Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands by Charles Nordhoff
page 184 of 346 (53%)
page 184 of 346 (53%)
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A good many Missourians and other Southern people have settled in this
part of the State. The better class of these make good farmers; but the person called "Pike" in this State has here bloomed out until, at times, he becomes, as a Californian said to me about an earthquake, "a little monotonous." The Pike in Mendocino County regards himself as a laboring-man, and in that capacity he has undertaken to drive out the Indians, just as a still lower class in San Francisco has undertaken to drive out the laboring Chinese. These Little Lake and Potter Valley Pikes were ruined by Indian cheap labor; so they got up a mob and expelled the Indians, and the result is that the work which these poor people formerly performed is now left undone. As for the Indians, they are gathered at the Round Valley Reservation to the number of about twelve hundred, where they stand an excellent chance to lose such habits of industry and thrift as they had learned while supporting themselves. At least half the men on the reservation, the superintendent told me, are competent farmers, and many of the women are excellent and competent house-servants. No one disputes that while they supported themselves by useful industry in the valleys where were their homes they were peaceable and harmless, and that the whites stood in no danger from them. Why, then, should the United States Government forcibly make paupers of them? Why should this class of Indians be compelled to live on reservations? Under the best management which we have ever had in the Indian Bureau--let us say under its present management--a reservation containing tame or peaceable Indians is only a pauper asylum and prison combined, a nuisance to the respectable farmers, whom it deprives of useful and necessary |
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