There's nothing like a primary source to startle you out of complacency about the past. Charles C. Mann posted one such yesterday from a just after the Civil War.
It's from the Chico (Calif.) Weekly Courant, printed on July 28, 1866. As he described it,
Excerpts from editorial calling on Congress to stop protecting Black people in the South and send troops to California instead to "exterminate" its original inhabitants:
There was no need for "protection of negroes against civilized white men" in the South... ! And then the editorial goes on to use the term "darkey," and of course the displaced original inhabitants of the Chico area are called "murdering savages."
All of this made me wonder who owned the Chico Weekly Courant, and how long Chico had been settled by white Easterners when 1866 rolled around. Here's what the Wikipedia has to say about the years leading up to that time in Chico's history:
Chico was founded by General John Bidwell, a member of one of the first wagon trains to reach California in 1843. Bidwell first came to the area in that same year as an employee of John Sutter. In 1844, William Dickey was granted Rancho Arroyo Chico by Mexican Governor Manuel Micheltorena. In two separate purchases in 1849 and 1851, Bidwell acquired the Rancho Arroyo Chico. He filed a claim for the land with the Public Land Commission in 1852, and the claim was confirmed the next year....
A treaty of "peace and friendship" was signed on September 18, 1853, between the Mechoopda, and other tribes of the area near Bidwell's Ranch [and areas]. United States Indian Agent O. M. Wozencraft represented the U.S. government at Bidwell's Ranch.
The city of Chico was founded in 1860 by General John Bidwell. That year, Bidwell requested the county send a surveyor to lay out the city street grid.
Chico was the starting point of the Koncow Trail of Tears... On August 28, 1863, all Konkow Maidu were to be at the Bidwell Ranch to be taken to the Round Valley Reservation at Covelo in Mendocino County. Any Indians remaining in the area were to be shot. 435 Maidu were rounded up and marched under guard west out of the Sacramento Valley and through to the Coastal Range. 461 Indians started the trek, 277 finished. They reached Round Valley on September 18, 1863.
This quote about the Concow Trail of Tears is from Jesse Dizard, chair of the Anthropology Department at Cal State Chico:
The Concow Trail of Tears was not an isolated event. Tension between white settlers and Native American communities had been growing for years. The Gold Rush of 1849 brought hundreds of thousands to California, most of them young men who cared very little for the indigenous population and its way of life, or their claims to traditional lands. Indeed, the concept of human rights either did not exist or was strictly reserved for European-Americans. Native Americans were forced from their lands, had their children kidnapped, were forced into indentured servitude, or quite simply were murdered. Retaliatory action from Native Americans was met with swift and often violent retribution.
Clearly, that was some treaty of "peace and friendship" that was signed in 1853. And, as anthropologist Dizard makes plain, only one type of person was considered human and worth protecting... in harmony with the writer's attitude about the value of the lives of Black people in the South.
The irony, of course, is that Congress withdrew federal troops from the South much too soon, essentially letting the Confederacy win the Civil War in all but name. And the U.S. sent plenty of troops to kill Indigenous people all over the West.
I did determine who the publisher of the Weekly Courant was. His name was A.W. Bishop, but so far I have been unsuccessful in finding any information about him.
4 comments:
I live in Chico, and my mom is very big into local history. You might like to have a look at her blog at https://goldfieldsbooks.com/ -- if you ask her who Bishop was, she might know or be able to find out. The Courant can't have lasted long; the two major Chico papers were the Enterprise and the Record, and today we have the Chico E-R.
John and Annie Bidwell are fascinating characters, and -- for white settlers/by comparison -- were protective and friendly with the local Mechoopda tribe, which is part of the Maidu nation. (We've also got plenty of vicious killers. I'm not by any means trying to say it was great.) Bidwell is practically unknown -- due partly IMO to his habit of not naming places after himself -- but was involved in much of California's early history. He also ran for president on the Prohibition/women's suffrage ticket.
I'm a librarian, and this being Native American Heritage Month, we've been doing a lot of promotion of Maidu history along with the Native American Center on campus. (Not Chico State, I'm not that fancy.) There is so much history around here; it's amazing to me, having grown up in a much less interesting area.
Wow, thanks for the lead! From what I saw, the Courant changed names or merged into another paper a few years later, but I don't recall off the top of my head if it was one of those two names.
It definitely seemed as though whoever owned the Courant and/or wrote the editorial was against Bidwell, because I think he was a political office-holder at the time it was written.
I saw my mom today and asked her about the Courant. She doesn't know a ton off the top of her head but says it was a Republican paper published from 1865-69, and she thinks there's only one archive copy extant, which Chico State has on microfilm.
Back when Republican meant something quite different than currently, of course... though what it meant in the context of Indigenous people (given that Lincoln went along with the hanging of 38 Dakota men at Fort Snelling during the Civil War) is another question. But clearly it was better than if it were a Democratic newspaper at the time.
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