavery.