Indians of California: The Changing Image

When the first Anglo-Americans visited California early in the nineteenth century, the future state was still a remote province of the Spanish empire. Early visitors, filled with a sense of American’s Manifest Destiny, described the missionary priests and their Indian converts in terms of the Black Legend of Spanish abuse of native peoples. Later, when the Anglos settled in California and assumed the life-style of the Mexican rancheros, they viewed the Indians as a primitive laboring class, docile and exploitable. Finally, after 1849, the gold rush brought hundreds of thousands of new white immigrants, who treated the primitive "diggers" simply as threats to their own prosperity and security. Bounty hunters shot down adult Indians, and Indian children and young people were sold into slavery as "apprentices."

The engine in this evolution of white attitudes was the changing needs of the white population. Needing to discredit Hispanic claims to the land, American observers saw the Indians as victims; needing a cheap labor force themselves, they viewed the Indians as a useful class; needing unimpeded access to the resources of the Golden State, they treated the Indians simply as obstacles to be eliminated.

• Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians
• Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History of Native Americans Since 1945
• California: An Interpretive History
• California Indians and Their Environment: An Introduction (Volume 96) (California Natural History Guides)
• Strangers in a Stolen Land (Adventures in the Natural History and Cultural Heritage of the Californias)
• California: An Interpretive History
• Indian Survival on the California Frontier (Yale Western Americana Series)
• An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (The Lamar Series in Western History)
• Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873
• Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)