1800s: Hide and Tallow Trade takes place
Trade in products produced from cattle ranching, including the meat, horns, skin (hide), and fat (tallow) from animals, flourished in California in the early 1800s (nineteenth century), and especially after overhunting led to the decline of the sea otter trade. Spain initially dominated the hide and tallow trade by banning foreign ships from California and using its Indian labor force at the missions. Native workers both herded cattle and processed hides and tallow. When Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821, the foreign trade ban was lifted and the American, English, and Portuguese traders who had previously participated in the hide and tallow trade illegally began to openly trade with California missions and ranches, which also utilized (sometimes coercively) native laborers. Ships often stopped at multiple points along the coast, trading dry goods, hardware, guns, and furniture for hides and tallow. Among other uses, California hides were transformed into shoes and factory belts in New England; much of the tallow, used for making soap and candles, was sent to South America. The hide and tallow trade was California’s main source of wealth between the 1820s and the Gold Rush.
1812: War of 1812 fought
The War of 1812 (1812–15) was a military conflict between the United States and Great Britain over British interference with American rights to maritime trade. While US victory solidified American independence, the conflict's end held serious implications for American Indians and their territorial rights. The Northeastern Indian confederacy, led by Tecumseh, aligned with the British at the onset of the war, believing an American defeat could prevent further incursions into their territories. The war lasted three years, during which time many American troops encroached upon Eastern Woodlands land. Tecumseh died in the 1813 Battle of the Thames and did not live to see the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war. Although the United States did not yet reach to California during the War of 1812, American ships engaging in maritime trade on the Pacific were at danger of capture by the British during the war.
1812–1842: Fort Ross occupied by Russians
Fort Ross was a Russian Fort in contemporary Sonoma County that served as the center of Colony Ross, a group of small settlements and a port in the area of Bodega Bay, in Kashaya Pomo territory. Unlike the Spanish, the Russians signed a contract with the Kashaya Pomo for the land they used, and they refrained from aggressively recruiting and proselytizing the inhabitants. As a result, the Kashaya Pomo viewed the Russians in part as a buffer against Spanish incursions, even as some were pressed into service. Fort Ross’ primary purpose was agricultural: to provide food supplies to company headquarters in the less temperate Sitka, Alaska. But the fort also conducted surreptitious trade with the Spanish Missions. During its years of operation, Fort Ross functioned as a multiethnic community, home to a population including Creoles, Russians, Alaska Natives of multiple regions, Kashaya Pomo, Siberians, and others who came under the influence of the Russian Empire. Fort Ross also served a strategic function, preventing the establishment of Spanish Missions in the northern reaches of California. Neither Spain nor Mexico ever recognized the colony, however. Fort Ross was abandoned in 1842; profits from maritime trade in the region had dwindled in the 1820s and 30s and agricultural endeavors were never as successful as hoped. Company holdings were sold to California businessman John Sutter, and the final vessel to leave Fort Ross departed with the remaining occupants on January 1, 1842.
1814: Massacre on San Nicolas Island occurs
In early 1814, a Russian American Company ship, the Il'mena, departed from Sitka, Alaska, to San Nicolas Island with a crew of conscripted Kodiak Aluttiq hunters. A violent confrontation between these Alaska Natives and the local islanders devasted the Nicoleño population.
1814: Steam-driven "double press" introduced to the Times in London
The invention of the steam-driven double printing press in 1814 mechanized the manually-powered Gutenberg Printing Press and supported printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. Developed by German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer, the machine was first utilized by the Times, a publication in London, before a factory that manufactured the press was established in 1817. Allowing for an impressive yield of 5,000 printed sheets per hour, Koenig's and Bauer's machine maximized newspaper production. This greatly expanded newspaper distribution in Europe and the Americas.
1821: Mexico gains independence from Spain
With the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba in 1821, Spain granted Mexico independence, ending a war that had begun in 1810.
1823: Johnson v. McIntosh ruled
A United States Supreme Court case that involved a land dispute between two American citizens in the state of Illinois. The case was used to test the question of whether American Indians had the right to sell land to American citizens. In a decision written by John Marshall, the court ruled that indigenous people did not have that right. They were “occupiers,” but not owners, of the land they inhabited; thus, they could not grant land titles to it. Instead, the US government owned the right to all untitled land; it had assumed that right from Great Britain (who had earned it via “discovery”) following the American Revolution. The case remains a cornerstone of federal Indian law and property law in the United States.
1824: Chumash neophytes revolt at La Purísima Mission
Chumash neophytes at Mission La Purísima stage a rebellion after a neophyte at Mission Santa Inez is beaten by military authorities. The Chumash remain in control until soldiers from the Monterey presidio arrive a month later. In the process of asserting their authority, the soldiers leave a number of Chumash injured or dead. The incident, and others like it, highlight the initial crumbling of the mission structure in the wake of Mexico's independence from Spain.
1826: Jedediah Smith reaches San Gabriel Mission
Jedediah Smith (1799–1831), a prolific fur trapper, made his claim to fame by leading the first overland party to California. Smith departed from the Great Salt Lake region and ended his initial expedition at San Gabriel Mission in 1826. Here, he observed the inner workings of the Southern California missions as well as mapped the local territory. Jose Echeandia, current governor of Alta California, did not appreciate the American presence in his province and negotiated for Smith to make his exit; still, Smith's journey fueled US interest in California.
1830: Indian Removal Act signed
Signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, the Indian Removal Act resulted in the relocation of approximately 50,000 native peoples from the Eastern seaboard to a defined "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi River. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians were forced to leave their homes and embark westward, no matter the cost to themselves. The mass removal of the Cherokee in 1838 came to be known as the Trail of Tears, a historical expression that captures the hardships and losses endured by the native Southeastern peoples at the hands of encroaching white settlers.
1833: First penny press introduced
The New York Sun was the first penny press in the United States, meaning that it could be purchased daily, for a penny, rather than through an annual subscription. The penny press’s affordability greatly expanded readership and contributed to increased literacy rates. Growing audiences—and the drive for more readers—also ushered in a style of news reporting, sensationalism, that capitalized on the attractiveness of shocking and provocative stories.
1834: Secularization of California Mission system completed
The process of secularization had begun following Mexico’s independence from Spain, with many Californios coveting the missions' rich land holdings. Rather than dividing the mission lands among the native peoples who had resided at the mission, the Church property was sold or given as land grants to local elites. Former “Mission Indians” were often left vulnerable in the process, as many were forced into labor on local ranches.
1835: Nicoleños removed to San Pedro
On November 21, 1835, the Mexican schooner Peor es Nada left San Nicolas Island for San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, carrying the small group of Nicoleños still living on the island at the time. However, one woman and her son were left behind. Extant records do not indicate on whose direction the Peor es Nada was sent to remove the islanders to the mainland. The Mexican schooner was owned by Jose Joaquín Gómez. It capsized in San Francisco Bay shortly after the Nicoleños disembarked. Many of the Nicoleños brought to San Pedro were placed in the homes of local, non-native, Catholic families, where they labored as servants. The woman left behind would remain on San Nicolas Island, alone after her son’s death, for the next 18 years, until a party led by American otter hunter George Nidever brought her to the California mainland in 1853.
1835: Great Moon Hoax articles published
A series of articles that have come to be known as the Great Moon Hoax were written by Richard Adams Locke and published in the New York Sun in 1835. The initial installment described the discovery of planets beyond our solar system and a confirmation of life on the moon. Readers were enthralled by the account and the paper's sales practically doubled. More installments followed, with increasingly outlandish claims, like the detection of a winged hominoid species. The Great Moon Hoax ultimately launched a debate on the role of ethics in journalism, calling to question the methods by which newspapers should be allowed to draw in readers.
1838: US Exploring Expedition begins
Though the US Exploring Expedition is best known for its discovery of Antarctica, the overseas voyage led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes also held major implications for American conquest on the West Coast. The expedition served as the first American mapping campaign in the Pacific. A crew divided across six ships charted the waters with the intent of aiding American whaling enterprises. Stops along the mainland reinforced the potential value of California, and a landing at a decaying Mexican presidio, where no official could be found, led to the group's conclusion that the land was ideal for American seizure.
1842: Initial American capture of Monterey takes place
The capture of Monterey, the capital city of Alta California, by a US Naval commander in 1842 was the result of misinformation and rumor that the United States was at war with Mexico. In fact, there was no military conflict. Monterey was quickly returned to Mexican authorities when the mistake was realized. However, the ease with which the city had been seized served to further stimulate war hawks eager for US expansion. The Mexican American War began just a few years later, in 1846.
1846: Bear Flag Revolt occurs
https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/bear-flag-revolt.htm
1846–48: Mexican-American War fought
The Mexican-American War was fought over disputed territory in present-day Texas, which the United States had annexed in 1845. While the United States claimed the southernmost boundary as the Rio Grande, Mexico maintained that the territory’s perimeter ended at the Nueces River. The war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: the United States gained its desired territory lines but agreed to pay $15 million in compensation and assumed $3.25 million in debt owed to the Mexican government. In the United States, the war for territorial expansion intensified the sectional conflict over slavery. It also fueled Manifest Destiny. The Mexican-American War was the first serious military conflict to be covered by news correspondents. New technology and transportation, including the Pony Express, railroads, and telegraph lines enabled the relatively rapid transport of information, and battles were often described in gruesome detail, especially for penny press.
1847: Boston Atlas prints story on Lone Woman
On January 7, 1847, the Boston Atlas published the first known account of the Lone Woman’s story under the headline “A Female Crusoe.” At this time, the Nicoleña still lived on San Nicolas Island, not arriving in Santa Barbara, California until 1853. As the Boston Atlas account appeared while she was still on the island, the author presumes she will “lie down and die alone, on the cold shore of her isolated home.” The Lone Woman’s story most likely travelled to Boston by way of New England sailors who heard the story while on the California coast. The Boston Atlas was a daily and semi-weekly newspaper that was in print from 1844–1857. The Atlas’ article on the Lone Woman was the first of many articles about the Nicoleña that would appear in print over the next 100 years. On January 8, 1847, there was already a retelling of the story in New York after the Atlas travelled south, probably by train. From there, the story continued to spread throughout the country and into the southern states before looping around to the Pacific coast and Hawaii.
1848: James Marshall finds gold in the American River
While building a sawmill on the bank of the American River, James Marshall, an employee and associate of California entrepreneur John Sutter, spotted gold. The California Star and the Californian reported Marshall's discovery, attracting miners and more importantly, entrepreneur Sam Brannan, who arrived in Sacramento from New York to sell mining supplies and promote local opportunity. The resulting mass migration had serious consequences for the native people of the region. While some Indians mined along the river for themselves, many were hired for this work by white settlers (as were many Chinese immigrants). As prospectors flocked from the East, native peoples were pushed off their lands, culturally significant plants were threatened, and increased tension between natives and whites resulted in violent clashes.
1849: California's First Constitutional Convention
California’s First Constitutional Convention was called in 1849 by Brigadier General Bennett Riley, head of the military government established to govern the lands that comprise the current state of California. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, had transferred this land from Mexico to the United States, and decisions now had to be made as to what kind of state California would be. Debate about slavery had intensified in the preceding decades, and great efforts were being made to maintain a balance between free and slave states in order to keep the peace between proslavery and antislavery forces. California entered the Union as a free state as part of the larger Compromise of 1850 (which also strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act). Although slavery was outlawed in California, the issue of citizenship and enfranchisement of indigenous peoples—and hence their protection against slave-like working conditions—remained up for discussion and debate. After much deliberation, delegates to the first constitutional convention remained deadlocked. Half voted to grant suffrage to all adult men except Indians and other non-white minorities and the other half voted to extend suffrage to all adult men. The presiding chair broke the tie, sealing the legislative fate of native peoples until 1924, when American Indians were granted suffrage in California following passage of the federal Indian Citizenship Act. While California’s first state constitutional convention did not grant native peoples voting rights, Representative Pablo de la Guerra succeeded in passing an amendment stating that the Legislature could grant citizenship and voting rights to any Indians that the legislative body deemed worthy; it was a small concession. Denial of suffrage severely limited the power California Indians had to determine their own political fate in the newly created state of California. A second constitutional convention convened in 1878 to address lingering problems from the first constitution, including taxation, finances, and government regulations. American Indian enfranchisement was not revisited at this convention.
1850: California passes Act for the Government and Protection of Indians
The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, passed by the California legislature in 1850, enabled the prosecution of “unemployed” adult Indians, much as vagrancy laws were established in the postbellum American South. Indian children were also vulnerable, with boys age 17 and younger and girls age 14 and younger bound as apprentices to masters who could retain any wages earned. With settlers encroaching on their homelands and cutting off access to traditional foods, medicine, and resources for manufacture, native peoples became refugees in their own land. In 1845, approximately 150,000 native people lived in California. By 1870, the number was reduced to 30,000.
1850–1913: Abalone fishing on San Nicolas Island takes place
Long prized by Native Californians for their meat and shells, abalone became an aim of commercial fishing beginning in the 1850s. The industry was dominated by Chinese fishermen because abalone meat was prized in China but undervalued in American California, where it was considered dull, common fare. The Chinese monopoly of coastal and island abalone fishing continued into the early 1900s (twentieth century). At that time, Japanese fishermen began harvesting abalone from the California Channel Islands, diving for a species found exclusively in deeper waters. Simultaneously, new ways of cooking abalone meat were popularized, making the sale of abalone within California’s borders more lucrative. The greatest threat to Chinese abalone fishermen, however, came in the form of three US fishery regulations passed before the turn of the century. The Scott Act (1888), the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1890), and the Geary Act (1892) each extended and expanded the reach of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Specifically, these regulations reduced the exceptions present in the original immigration act, with the effect being that fishermen were defined as laborers who were barred from entering (or re-entering) the country. Chinese fishermen pushed back against the regulations but were definitively defeated in 1913, when the California state government outlawed the shipment of abalone overseas, thereby ending the lucrative trade to China.
1852–53: George Nidever travels to San Nicolas Island
In April 1852, Santa Barbara resident George Nidever went to San Nicolas Island with a party including the English sailor Tom Jeffries and two unidentified Indians to search for seagull eggs, a lucrative commodity. According to journalist Emma Hardacre, one of the Franciscan priests at Mission Santa Barbara, Father González, paid Tom Jeffries $200 to search for the Lone Woman during the trip. While making camp on the beach, the crew spotted footprints in the sand and concluded that they must have been left by a woman due to their small size. Before they could investigate further, however, a large storm arose and forced the crew to evacuate San Nicolas without searching for the Lone Woman.
In the winter of 1852, Santa Barbara resident George Nidever returned to San Nicolas Island with the Prussian sailor Charles Dittman and two unidentified California Indians to hunt for sea otters. According to Nidever, the Franciscan Father González requested that he search for the Lone Woman on this journey. Upon arrival, the men spotted footprints on the beach; however, the trail disappeared in soft moss. The crew continued to search for signs of the Lone Woman and found a woven basket with tools. Nidever scattered the contents in hopes that the Lone Woman would collect her belongings, thereby proving her existence. However, before the men could wait for the Lone Woman to retrieve her items, a storm drove the crew off the island.
In May 1853, George Nidever returned to San Nicolas Island with Carl Dittman, an Irishman called “Colorado”, and a small group of native men including (Chumash), and Hilario Valenzuela (Yaqui), to hunt for sea otter and look for the Lone Woman. As Nidever and the rest of the crew searched the beach, Dittman investigated the scrubland of the inner portion of the island. According to Dittman’s account, he sighted the Lone Woman in a crude hut (or windbreak). However, other people suggest that the Lone Woman revealed herself to Dittman because she was able to avoid contact with hunters and trappers for more than a decade and a half; she would not have allowed Dittman to stumble upon her. Both Nidever and Dittman reported that the Lone Woman was well-mannered and hospitable despite the fact that neither party could understand one another. Communicating through signs, Nidever believed that he understood the Lone Woman and that she told him that her baby had been eaten by wild dogs. The Lone Woman joined Nidever’s hunting party and returned with them to the mainland.
1853: Rejection of series of California treaties takes place
In 1851 and 1852, 139 California tribes sign a combined 18 land treaties with the U.S. government. Because of political pressure from settlers in post-Gold Rush California, a 2/3 Senate approval never materialized, meaning the treaties had no legal bearing. In 1853, the 11,700 square miles initially proposed for Indian reservations in California were divided into smaller tracts that would not only serve as reservations but also double as US Army outposts. Poor living conditions on the designated land led to famine and revolt, triggering a cycle of violence as military and paramilitary units counterattacked. Starvation and violence led to a precipitous decline in California’s indigenous population during the last half of the nineteenth century, even as native peoples fought for their survival.
1853: Lone Woman arrives in Santa Barbara and dies
The Lone Woman died in 1853 and was buried at Mission Santa Barbara after being conditionally baptized with the name Juana María. After being taken from San Nicolas Island to the mainland by a party captained by sea otter hunter George Nidever, the Nicoleña resided with Nidever’s family in Santa Barbara, California. She stayed with Nidever’s family until she died seven weeks later, likely due to dysentery. She was conditionally baptized and buried, likely in an unmarked grave, at Mission Santa Barbara. In 1928, 75 years after her death, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a plaque commemorating her life and death at Santa Barbara Mission.
1857: Sheep ranching on San Nicolas Island begins
San Nicolas Island was used for sheep ranching between 1857 and 1943, as were a number of other Channel Islands (e.g., Santa Cruz, San Miguel). In the early twentieth century, the federal government issued five-year leases to farmers, granting them permission to graze their herds on the islands. While less is known about sheep ranching on San Nicolas than on the other islands, the first herd of approximately 500 ewes and a few rams appeared on San Nicolas in 1857, and by 1875, their numbers had multiplied to 16,000. The total number of sheep recorded rose to 40,000 at one point, but the island’s vegetation couldn’t sustain that many animals, and many died of starvation. Island wool was sheered, packed, and sent to San Francisco, ultimately bound for mills in New England. Mutton was sent to markets in Los Angeles. In the early years, island sheep were allowed free reign of the island; however, this practice ended when Basque herders arrived in California and placed sheep into bounded pastures. Regardless of where the sheep grazed, however, they destroyed island vegetation, and island sheep ranching eventually declined due to severe defoliation. Ranching had other enduring consequences; the animals trampled over thousand-years-old human remains and ethnographic objects on the island, exposing them to collectors and archeologists alike.
1861: Telegraph lines increase speed of news delivery
In 1861, Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in the United States. The installation of these lines changed how news stories spread across the country. Prior to this, news was disseminated via horse and carriage, as well as by boats and trains that ran along the coasts. The telegraph allowed news to be transferred between its stations nearly instantaneously, bringing about the possibility for widespread, timely national coverage of news. The circulation of the Lone Woman’s story illustrates these effects. Before 1861, the Lone Woman’s story was primarily confined to the East Coast and California, with a few small exceptions in the Midwest. After the telegraph line was installed, the story begins to slowly spread to the middle of the country, picking up strongly in 1881.
1869: Transcontinental Railroad completed
On May 10, 1869, the final spike of the transcontinental railroad connecting the eastern half of the United States to the western half was ceremonially hammered into the ground at Promontory Point, Utah. The massive transportation project involved a business partnership between the Union Pacific Railroad in the East and Central Pacific Railroad in the West. Once linked, the lines expedited the transportation of information, goods, and people across the still largely unsettled west. The railroad ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, a northern route that was selected by Congress during the Civil War, when no representatives from southern states were present to object. In 1862, and again in 1864, Congress made provisions to help finance the project by way of land grants and federal bonds. The railroad would ultimately transform all aspects of life in the west and would be particularly devastating for native peoples as it accelerated the speed of settlement and destruction of natural resources essential to traditional lifeways.
1870: Mass hunting of buffalo begins
The completion of the transcontinental railroad allowed for quick and easy shipment of commodities across the United States. Buffalo hides, used for clothing and industrial conveyor belts, were among the first products to capitalize on railroad transportation. Beginning in 1870 and lasting throughout the 1880s, parties of freelance hunters swarmed to the Midwest and exterminated a majority of the wild buffalo population, transporting the profitable hides to markets on the East Coast. The buffalo population was estimated to equal about 30 million before the mass slaughtering. The destruction of the herds posed a significant challenge for Great Plains Indians who relied on buffalo for sustenance.
1872: General Mining Act signed into law
The General Mining Act of 1872 further threatened native people’s access to their land. The law allowed for any taxpayer or company to lay claim to a territory if a mineral with potential for valuable enterprise was discovered there. Because of the ambiguously defined rules regarding the size of a claim and the proof of discovery, many were able to usurp Indian lands after the bill's passing without much, or any, government oversight.
1877: Stephen Powers publishes Tribes of California
Journalist Stephen Powers (1840–1904) collected and published his ethnographic observations in Tribes of California, a text that later shaped anthropologists’ ideas about the indigenous peoples of the region. University of California professor Alfred Kroeber, for example, was greatly influenced by Powers’ claim that the "quasi-Christianized Indians of the missions" could no longer be identified as the same natives who inhabited the land prior to European contact. This idea influenced which tribes were studied by newly professional anthropologists. Those who were not later had difficulty gaining federal recognition by the United States government
1879: Bureau of American Ethnology founded
The Bureau of American Ethnology was created in 1879 as a division of the National Smithsonian Institute, the largest museum research initiative in the world. The bureau was responsible for establishing anthropology as an academic and professional discipline in the United States. Well into the twentieth century, it served as the United States’ leading anthropological research program, dominating publications in the field. Research was motivated both by scientific interest and the need to develop US Indian policy. In 1965, the Bureau of American Ethnology merged with the larger Smithsonian Museum Department of Anthropology.
1879: Carlisle Indian Industrial School opens
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1917), located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was a residential boarding school for American Indian children. The school emerged during an era of American Indian policy that emphasized assimilation. As the superintendent of Carlisle stated, the goal of the school was to "kill the Indian and save the man." Native children were required to wear uniforms, cut their hair, speak English, and perform manual labor as part of their vocational and industrial instruction. Due to a lack of funding for the institute and students’ cultural alienation while in residence, many children became ill and a number ran away. The Carlisle School served as a model for other Native American boarding schools, leaving a complex legacy of both idealistic goals (preparing native children for high achievement in mainstream America) and the reality that forced assimilation and overbearing punishment causes trauma and leads to a catastrophic communal loss of culture and language.
1880: Emma Hardacre publishes "Eighteen Years Alone"
Emma Hardacre published her now famous article “Eighteen Years Alone” in Scribner’s Monthly in May 1880. Prominent local citizens with ties to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History asked Hardacre to write a story about the Lone Woman when the journalist was visiting Santa Barbara. The resulting piece was so widely read and reprinted that it influenced how the public would understand the story of the Nicoleña for a century to come. Conforming to journalistic standards of the time, Hardacre wrote a sensationalist account that incorporated such literary tropes as the female Crusoe, vanishing Indian, and Noble Savage. This, as well as the factual information (and misinformation) she included, influenced Scott O’Dell’s portrayal of the Lone Woman in his 1960 novel, Island of the Blue Dolphins.
1882: Chinese Exclusion Act signed
On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This law made it extremely difficult for Chinese people to immigrate to the United States as it forbade the entry of laborers of any kind. Those seeking entry to the United States from China had to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were neither “skilled” nor “unskilled laborers.” The Act also placed onerous restrictions on people of Chinese descent who already lived in the United States. It prohibited them from reentering the country without the above certification if they left the United States for any reason. The original Chinese Exclusion Act was scheduled to expire in 1892, but it was extended for ten years by the Geary Act, and then made permanent in 1902. In 1893, the McCreary Act broadened the interpretation of “laborer,” as used in the Chinese Exclusion Act, to include fishermen and laundry owners, a revision that further restricted Chinese immigration to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act reflects both Americans’ economic anxieties in the late 1800s (nineteenth century) as US settlers moved west as well as ongoing racist attitudes. After passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, large-scale Chinese immigration into the United States did not resume until the Immigration Act of 1965.
1887: General Allotment Act (Dawes Severalty Act) signed
The General Allotment Act of 1887, or Dawes Severalty Act, ordered the parceling of communally-held tribal lands to specific native families (160 acres of territory) and individuals (80 acres of territory). Any remaining territory was sold to settlers. The Dawes Act had devastating consequences, as native land holdings decreased from 138 million acres to 48 million acres within a fifty-year period.
1890: Battle of Wounded Knee fought
In 1890, the United States’ Seventh Cavalry, which had suffered significant casualties at the hands of the Lakota in the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876), was sent to expel Chief Bigfoot’s Lakota-Minneconjou tribe from its reservation on the Great Plains. The relationship between the area’s white settlers and local native peoples had been strained as the Lakota addressed the increasing threat of westward expansion with the Ghost Dance, a form of resistance to assimilation that manifested spiritually. The dance frightened settlers, who perceived it as bellicose, and they requested that the tribe be removed. The US troops sent to Wounded Knee killed more than half the Lakota population in what was later portrayed as a massacre.
1898: Scott O'Dell born in Los Angeles
Scott O’Dell was born on May 23, 1898, in Los Angeles, then a city of about 100,000 people. California had been a state for forty-eight years by the time O’Dell was born, making him the third generation to live in California after the beginning of US statehood. The railroads built in the decades before O’Dell’s birth connected California to the rest of the United States, and they were what brought O’Dell’s family west. O’Dell’s father initially worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. Growing up in coastal California, O’Dell was well acquainted with its marine environment and landscape, and these figures prominently in the rich imagery of his bestselling novel, Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960).
1899: Franz Boas becomes first anthropology professor
German anthropologist Franz Boas becomes the curator of Ethnology and Somatology for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and then a professor in Columbia University's newly established anthropology department. Among his most influential students is Alfred Kroeber, who would go on to establish the department of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Boas is renowned for his development of the principle of cultural relativism, a theory that posed that individual cultures are relative to one another and can only be analyzed within the framework of their specific culture.
Trade in products produced from cattle ranching, including the meat, horns, skin (hide), and fat (tallow) from animals, flourished in California in the early 1800s (nineteenth century), and especially after overhunting led to the decline of the sea otter trade. Spain initially dominated the hide and tallow trade by banning foreign ships from California and using its Indian labor force at the missions. Native workers both herded cattle and processed hides and tallow. When Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821, the foreign trade ban was lifted and the American, English, and Portuguese traders who had previously participated in the hide and tallow trade illegally began to openly trade with California missions and ranches, which also utilized (sometimes coercively) native laborers. Ships often stopped at multiple points along the coast, trading dry goods, hardware, guns, and furniture for hides and tallow. Among other uses, California hides were transformed into shoes and factory belts in New England; much of the tallow, used for making soap and candles, was sent to South America. The hide and tallow trade was California’s main source of wealth between the 1820s and the Gold Rush.
1812: War of 1812 fought
The War of 1812 (1812–15) was a military conflict between the United States and Great Britain over British interference with American rights to maritime trade. While US victory solidified American independence, the conflict's end held serious implications for American Indians and their territorial rights. The Northeastern Indian confederacy, led by Tecumseh, aligned with the British at the onset of the war, believing an American defeat could prevent further incursions into their territories. The war lasted three years, during which time many American troops encroached upon Eastern Woodlands land. Tecumseh died in the 1813 Battle of the Thames and did not live to see the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war. Although the United States did not yet reach to California during the War of 1812, American ships engaging in maritime trade on the Pacific were at danger of capture by the British during the war.
1812–1842: Fort Ross occupied by Russians
Fort Ross was a Russian Fort in contemporary Sonoma County that served as the center of Colony Ross, a group of small settlements and a port in the area of Bodega Bay, in Kashaya Pomo territory. Unlike the Spanish, the Russians signed a contract with the Kashaya Pomo for the land they used, and they refrained from aggressively recruiting and proselytizing the inhabitants. As a result, the Kashaya Pomo viewed the Russians in part as a buffer against Spanish incursions, even as some were pressed into service. Fort Ross’ primary purpose was agricultural: to provide food supplies to company headquarters in the less temperate Sitka, Alaska. But the fort also conducted surreptitious trade with the Spanish Missions. During its years of operation, Fort Ross functioned as a multiethnic community, home to a population including Creoles, Russians, Alaska Natives of multiple regions, Kashaya Pomo, Siberians, and others who came under the influence of the Russian Empire. Fort Ross also served a strategic function, preventing the establishment of Spanish Missions in the northern reaches of California. Neither Spain nor Mexico ever recognized the colony, however. Fort Ross was abandoned in 1842; profits from maritime trade in the region had dwindled in the 1820s and 30s and agricultural endeavors were never as successful as hoped. Company holdings were sold to California businessman John Sutter, and the final vessel to leave Fort Ross departed with the remaining occupants on January 1, 1842.
1814: Massacre on San Nicolas Island occurs
In early 1814, a Russian American Company ship, the Il'mena, departed from Sitka, Alaska, to San Nicolas Island with a crew of conscripted Kodiak Aluttiq hunters. A violent confrontation between these Alaska Natives and the local islanders devasted the Nicoleño population.
1814: Steam-driven "double press" introduced to the Times in London
The invention of the steam-driven double printing press in 1814 mechanized the manually-powered Gutenberg Printing Press and supported printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. Developed by German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer, the machine was first utilized by the Times, a publication in London, before a factory that manufactured the press was established in 1817. Allowing for an impressive yield of 5,000 printed sheets per hour, Koenig's and Bauer's machine maximized newspaper production. This greatly expanded newspaper distribution in Europe and the Americas.
1821: Mexico gains independence from Spain
With the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba in 1821, Spain granted Mexico independence, ending a war that had begun in 1810.
1823: Johnson v. McIntosh ruled
A United States Supreme Court case that involved a land dispute between two American citizens in the state of Illinois. The case was used to test the question of whether American Indians had the right to sell land to American citizens. In a decision written by John Marshall, the court ruled that indigenous people did not have that right. They were “occupiers,” but not owners, of the land they inhabited; thus, they could not grant land titles to it. Instead, the US government owned the right to all untitled land; it had assumed that right from Great Britain (who had earned it via “discovery”) following the American Revolution. The case remains a cornerstone of federal Indian law and property law in the United States.
1824: Chumash neophytes revolt at La Purísima Mission
Chumash neophytes at Mission La Purísima stage a rebellion after a neophyte at Mission Santa Inez is beaten by military authorities. The Chumash remain in control until soldiers from the Monterey presidio arrive a month later. In the process of asserting their authority, the soldiers leave a number of Chumash injured or dead. The incident, and others like it, highlight the initial crumbling of the mission structure in the wake of Mexico's independence from Spain.
1826: Jedediah Smith reaches San Gabriel Mission
Jedediah Smith (1799–1831), a prolific fur trapper, made his claim to fame by leading the first overland party to California. Smith departed from the Great Salt Lake region and ended his initial expedition at San Gabriel Mission in 1826. Here, he observed the inner workings of the Southern California missions as well as mapped the local territory. Jose Echeandia, current governor of Alta California, did not appreciate the American presence in his province and negotiated for Smith to make his exit; still, Smith's journey fueled US interest in California.
1830: Indian Removal Act signed
Signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, the Indian Removal Act resulted in the relocation of approximately 50,000 native peoples from the Eastern seaboard to a defined "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi River. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians were forced to leave their homes and embark westward, no matter the cost to themselves. The mass removal of the Cherokee in 1838 came to be known as the Trail of Tears, a historical expression that captures the hardships and losses endured by the native Southeastern peoples at the hands of encroaching white settlers.
1833: First penny press introduced
The New York Sun was the first penny press in the United States, meaning that it could be purchased daily, for a penny, rather than through an annual subscription. The penny press’s affordability greatly expanded readership and contributed to increased literacy rates. Growing audiences—and the drive for more readers—also ushered in a style of news reporting, sensationalism, that capitalized on the attractiveness of shocking and provocative stories.
1834: Secularization of California Mission system completed
The process of secularization had begun following Mexico’s independence from Spain, with many Californios coveting the missions' rich land holdings. Rather than dividing the mission lands among the native peoples who had resided at the mission, the Church property was sold or given as land grants to local elites. Former “Mission Indians” were often left vulnerable in the process, as many were forced into labor on local ranches.
1835: Nicoleños removed to San Pedro
On November 21, 1835, the Mexican schooner Peor es Nada left San Nicolas Island for San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, carrying the small group of Nicoleños still living on the island at the time. However, one woman and her son were left behind. Extant records do not indicate on whose direction the Peor es Nada was sent to remove the islanders to the mainland. The Mexican schooner was owned by Jose Joaquín Gómez. It capsized in San Francisco Bay shortly after the Nicoleños disembarked. Many of the Nicoleños brought to San Pedro were placed in the homes of local, non-native, Catholic families, where they labored as servants. The woman left behind would remain on San Nicolas Island, alone after her son’s death, for the next 18 years, until a party led by American otter hunter George Nidever brought her to the California mainland in 1853.
1835: Great Moon Hoax articles published
A series of articles that have come to be known as the Great Moon Hoax were written by Richard Adams Locke and published in the New York Sun in 1835. The initial installment described the discovery of planets beyond our solar system and a confirmation of life on the moon. Readers were enthralled by the account and the paper's sales practically doubled. More installments followed, with increasingly outlandish claims, like the detection of a winged hominoid species. The Great Moon Hoax ultimately launched a debate on the role of ethics in journalism, calling to question the methods by which newspapers should be allowed to draw in readers.
1838: US Exploring Expedition begins
Though the US Exploring Expedition is best known for its discovery of Antarctica, the overseas voyage led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes also held major implications for American conquest on the West Coast. The expedition served as the first American mapping campaign in the Pacific. A crew divided across six ships charted the waters with the intent of aiding American whaling enterprises. Stops along the mainland reinforced the potential value of California, and a landing at a decaying Mexican presidio, where no official could be found, led to the group's conclusion that the land was ideal for American seizure.
1842: Initial American capture of Monterey takes place
The capture of Monterey, the capital city of Alta California, by a US Naval commander in 1842 was the result of misinformation and rumor that the United States was at war with Mexico. In fact, there was no military conflict. Monterey was quickly returned to Mexican authorities when the mistake was realized. However, the ease with which the city had been seized served to further stimulate war hawks eager for US expansion. The Mexican American War began just a few years later, in 1846.
1846: Bear Flag Revolt occurs
https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/bear-flag-revolt.htm
1846–48: Mexican-American War fought
The Mexican-American War was fought over disputed territory in present-day Texas, which the United States had annexed in 1845. While the United States claimed the southernmost boundary as the Rio Grande, Mexico maintained that the territory’s perimeter ended at the Nueces River. The war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: the United States gained its desired territory lines but agreed to pay $15 million in compensation and assumed $3.25 million in debt owed to the Mexican government. In the United States, the war for territorial expansion intensified the sectional conflict over slavery. It also fueled Manifest Destiny. The Mexican-American War was the first serious military conflict to be covered by news correspondents. New technology and transportation, including the Pony Express, railroads, and telegraph lines enabled the relatively rapid transport of information, and battles were often described in gruesome detail, especially for penny press.
1847: Boston Atlas prints story on Lone Woman
On January 7, 1847, the Boston Atlas published the first known account of the Lone Woman’s story under the headline “A Female Crusoe.” At this time, the Nicoleña still lived on San Nicolas Island, not arriving in Santa Barbara, California until 1853. As the Boston Atlas account appeared while she was still on the island, the author presumes she will “lie down and die alone, on the cold shore of her isolated home.” The Lone Woman’s story most likely travelled to Boston by way of New England sailors who heard the story while on the California coast. The Boston Atlas was a daily and semi-weekly newspaper that was in print from 1844–1857. The Atlas’ article on the Lone Woman was the first of many articles about the Nicoleña that would appear in print over the next 100 years. On January 8, 1847, there was already a retelling of the story in New York after the Atlas travelled south, probably by train. From there, the story continued to spread throughout the country and into the southern states before looping around to the Pacific coast and Hawaii.
1848: James Marshall finds gold in the American River
While building a sawmill on the bank of the American River, James Marshall, an employee and associate of California entrepreneur John Sutter, spotted gold. The California Star and the Californian reported Marshall's discovery, attracting miners and more importantly, entrepreneur Sam Brannan, who arrived in Sacramento from New York to sell mining supplies and promote local opportunity. The resulting mass migration had serious consequences for the native people of the region. While some Indians mined along the river for themselves, many were hired for this work by white settlers (as were many Chinese immigrants). As prospectors flocked from the East, native peoples were pushed off their lands, culturally significant plants were threatened, and increased tension between natives and whites resulted in violent clashes.
1849: California's First Constitutional Convention
California’s First Constitutional Convention was called in 1849 by Brigadier General Bennett Riley, head of the military government established to govern the lands that comprise the current state of California. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, had transferred this land from Mexico to the United States, and decisions now had to be made as to what kind of state California would be. Debate about slavery had intensified in the preceding decades, and great efforts were being made to maintain a balance between free and slave states in order to keep the peace between proslavery and antislavery forces. California entered the Union as a free state as part of the larger Compromise of 1850 (which also strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act). Although slavery was outlawed in California, the issue of citizenship and enfranchisement of indigenous peoples—and hence their protection against slave-like working conditions—remained up for discussion and debate. After much deliberation, delegates to the first constitutional convention remained deadlocked. Half voted to grant suffrage to all adult men except Indians and other non-white minorities and the other half voted to extend suffrage to all adult men. The presiding chair broke the tie, sealing the legislative fate of native peoples until 1924, when American Indians were granted suffrage in California following passage of the federal Indian Citizenship Act. While California’s first state constitutional convention did not grant native peoples voting rights, Representative Pablo de la Guerra succeeded in passing an amendment stating that the Legislature could grant citizenship and voting rights to any Indians that the legislative body deemed worthy; it was a small concession. Denial of suffrage severely limited the power California Indians had to determine their own political fate in the newly created state of California. A second constitutional convention convened in 1878 to address lingering problems from the first constitution, including taxation, finances, and government regulations. American Indian enfranchisement was not revisited at this convention.
1850: California passes Act for the Government and Protection of Indians
The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, passed by the California legislature in 1850, enabled the prosecution of “unemployed” adult Indians, much as vagrancy laws were established in the postbellum American South. Indian children were also vulnerable, with boys age 17 and younger and girls age 14 and younger bound as apprentices to masters who could retain any wages earned. With settlers encroaching on their homelands and cutting off access to traditional foods, medicine, and resources for manufacture, native peoples became refugees in their own land. In 1845, approximately 150,000 native people lived in California. By 1870, the number was reduced to 30,000.
1850–1913: Abalone fishing on San Nicolas Island takes place
Long prized by Native Californians for their meat and shells, abalone became an aim of commercial fishing beginning in the 1850s. The industry was dominated by Chinese fishermen because abalone meat was prized in China but undervalued in American California, where it was considered dull, common fare. The Chinese monopoly of coastal and island abalone fishing continued into the early 1900s (twentieth century). At that time, Japanese fishermen began harvesting abalone from the California Channel Islands, diving for a species found exclusively in deeper waters. Simultaneously, new ways of cooking abalone meat were popularized, making the sale of abalone within California’s borders more lucrative. The greatest threat to Chinese abalone fishermen, however, came in the form of three US fishery regulations passed before the turn of the century. The Scott Act (1888), the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1890), and the Geary Act (1892) each extended and expanded the reach of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Specifically, these regulations reduced the exceptions present in the original immigration act, with the effect being that fishermen were defined as laborers who were barred from entering (or re-entering) the country. Chinese fishermen pushed back against the regulations but were definitively defeated in 1913, when the California state government outlawed the shipment of abalone overseas, thereby ending the lucrative trade to China.
1852–53: George Nidever travels to San Nicolas Island
In April 1852, Santa Barbara resident George Nidever went to San Nicolas Island with a party including the English sailor Tom Jeffries and two unidentified Indians to search for seagull eggs, a lucrative commodity. According to journalist Emma Hardacre, one of the Franciscan priests at Mission Santa Barbara, Father González, paid Tom Jeffries $200 to search for the Lone Woman during the trip. While making camp on the beach, the crew spotted footprints in the sand and concluded that they must have been left by a woman due to their small size. Before they could investigate further, however, a large storm arose and forced the crew to evacuate San Nicolas without searching for the Lone Woman.
In the winter of 1852, Santa Barbara resident George Nidever returned to San Nicolas Island with the Prussian sailor Charles Dittman and two unidentified California Indians to hunt for sea otters. According to Nidever, the Franciscan Father González requested that he search for the Lone Woman on this journey. Upon arrival, the men spotted footprints on the beach; however, the trail disappeared in soft moss. The crew continued to search for signs of the Lone Woman and found a woven basket with tools. Nidever scattered the contents in hopes that the Lone Woman would collect her belongings, thereby proving her existence. However, before the men could wait for the Lone Woman to retrieve her items, a storm drove the crew off the island.
In May 1853, George Nidever returned to San Nicolas Island with Carl Dittman, an Irishman called “Colorado”, and a small group of native men including (Chumash), and Hilario Valenzuela (Yaqui), to hunt for sea otter and look for the Lone Woman. As Nidever and the rest of the crew searched the beach, Dittman investigated the scrubland of the inner portion of the island. According to Dittman’s account, he sighted the Lone Woman in a crude hut (or windbreak). However, other people suggest that the Lone Woman revealed herself to Dittman because she was able to avoid contact with hunters and trappers for more than a decade and a half; she would not have allowed Dittman to stumble upon her. Both Nidever and Dittman reported that the Lone Woman was well-mannered and hospitable despite the fact that neither party could understand one another. Communicating through signs, Nidever believed that he understood the Lone Woman and that she told him that her baby had been eaten by wild dogs. The Lone Woman joined Nidever’s hunting party and returned with them to the mainland.
1853: Rejection of series of California treaties takes place
In 1851 and 1852, 139 California tribes sign a combined 18 land treaties with the U.S. government. Because of political pressure from settlers in post-Gold Rush California, a 2/3 Senate approval never materialized, meaning the treaties had no legal bearing. In 1853, the 11,700 square miles initially proposed for Indian reservations in California were divided into smaller tracts that would not only serve as reservations but also double as US Army outposts. Poor living conditions on the designated land led to famine and revolt, triggering a cycle of violence as military and paramilitary units counterattacked. Starvation and violence led to a precipitous decline in California’s indigenous population during the last half of the nineteenth century, even as native peoples fought for their survival.
1853: Lone Woman arrives in Santa Barbara and dies
The Lone Woman died in 1853 and was buried at Mission Santa Barbara after being conditionally baptized with the name Juana María. After being taken from San Nicolas Island to the mainland by a party captained by sea otter hunter George Nidever, the Nicoleña resided with Nidever’s family in Santa Barbara, California. She stayed with Nidever’s family until she died seven weeks later, likely due to dysentery. She was conditionally baptized and buried, likely in an unmarked grave, at Mission Santa Barbara. In 1928, 75 years after her death, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a plaque commemorating her life and death at Santa Barbara Mission.
1857: Sheep ranching on San Nicolas Island begins
San Nicolas Island was used for sheep ranching between 1857 and 1943, as were a number of other Channel Islands (e.g., Santa Cruz, San Miguel). In the early twentieth century, the federal government issued five-year leases to farmers, granting them permission to graze their herds on the islands. While less is known about sheep ranching on San Nicolas than on the other islands, the first herd of approximately 500 ewes and a few rams appeared on San Nicolas in 1857, and by 1875, their numbers had multiplied to 16,000. The total number of sheep recorded rose to 40,000 at one point, but the island’s vegetation couldn’t sustain that many animals, and many died of starvation. Island wool was sheered, packed, and sent to San Francisco, ultimately bound for mills in New England. Mutton was sent to markets in Los Angeles. In the early years, island sheep were allowed free reign of the island; however, this practice ended when Basque herders arrived in California and placed sheep into bounded pastures. Regardless of where the sheep grazed, however, they destroyed island vegetation, and island sheep ranching eventually declined due to severe defoliation. Ranching had other enduring consequences; the animals trampled over thousand-years-old human remains and ethnographic objects on the island, exposing them to collectors and archeologists alike.
1861: Telegraph lines increase speed of news delivery
In 1861, Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in the United States. The installation of these lines changed how news stories spread across the country. Prior to this, news was disseminated via horse and carriage, as well as by boats and trains that ran along the coasts. The telegraph allowed news to be transferred between its stations nearly instantaneously, bringing about the possibility for widespread, timely national coverage of news. The circulation of the Lone Woman’s story illustrates these effects. Before 1861, the Lone Woman’s story was primarily confined to the East Coast and California, with a few small exceptions in the Midwest. After the telegraph line was installed, the story begins to slowly spread to the middle of the country, picking up strongly in 1881.
1869: Transcontinental Railroad completed
On May 10, 1869, the final spike of the transcontinental railroad connecting the eastern half of the United States to the western half was ceremonially hammered into the ground at Promontory Point, Utah. The massive transportation project involved a business partnership between the Union Pacific Railroad in the East and Central Pacific Railroad in the West. Once linked, the lines expedited the transportation of information, goods, and people across the still largely unsettled west. The railroad ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, a northern route that was selected by Congress during the Civil War, when no representatives from southern states were present to object. In 1862, and again in 1864, Congress made provisions to help finance the project by way of land grants and federal bonds. The railroad would ultimately transform all aspects of life in the west and would be particularly devastating for native peoples as it accelerated the speed of settlement and destruction of natural resources essential to traditional lifeways.
1870: Mass hunting of buffalo begins
The completion of the transcontinental railroad allowed for quick and easy shipment of commodities across the United States. Buffalo hides, used for clothing and industrial conveyor belts, were among the first products to capitalize on railroad transportation. Beginning in 1870 and lasting throughout the 1880s, parties of freelance hunters swarmed to the Midwest and exterminated a majority of the wild buffalo population, transporting the profitable hides to markets on the East Coast. The buffalo population was estimated to equal about 30 million before the mass slaughtering. The destruction of the herds posed a significant challenge for Great Plains Indians who relied on buffalo for sustenance.
1872: General Mining Act signed into law
The General Mining Act of 1872 further threatened native people’s access to their land. The law allowed for any taxpayer or company to lay claim to a territory if a mineral with potential for valuable enterprise was discovered there. Because of the ambiguously defined rules regarding the size of a claim and the proof of discovery, many were able to usurp Indian lands after the bill's passing without much, or any, government oversight.
1877: Stephen Powers publishes Tribes of California
Journalist Stephen Powers (1840–1904) collected and published his ethnographic observations in Tribes of California, a text that later shaped anthropologists’ ideas about the indigenous peoples of the region. University of California professor Alfred Kroeber, for example, was greatly influenced by Powers’ claim that the "quasi-Christianized Indians of the missions" could no longer be identified as the same natives who inhabited the land prior to European contact. This idea influenced which tribes were studied by newly professional anthropologists. Those who were not later had difficulty gaining federal recognition by the United States government
1879: Bureau of American Ethnology founded
The Bureau of American Ethnology was created in 1879 as a division of the National Smithsonian Institute, the largest museum research initiative in the world. The bureau was responsible for establishing anthropology as an academic and professional discipline in the United States. Well into the twentieth century, it served as the United States’ leading anthropological research program, dominating publications in the field. Research was motivated both by scientific interest and the need to develop US Indian policy. In 1965, the Bureau of American Ethnology merged with the larger Smithsonian Museum Department of Anthropology.
1879: Carlisle Indian Industrial School opens
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1917), located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was a residential boarding school for American Indian children. The school emerged during an era of American Indian policy that emphasized assimilation. As the superintendent of Carlisle stated, the goal of the school was to "kill the Indian and save the man." Native children were required to wear uniforms, cut their hair, speak English, and perform manual labor as part of their vocational and industrial instruction. Due to a lack of funding for the institute and students’ cultural alienation while in residence, many children became ill and a number ran away. The Carlisle School served as a model for other Native American boarding schools, leaving a complex legacy of both idealistic goals (preparing native children for high achievement in mainstream America) and the reality that forced assimilation and overbearing punishment causes trauma and leads to a catastrophic communal loss of culture and language.
1880: Emma Hardacre publishes "Eighteen Years Alone"
Emma Hardacre published her now famous article “Eighteen Years Alone” in Scribner’s Monthly in May 1880. Prominent local citizens with ties to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History asked Hardacre to write a story about the Lone Woman when the journalist was visiting Santa Barbara. The resulting piece was so widely read and reprinted that it influenced how the public would understand the story of the Nicoleña for a century to come. Conforming to journalistic standards of the time, Hardacre wrote a sensationalist account that incorporated such literary tropes as the female Crusoe, vanishing Indian, and Noble Savage. This, as well as the factual information (and misinformation) she included, influenced Scott O’Dell’s portrayal of the Lone Woman in his 1960 novel, Island of the Blue Dolphins.
1882: Chinese Exclusion Act signed
On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This law made it extremely difficult for Chinese people to immigrate to the United States as it forbade the entry of laborers of any kind. Those seeking entry to the United States from China had to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were neither “skilled” nor “unskilled laborers.” The Act also placed onerous restrictions on people of Chinese descent who already lived in the United States. It prohibited them from reentering the country without the above certification if they left the United States for any reason. The original Chinese Exclusion Act was scheduled to expire in 1892, but it was extended for ten years by the Geary Act, and then made permanent in 1902. In 1893, the McCreary Act broadened the interpretation of “laborer,” as used in the Chinese Exclusion Act, to include fishermen and laundry owners, a revision that further restricted Chinese immigration to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act reflects both Americans’ economic anxieties in the late 1800s (nineteenth century) as US settlers moved west as well as ongoing racist attitudes. After passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, large-scale Chinese immigration into the United States did not resume until the Immigration Act of 1965.
1887: General Allotment Act (Dawes Severalty Act) signed
The General Allotment Act of 1887, or Dawes Severalty Act, ordered the parceling of communally-held tribal lands to specific native families (160 acres of territory) and individuals (80 acres of territory). Any remaining territory was sold to settlers. The Dawes Act had devastating consequences, as native land holdings decreased from 138 million acres to 48 million acres within a fifty-year period.
1890: Battle of Wounded Knee fought
In 1890, the United States’ Seventh Cavalry, which had suffered significant casualties at the hands of the Lakota in the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876), was sent to expel Chief Bigfoot’s Lakota-Minneconjou tribe from its reservation on the Great Plains. The relationship between the area’s white settlers and local native peoples had been strained as the Lakota addressed the increasing threat of westward expansion with the Ghost Dance, a form of resistance to assimilation that manifested spiritually. The dance frightened settlers, who perceived it as bellicose, and they requested that the tribe be removed. The US troops sent to Wounded Knee killed more than half the Lakota population in what was later portrayed as a massacre.
1898: Scott O'Dell born in Los Angeles
Scott O’Dell was born on May 23, 1898, in Los Angeles, then a city of about 100,000 people. California had been a state for forty-eight years by the time O’Dell was born, making him the third generation to live in California after the beginning of US statehood. The railroads built in the decades before O’Dell’s birth connected California to the rest of the United States, and they were what brought O’Dell’s family west. O’Dell’s father initially worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. Growing up in coastal California, O’Dell was well acquainted with its marine environment and landscape, and these figures prominently in the rich imagery of his bestselling novel, Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960).
1899: Franz Boas becomes first anthropology professor
German anthropologist Franz Boas becomes the curator of Ethnology and Somatology for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and then a professor in Columbia University's newly established anthropology department. Among his most influential students is Alfred Kroeber, who would go on to establish the department of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Boas is renowned for his development of the principle of cultural relativism, a theory that posed that individual cultures are relative to one another and can only be analyzed within the framework of their specific culture.
Last updated: November 17, 2018