Indians Were Cowgirls and Cowboys

Yakima Canutt, Western Film Rider - long-time friend of Erma Baker (rodeo friends)

Erma Baker and Red Baker-Frisbie on way to the Highland Lakes Country 1950s

Roundup Pendleton Oregon 1916 Bertha B, Annie Ingle, and Erma Baker (racing)

At the Trinity River 1985

Alma Sears, Erma Baker, Alma Smith-Scott, Patsy and Billy

Photos Northwest California Indians

From my files

Wintu Basket pattern See more about Baskets at www.ciba.org

Alma Sears Baker and son Robert- Wailakki Wintu

Erma, Lue, and Alma Wailakki Wintu Women (Lue is dau of Alma Sears and Abial Smith); Erma is daughter of Alma Sears Baker (1/2 sister of Lue); Alma in this photo is daughter of Erma Baker and Leslie Francis Smith (Smith is from Danish ancestry)

Fern canyon, a scene from Northwestern California

See more about native California at www.heydaybooks.com

Photos of Northwest California Indains

Here are photos of Native American people from northwest California.

Bonnie Blockburger, a Wailakki woman

Lucy Young, a Wailakki woman

Lucy and Sam, Wailakki Wintu

Grant and Lily Towendolly, Trinity County origins

Wintu art on wood from Toyon Wintu gathering

Listen to Native American radio click here www.gatheringofnations.com/gonradio/index.htm

Questions from Jens in comment section

Yesterday, Jens wrote concerning a question about why the white men would marry indian women but that he could find no evidence that indian men married white women. His question is, why? To this, Western Writer answers, there are many reasons we can explore, some can be discovered in sociology. I believe these are facts: (1) most societies want to "marry up"; in northwestern California, those white men who married Indian women were known as "buckskin men"; a slander that I will discuss in the forthcoming book about the Wailakki. (2) often, in northwestern California, the white men who married native women abandoned them when white women began to arrive in California (the first white men came alone in search of gold, land, and adventure); (3) if a white woman was to marry an Indian man, she would be "marrying down" - way down. I am adding here an observation made by a graduate student from Columbia University, when she visited the Wailakki/Lassik and other tribes at Round Valley Reservation -

[Amelia Susman visited Round Valley in 1937 wrote of the conditions there. The turn-of-the-century Dawes Act promised reservation land would be divided up and given to individual Indians, but this, too, worked against the Native people. Lots were only ten acres (five acres for a married woman) -- too small for anything but truck farming, which required equipment, credit, and lots of market savvy. Susman found many of the Indians leasing their land to whites. But as always, there was a Catch-22 for the Indians: the whites set the price of the rent.
She also found the valley as segregated as the Deep South. Reporting that whites made no secret of their claims to superiority, they told her racist tales of drunken Indians involved in "cutting scrapes." There was no mingling of the two cultures; like in the South, whites only spoke well of Indians when they were servants.]

A cousin of Western Writer obtained a plot in Round Valley in the Dawes Act era. Plots in that Valley were purposely small, so that the natives could not join their land to make a space large enough for cattle grazing or for raising large grain crops. The "rules" were set in place with the intent to marginalize the native peoples and to eventually reduce their numbers - a form of extermination. Another facet of living on the reservation was that the rez was managed by a major United States church and the natives lived under "Christian" rules or they could not stay. Indian languages were not allowed to be spoken. Indian traditions were not to be practiced. Children, when they came of a certain age, were sent away to "Indian Schools" where they were further indoctrinated in "civilized behavior" according to the Euro-American standards.

Life in the Round Valley region had not changed much for the better as of 1995, when Western Writer was living in the Wailakki home country of southern Trinity county - just to the south was Round Valley. Here, from the Albion Monitor of Mendocino County is a link to go to www.monitor.net/monitor/9-2-95/indianwars.html

I would like very much to have commentary on these facts of native american life.

New information source

A good source for finding Native American information and for sharing information is at NativeWiki.org This is linked to NativeWeb.net which is chock full of information about Native America.

I want to again remind readers to go to HeydayBooks.org for books relating to Native California and to early American settlers and immigrants and the Spanish who preceded them.

new info from Jens

extracted from communications between Western Writer and Jens -

WesternWriter to Jens

You should go to the following site to read more about the Native Americans. On the page I am directing you to, just below, is the face of a woman. She is Lucy ROGERS Young, usually referred to as Lucy Young, because she had married Sam Young, the foster-son of the woman doctor “White Lily”. They moved to the Round Valley Reservation after 1915-1920 or later, and the Methodist church insisted that they get married if they wanted to live there “in the face of God”, etc.

Lucy ROGERS Young is a cousin of mine in more ways than one. She is the grandchild of the old chief known as T’ell-kaiit-cin (the highest/eldest member of the White Lily Clan) T (pronounce Ø or Ø) ell (highest or eldest member of the family) kaiit (flower or lily) and cin (meaning white or no-rainbow-color)


Go to the Blocksburg California site. This talks about Blocksburg which was formerly known as Dobbins Creek, before Ben Blockenburger (a German man) cam to town. Ben Block or Blockenburger married a Wailakki woman and then threw her over when a white woman suitable for marriage came to town. The Wailakki woman was known as Bonnie Blockenburger. There are Block children in the genealogy of Round Valley, much of which data was collected by the late Floyd Barney (who also was the editor of Families of Round Valley
, the book which you already have and which you mentioned in a letter this week (last week)

http://www.blocksburg.com


I was delighted to receive your most recent email (about three notes from you). I am going to make it a priority to get some photos of the landscape and some Wailakki people into the website.

I am going to scan and send photos of Lucy Young, principal informant to anthropologists, lived at what is now Zenia, with her husband (Abe Rogers, the first white man to live among the Wailakki Indians at Zenia; arrived there before 1860). Lucy was born the daughter of Y’ell-taci and T’ell-t’etz in approximately 1846. She would have been six (6) years old when the massacre occurred near the present town of Hayfork. I strongly believe that the massacre occurred not at the site of the natural limestone bridge, but rather at a camping place along a stream source which would provide water for a gathering of the 150-300 people who were gathered for the Spring Solstice in mid-April 1852. (This attack on the Indian campsite is usually called the Natural Bridge Massacre. I suspect that calling the limestone bridge the site of the massacre sounded more romantic than saying they were actually camped in a “large valley with mountains on three sides” (attributed to one of the Old Settlers who participated in the attack on the campsite)

Abe Rogers, Greenleaf French, Amos and Enos (Commodore) Peabody were among the very first white men to penetrate Wailakki territory in the region known as South of the South Fork. South Fork is the longest continuous mountain ridge in the region and had no gold deposits, so it was a safer place for Indians, but only if they were under the protective umbrella of a white man. Abe Rogers was that umbrella for the White Lily family (I like to call them the White Lily Clan).

The land which is South of the South Fork Ridge of mountains was known to the Wailakki-Wintu people as the Kett-en-chah-gah (hence the name Kettenshaw and Hettenshaw)

A Wailakki man name Lassik (Ell-ai-sec) was the last leader to oppose the Euro-American incursions. He is memorialized at the Fort Humboldt Museum in Humboldt County, CA. Fort Humboldt was built to house the United States Army which was brought in to “quelch” the destructive raids being perpetrated on the “innocent” Euro-American farmers and stockraisers who were trying to settle the area and “till the land” as commanded in the Bible. .

Yellowjacket (Y’ell-ai-cha-gah) who is probably Lucy’s ½ brother or nephew); he is listed as Jack French ½ Wailakki in the census, and I believe he is the son of a Wailakki woman and Greenleaf French (stories said he was adopted by G. French. Kaiitcin believes he was actually the son of Greenleaf French, but societal protocol of the time would not allow French to acknowledge him. Jack French aka “Yellowjacket” was listed on the census as ½ Indian, therefore he had to be the son of a white man. Now, let it be known that it is possible that Yellowjacket Jack French was not ½ Indian. Perhaps he was 100% Indian, At this point in time, I have delved into that area of possibilities.

George Washington Burgess arrived as one of the earliest men to actually settle in the Zenia area, which was a part of what the Waliakki Wintu people called the entire region South of the South Fork. An article in the Weaverville newspaper said that Burgess and his wife were moving to the Hettenshaw in the early 1870s. The Weekly Trinity Journal dated May 20, 1871, stated that George Burgess and wife have removed from Weaverville to the State of Kettechau. George intends going into the stock business with Green French.” George W. Burgess had already been to the Kettenshaw some time earlier and established the fact that it was a good place to take a wife, and no doubt he had already built some sort of shelter. His wife was coming from Maine where they were a well-established family. I cannot imagine that she was going to settle for a “shack”.

The Burgess brothers were George Washington Burgess (1839-1921); Ezekiel ”Zeke” Virgil burgess (1849-1909), John H. Burgess (1853 to about 1880 according to research done by Ralph Hinton in 2008 report). John Burgess died shortly after he and his wife Orinda arrived at the Hettenshaw site of present day Zenia. (Orinda would later marry Greenleaf French, and after his death, she married one of the founding fathers of the village of Blocksburg – I have pictures of the headstone for both her and the husband). The cemetery is named for him – his family.

“We do not Weave the Web of Life. We are only strands in the Web” (adapted from Chief Seattle)

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As to my opinion about the people who were at Sutter's New Helvetia, I believe it is quite likely that Pierson B. Reading brought some of them down from the area which is now Shasta, Tehama, and Trinity Counties. As you correctly note, they were from the "North-West mountains" - that infers the same counties that I have just listed.

Two early "immigrants" known as Granville Swift and Franklin Sears (who stayed at Sutter's each Winter) did enslave some Wailakki-Wintu and put them to work in mining for gold after they laid claims just north of New Helvetia. They are chronicled in many pieces written about the history of the area. I know their story pretty well because I am related to the Sears. Both are descended from Daniel Boone and came out of Missouri backwoods - very "rough" men, who even threatened Sutter with big knives when he would not do what they wanted from him. Both Sears and Swift were at the fort with Sutter when gold was discovered by James Marshall. It was Winter and their land to the north was difficult to live on because of heavy rains and muddy land; they had purchased the land and cattle one of the Larkin Grant; the northern-most Larkin land. When they discovered gold on the Yuba River, they neglected their land (the Larkin Grant) and went to mining full-scale. They definitely used Indians as slaves. They each became the equivalent of millionaires and later moved to the Sonoma area (after the Mexican War) where they became farmers and wine vintners.

Pierson Barton Reading, on the other hand, was friendly to the Indians and is not known to have ever enslaved them or used them badly. Reading called these Indians to whom he was a benefactor of sorts, the "Wylakkers" and we know that he applied this term to all Indians in the northwest region of the mountains.


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extract from letter by email August 2 2009 Jens to WesternWriter

Hello! Now here in Hamburg is Sunday midday. All is resting and nobody is available at service telephones so that I may continue work. I find the contents of your site interesting and significant and important to save and fix it for later anthropologist-generations. There are lost already enough conclusive facts of Wailakki-history.

About the Modoc War and Captain Jack you can find hundreds of different texts, but not about our Wintu-favorites ! I think the reason is: Because they were more peaceful. from letter by email August 2 2009