Tales Of Meteors, Baskets, Troops Round Off Indian Claim Hearing
BERKELEY, July 7. - Baskets, meteors and the U.S. Army figured in the last
day of testimony in the three-week-long hearing before the
United States Indian Claims Commission, meeting at the University of California.
As final witness before the congressionally established court, Dr.
Samuel A. Barrett, 75-year-old native Californian, retired director of the famed
Milwaukee Museum of Natural History and
presently a research associate at the U. C. Museum of Anthropology, outlined
the manner in which white man's barbarism dispossessed the Indian of his
native lands.
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| Dr. J. B. Tompkins (left) of the U. C. Bancroft Library and Dr. Samuel A. Barrett, U. C. anthropologist, display vara sticks, emblems of office of early Spanish alcaldes and officials at the Berkeley Indian hearings. |
Barrett told the commissioners how he
commenced his studies of the state's aborigines back in 1894, and had
continued his research during the following 60 years.
TRADE DEAL TOLD
Appearing throughout the day, Barrett told the court how, as a young boy,
son of a Ukiah merchant, he negotiated a deal with a large California
department store to provide them with Indian baskets.
"This was just about the time - around 1894 - that the basket craze was
starting," Barrett explained.
He remarked that he occasionally slipped a particularly well-made basket
under the counter for his own use.
"Soon I had the best, and probably the only California Indian basket
collection in existence," he added.
Barrett explained how certain baskets were made by certain Indian tribelets,
and that many of the baskets were not only used for gathering and storing
purposes, but also as cooking utensils.
TRADER QUOTED
Barrett read into the record, during the forenoon session, quotations from
the accounts of
Zenas Leonard, a
fur trapper and trader who led a party of nearly 50 whites into California
between 1831 and 1836.
The account relates the impressions of a white man who viewed the early
Indians' legendary "year that the stars fell."
The so-called "year that the stars fell” - around Nov. 12, 1833
- has been an important date in the previous anthropological testimony given
by Dr.
Alfred Kroeber,
76-year-old dean of American anthropologists and star witness in the
hearings, and Dr.
Robert Heizer, 39,
vice chairman of U. C. Department of Anthropology.
Leonard's writings
- as placed in the record by Barrett - were assertedly made while the
trapper and his party were encamped in the vicinity of what is now the city
of Concord, nearly 10 miles north of Mt. Diablo.
Leonard, whose original accounts, according to Barrett,
now have a collector's market value of more than $1,500, wrote of the great consternation of his men over the "singular appearance
of the heavens."
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| A map of Leonard’s travels that was published in the 1904 edition of his book. [Adventures of Zenon Leonard (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers Co., 1904)] |
METEORS CRASH
"Soon after dark the air appeared to be completely thickened with meteors
falling toward earth, some of which would explode in the air and others
would be dashed to the ground, frightening our horses so much that it
required the most active vigilance of the whole company to keep them
together," Leonard was reported to have written.
Before launching into early Army troop operations in California, Barrett
described his role in the archeological survey of the locally famous
shell-mound village located where the city of Emeryville now stands.
Wig-wagging his snow-white Buffalo Bill mustache and goatee, Barrett
recalled the so-called Indian wars as fought between the United States Army
and California's aborigines.
See also California genocide
At one point, in response to the Indian attorney's questioning he stated, "I
hate to acknowledge that these were United States soldiers."
Key to the lengthy series recorded documents the clear-voiced anthropologist
submitted for the record was a statement given by a California Indian whom
Barrett said he had interviewed while a member of U. C. first class of
anthropology students in 1903, who was named William Benson.
FACTS VERIFIED
The Benson statement had been taken and investigated by a team of U. C.
anthropologists around the turn of the century. The evidence, as to its
authenticity. had been reviewed and verified by Dr. Max Radin, U. C John
Henry Boalt Professor of Law.
The Benson document referred to the murder of two infamous California miners named Stone and Kelsey.
The pair, according to Barrett's testimony, "ruled the Indians of the region
with an iron hand.
"They made the Indians build high log stockades about their villages and
established absolute curfew. Anyone found outside the stockades at off hours
was severely punished," his testimony read.
The two whites not only deprived the Indians of their native liberties but
denied them their stone-age weapons which enabled them to furnish food and
clothing for their families, according to the scientist's testimony.
BRUTALLY FLOGGED
"When ordered to deliver their young daughters to the house, if a father or
mother refused or evaded, either or both would be strung up or brutally
flogged," Barrett testified.
Barrett explained to the commissioners how the two whites had deprived the
Indians under their sphere of influence both the means and permission to
obtain food in the native ways, and that extreme conditions of starvation
had set in.
Finally the Indians, following the public murder of his own half-breed
nephew by Stone, decided and actually did contrive to kill the white
despots, he explained.
The Indians fled the vast
rancerio owned by
the pair and took refuge on a large island on the upper end of Clear Lake in
what is now known as Lake County.
United States troops hunted the group down, to take revenge, according to
Barrett, and the following account has been attested to by not only a host
of Indians but authenticated by teams of white academic specialists.
BURNED AT STAKE
"The soldiers caught two (Indian) men, took them to the army camp, bound
them with wire to a tree and then at night burned them. Their cries were
heard on the island, calling their own names and saying that they were being
burned," Barrett related.
"An old woman hidden nearby says she saw two soldiers with a girl skewered
on their bayonets, heave the body into the river," and Barrett stated that
Benson's account noted that it took four or five days after the soldiers had
departed before the Indians could gather up the dead and cremate them, which
was done on a spot on the eastern side of the island.
Barrett elaborated on equally bloody accounts elsewhere in the north central
part of the state performed by U. S. troops among the aborigines, over the
killing of Stone and Kelsey.
"The best we can determine," Barrett told the court, "is that about 300 to 400 Indians were wiped out by government troops over the death of these two renegades."
Today's testimony ends evidence submitted by attorneys for the state's
33,000 Indians, charging that their forefathers held legal title to the land
now claimed as California.
Further hearings will depend upon whether the Indian Claims Commission will
find that the Federal Government is legally liable for claim or not.
It the Government is found to be liable, further hearings will be held to
determine the actual lạnd value of California in 1850.
Much Talking Done
BERKELEY, July 7. - A massive amount of testimony went into the record
during the two - and - a - half week hearing on the Indians claim against
the U.S. Government, Reginald Foster, chief counsel for the Indians, said
today.
Some 345,000 words of testimony were taken down by two court reporters and
transformed by a single typist into a permanent record consisting of 1,140
pages in 11 separate volumes.
More than 2,000 separate exhibits, weighing a total of about 100 pounds,
were entered as evidence, Foster added.
Art Objects Shown at Hearings
BERKELEY, July 7 - Indian Claims Commissioners Edgar Witt, chairman, and
William Holt, were given a firsthand view of some of early day California.
In testimony given yesterday by Dr. Samuel A. Barrett, reference was made to
the size of a given Indian
rancherio as
being so many leagues.
Witt asked, "tell me professor, just how big is a league?"
Barrett answered that it all depended upon how big the
Alcalde's staff was.
The Alcalde - or Spanish-Mexican mayor, or more properly, village dictator -
used a staff as his emblem of office. The length of the staff, according to
Barrett, served as the standard length of measure in the Alcalde's
community.
See vara
Barrett, who displayed an original Spanish Alcalde's staff to the
commissioners - one that is possessed by the University of California's
famed Bancroft Library and trimmed with a head fashioned from an old tin can
- also illustrated the high degree of artistry that California's aborigines
performed in their basketry.
Spread on a table for the commissioner's inspection was one of the most
high-priced - from the standpoint of collector's values - basket collections
in the Nation.
Many of the baskets were coated on the outside with a beautiful cover of
bird feathers in every vivid hue imaginable.
Together with the early masterpieces of basketry and Spanish rule, women of
California's present day
tribe of Yurok Indians from the
northwestern part of the state, presented an exact replica of
a sweat house that still stands
- the possession of
Billy Brooks
- near the
mouth of the Klamath River
in Humboldt County.
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Tribune photos Miss Theresa Williams of 1515 Webster St. Oakland, shows a model of a Yurock sweat house which is still standing on the land of tribesman Billy Brooks near Klamath, Calif. Indians bathed in the house. |
Miss
Thressa [Theresa] Williams
of
1515 Webster St., Oakland,
herself a pure-blood Yurok,
explained that only the men folk among the tribe possessed and used the
so-called sweat house.
She said the original house - from which the model was designed - still
stands near
Terwer, California.
I visited this site, before researching this article, not knowing its full significance. Here are some photos I took of the sweat house [temescal] and other structures. - MF
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