History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Part 4

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682

USA > California > Kern County > History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 4

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HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

of the cradles of Kern county's early civilized life, and farther on is Piute mountain, the scene of some of the earlier placer mining; Amalie and Paris on Caliente creek, centers of a later and more permanent mining development ; Tehachapi creek, up which the Southern Pacific winds its difficult and tortuous passage; Bear mountain, rising to the west some seven thousand feet, one of the most conspicuous of the landmarks to be seen from the valley about Bakersfield; the pleasant and fertile mountain valleys that bear the names of Bear, Brites, Cummings and Tehachapi; then the saddle at the crest, the crow's nest, in which the town of Tehachapi sits.

On the western slope of Bear mountain is the Rancho El Tejon, one of the early Spanish grants, woven closely with the history of the Indians in this part of the state, and forming now, with the Alamos, Castac and La Liebre grants a magnificent mountain and valley stock range-the third large land holding in the county-soon, it is hoped, to be subdivided for more intensive use.

Beyond Tehachapi and the Tejon ranch is a great procession of broken, tumbled and unappreciated hills which lead the traveler at last to the wonder- ful southland where even a sand dune with a cactus growing on it is a para- dise of health and beauty and greatly to be desired at so much per square foot.

The Desert Triangle Again

Before we bring our airship down let us sail again over the great tri- angle of desert with which this description of the county began. Skirting the base of the hills at its western edge is the Los Angeles aqueduct, a great tube of concrete through which the people of the southern city hope to lead the waters of Owens river to fill their faucets, sprinkle their lawns and irrigate some thousands of acres of garden land in what are now the suburbs, but which undoubtedly the city will soon annex. The Southern Pacific, the Santa Fe and the Nevada and California railroads all cross this triangle of desert in different directions, all meeting at Mojave, which is both a mining and a railroad town. To the northeast are Randsburg, Garlock, Goler and Johannesburg, all of which figure in the history of the desert mines, and still farther north, Indian Wells and Salt Wells valley, where venturesome pros- pectors would find still another oil field, and Inyokern, a new settlement of farmers in the northeast corner of the county.

Bakersfield, the Commercial Center

The center of all Kern county's commercial activity and the point around which the greater part of the county's history revolves, is Bakersfield. Lo- cated where Kern river enters its delta ; the spot whence the irrigating canals diverge ; the place where the railroads add the helper engines for the heavy haul up the mountain; the place whence the branch railroads lead to the west side oil fields ; at the door of the great Kern river field, where the citrus mesa meets the lower valley land, Bakersfield is in close and constant touch with all the greater resources and activities of the county. Even the roads from the mountain mines converge here. Only the mines of the desert are far removed by distance and association, from the county seat.

The federal census of 1910 gave Bakersfield a population of 12,727, as against 4836 ten years before. The county census for 1910 was 37,715, and for 1900, 16,480. The great gain was mainly due to the development of the oil fields, although a slow but steady gain in the valley farming sections was evident, and this gain also assisted the growth of Bakersfield. The five banks

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BASKETS MADE BY KERN COUNTY INDIANS

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

of Bakersfield on December 31, 1910, showed a total of deposits amounting to $5,679,000, a gain of more than two million dollars in the twenty months just previous to that date. The postal receipts for the city in 1910 were over sixty thousand dollars. Close to a million and a half dollars was spent in building in Bakersfield in 1910, and the cost of the new residences constructed in that period ranged up to seventeen thousand dollars each. The assessed valuation of Kern county in 1910 was over fifty-three million, making a per capita wealth according to the very low estimates of the assessor of $1350 for every man, woman and child within the county's borders.

These figures give some fair idea of the prosperity and financial stability of the city and county at the present time. The prospects for the future were never brighter.

CHAPTER II

Indians and the Tejon Ranch

On the top of Black mountain, northwest of Garlock, among the ranges of dead, forgotten hills that stand sentinel over the dead and forgotten wastes of desert in the far eastern part of the county, were found in the '80s the remains of a prehistoric village which may have been occupied many centuries ago by the same race of men that built the extinct and buried cities of Arizona and Mexico.

In a hollow between two ridges of the mountain are the ruins of two parallel walls, two hundred feet in length, with shorter walls extending from them at right angles. . From the size and form of the building to which the walls seem to have belonged it is doubtless permissible to assume that it may have been a temple, a fort or some other public building. Down a little way on the northern slope of the mountain stand the ruins of what appears to have been a dwelling. What is left of the walls, standing two or three feet in height, form almost a perfect circle. On the east was a door, and carved on the inside of the walls are hieroglyphics identical with those found on the famous Poston butte near Florence, Arizona. The rocks, also, are very similar to those of the Poston carvings. One of the characters is described as not unlike the astronomical sign for the planet Mars. The evident size of the work and the character of the carving indicate that the ruins are not those of a building erected by any of the more recent Indian tribes, and the decay and discoloration of the rock show that the carving was done centuries ago.

A circumstance that gives these ruins still greater interest to the visitor is the old, dead aspect of all the country around. The dead, barren hills, the gray reaches of desert, the dry wind, the solemn, cloudless sky, the blazing, unobscured sun, the ineffable silence brooding everywhere, all remind one, the travellers say, of the Holy Land, and of the old cradles of dead races in Asia and Egypt.

There is not a little in Kern county for the archeologist to unearth, but even of our immediate predecessors, the Indians who possessed the land before the white men came, we know comparatively little. There is reason to suppose that at somewhat earlier dates California was peopled by a more heroic race of redmen than was found here when the first gold seekers began

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

to explore the Sierras for placer mines. The descriptions of the Indians left by the first historians disagree widely as to the size, appearance and general character of the tribes that inhabited the state and there seems to be an equal discrepancy in the measurements of the bones exhumed from the Indian burying places. When Kit Carson first visited California in 1829 he found the valleys swarming with large and prosperous tribes. About that date it was roughly estimated that the number of Indians in the state was upward of 100,000. In 1859 Carson again visited the valley and found that the tribes he had known on his former tour had wholly disappeared and that the people living here at that time had never heard of them. In 1863 the Department of the Interior counted 29.300 Indians in the state.

Between Goose lake in Kern county and Tulare lake was found. years ago, the remains of an old Indian village with the ground about it strewn with skulls and bleaching bones as though some pestilence had descended upon the tribe and mowed it down so swiftly and relentlessly that none were left with strength to bury the dead. Early records tell also of epidemics of smallpox and other diseases that decimated the Indian tribes.

In his researches into the history and habits of the Indians, E. L. McLeod, who gathered one of the finest collections of Indian baskets in the state, fell upon an interesting clue to the origin of the Kern county tribes who were known quite generally by the name Yokut. Spending a day in Hanford, Mr. MeLeod saw a number of Indians squatting along the curb of one of the streets, and as was his custom when the opportunity served, he went to talk with them. Presently down the street came a runaway team, and thereafter the usual crowd of people gathered.

"Yokut! Yokut!" exclaimed one of the Indian women, pointing toward the sudden assemblage.

Mr. McLeod scented the clue and at once inquired what the women meant by the exclamation.

"They come everywhere," was the explanation forthcoming, and com- bining this new knowledge with what he had formerly known of the Yokut Indians, Mr. McLeod reached the conclusion that the name did not indicate an homogenous tribe but that the Yokuts came from everywhere.

The average Indian found here by the earliest settlers was not a par- ticularly noble specimen of manhood. He reared no temples and built no monuments. For a dwelling he hollowed out a little circle in the earth, raised above it a cone-shaped framework of poles or brush and thatched it with bark, grass or rushes. As late as 1874 many of the old mnen wore no clothes save a breech clout, summer or winter. In cold weather they huddled in their huts, scurrying out into the wet or snow, stark naked, when need required, to gather a little wood for the fire that smouldered in the center of their dingy, smoky homes. Meat formed but a very small part of the diet of the Kern county Indians of the earlier times. Those who lived by the valley lakes caught clams, and squirrels and smaller game fell victims to their arrows. But the main staples of their larder were acorns, juniper berries, piñons, the few wild fruits and nuts, the edible roots and seeds of wild grasses that grew along the foothills before the foxtail usurped their place.

Through the mountains everywhere are found in broad, flat rocks the clusters of hollowed holes where the village women gathered to pound the acorns and grass seeds into the dough from which they baked their bread.

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

In the valleys are found the portable stone mortars and pestles, which the squaws had to carry about with them because no native stones were to be found by the valley villages. These mortars and pestles, sinkers which were cleverly fashioned from granite for the fishermen. the spear and arrow heads which were chipped out by touching the heated stones with a piece of wet wood. and the handsome and artistically woven baskets which served a multitude of purposes, are practically the only specimens of the handicraft of the Indians that remain.

Anthropologists, particularly Dr. C. Hart Merriam of Washington, D. C., have been fairly successful in gathering information concerning the customs, religion and language of the Indians of this part of the state, and Prof. George H. Taylor, now of Fresno, but for many years a resident of Bakers- field, after months of effort got one of the remaining tribal singers to sing into a phonograph one of the more elaborate ceremonials of her race. Into the very striking music of the ceremonial is woven all the pathos, all the mystery, all the fear and all the struggling hopefulness. that this childlike people gained from the great Mother Nature of whom they understood so little and with whom they lived in such daily, intimate contact. The music of the ceremonial has not yet been transcribed. It will be a pity, indeed, if it is not reduced to some enduring form, for it is one of the few legacies of a fast-dying people that later races may profitably preserve.

In some of the Indian mounds in the valley between Buena Vista and Tulare lakes the bodies of the dead seem to have been buried in a sitting posture, but inquiry does not develop that this was always the case. Many of the burying grounds in the lower lands have been disturbed by floods, however, and the bones and whatever articles may have been buried with the bodies have been scattered and recovered with deeper or shallower washings of mud and sand. Some of the remains in the valley mounds had been wrapped in blankets or cloth of some coarse texture, and quite recently J. W. Stockton dug up and forwarded to the Smithsonian Institution the bones of an Indian that had been buried in a sitting posture in the bank of Kern river not far from the Kern river oil field. This body had been covered with reeds in the form of a coarse basket.

Tribal Names and Characteristics

From C. Hart Merriam's "Distribution of Indian Tribes in the Southern Sierra and Adjacent Parts of the San Joaquin Valley, California," the fol- lowing is condensed :

"South of the Muwa, and ranging from Fresno creek to Kern lake and Tehachapi basin, are tribes of two widely different linguistic families-the Yokut and Paiute. These tribes are arranged, in the main, in parallel belts, the Yokuts occupying the lower and more westerly country, the Paiutes the higher and more easterly. But there is this important difference: The Yokut tribes are more numerous, and until the confiscation of their lands by the whites their distribution was continuous, while the Paiute tribes are few and their distribution is, and always was, interrupted by broad intervals. Powers recognized the general facts that the Indians of this part of Cali- fornia belonged in the main to the Yokut and Paiute stocks; that the Yokut tribes were a peaceful people and were the earlier occupants of the region ; and that the Paiute tribes were more powerful and warlike and entered at a later period. He states that bands of Paiutes, leaving their desert homes

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

east of the mountains, had pushed through the passes of the Sierras, invaded certain valleys of the western slope, and driven out the Yokut people.

"Tribes of other linguistic families inhabited the hot Tulare-Kern basin and the region to the west and southwest, but they do not come within the scope of the present paper. In the area south of Fresno creek I have obtained vocabularies of eighteen tribes, of which nine are of Yokut origin and nine of supposed Paiute of Shoshonian origin."

Of the nine Yokut tribes which Dr. Merriam enumerates, the Taches lived around Tulare lake in the lower Sonoran zone, and the Yowelmannes inhabited the Bakersfield plain and thence to Kern lake. But a few of either tribe remain. Of the Paiute tribes the Pakanepul are found on the South Fork of Kern river, and the Newooah center about Paiute mountain. Dr. Merriam states that the languages of the two tribes last mentioned differ so greatly from each other and from the supposed common Paiute stock as represented by the Owens Valley Paiutes that if they really are of Paiute origin they must have crossed the mountains at a very remote date. The chief and almost only resemblance in the languages is in the numerals, and Dr. Merriam says that this may have arisen through contact rather than through common heredity.

The word Yokut, Dr. Merriam says, means "the people," as also does the tribal name Newooah, and a number of other family and tribal names by which the Indians referred to themselves.

The Paiute tribes inhabited the cooler Ponderosa pine belt of the moun- tains, while the Yokuts lived in the hot San Joaquin valley and rarely pushed their way so high as the Digger pine belt.

Civilizing the Indian

While no Spanish missions were established in the territory now com- prised in Kern county, the Indians found here had been to some extent in- fluenced by the civilization of the padres through the fact that many of the young braves from the different tribes were taken to the missions and kept there under the teaching of the fathers for longer or shorter periods, and also because tribes that had been driven from the older parts of the state by the encroachments of the whites migrated to this end of the San Joaquin valley or to the mountains round about.

There were no Indian wars worthy the name in the history of the state, but in 1850 the Indians from White river to Kern lake made an appar- ently concerted attack on the white miners and settlers, and the fear of danger more than the actual harm the Indians inflicted prompted the President in 1850 to appoint a peace commission consisting of Redick McKee, G. W. Barbour and O. M. Wozencraft, Indian agents, to make peace with the tribes. These emissaries decided that the Indians had been forced to steal from the white men and had been justly angered into attacking them by having been driven from their ancient hunting and fishing grounds to the less hospitable mountains and desert plains. The peace commission recommended that the Indians be made allowances of food and given reserva- tions on the plains. On June 10, 1851, it is recorded, treaties were made with eleven tribes around Kern lake.

But after the apparent habit of Indian agencies, jealousies interferred with the smooth working of the plans of the peace commission, and the three commissioners soon divided the territory into three jurisdictions, Bar- bour taking charge of the San Joaquin valley. About the same time charges

ST. FRANCIS' CHURCH, BAKERSFIELD

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

of graft and mismanagement reached Washington, and in the spring of 1852 Lieut. E. F. Beale was made superintendent of Indian affairs in California.

Beale had very well formed ideas concerning Indian management and he proceeded to put them into effect, concentrating his main energies at Tejon. In brief his scheme was a mixture and adaptation of the methods of the army and the missions. He adopted the plan of communal farming, pro- vided instruction under the supervision of resident agents, and established forts with garrisons of soldiers both to protect the Indians and to keep them within bounds and under proper discipline. The plan was working admir- ably, but the government authorities thought that the expenditures were out of proportion to the number of the wards of the nation provided for, and Beale was replaced by Col. T. J. Henley.

Henley established three other reservations at once, and later increased that number, the reservation on Tule river being one. In addition many farms and branch reservations were equipped. Soldiers from the forts and visitors to the reservations carried word to Washington that too much graft was going on under cover of aid to the California Indians, and G. Bailey was sent to make an investigation. Further changes followed, the allowance for Indian agencies was reduced, the Fresno and Kings river farms were abandoned, and in 1863 Tejon was given up and the Indians in this part of the state were concentrated on the Tule river farm. In 1873 the Tule farm was abandoned, and the Indians were moved to the reservation on the south fork of Tule river, back in the mountains.

Such is a bare outline of a very interesting chapter in the history of the nation's dealings with the aboriginal tribes. J. J. Lopez, for many years in charge of sheep and cattle at the Tejon ranch, supplies from memory and tradition something of the local color and interest. Many years ago, Lopez relates, the mountains around Tejon were a harbor for renegade Indians from the coast and southern missions. An Indian that had been taken to the mis- sions, baptized, taught the taste of meat and the pains of hard labor and who had gone wild again was a worse Indian than one who had remained in his savage and ignorant state, and when the original Spanish grantors of the land now included in the Tejon ranch came to take possession they found the Indians so troublesome and the bears so numerous and aggressive that they relinquished their plans.

Next to the renegade Indians, who were specially adept at stealing, the most troublesome of the savages were the Serranos, who in the '50s had their hunting grounds in Inyo county and the Monache meadows and drove off cattle wherever they could find them through the mountains from Tulare to Los Angeles county, and the Tecuyas, a tribe of warlike Indians that migrated from the coast and took up their abode a little to the west of the mouth of Tejon cañon. It happened that the hills between Tejon canon and San Emidio had long been the hunting grounds of the Pescaderos, who had their village on the border of Kern lake, and the result was perennial warfare between the new comers and the old.

The Serranos, the Pescaderos and the Tecuyas together with the peace- able Tehachapis and other tribes from the mountain valleys, all were gathered at Tejon, and they seem to have gotten along fairly well under the restraint of the soldiers and the influence of Lieutenant Beale's patriarchal govern- ment. But when the tribes were moved north the Tecuyas and Castacs elected to return to the coast, not caring to associate with the other clans. A large 2

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

number remained at Tejon, and after Beale had bought the grants and estab- lished his farming and stock-raising industries there he gave such of the Indians as cared to stay tracts of four or five acres each to farm for them- selves and employed them as herders, shearers and farm laborers. About one hundred and fifty Indians, mostly Serranos, now live on the Tejon ranch, and their presence there links the Tejon of the present with the primi- tive days before the white man came, as no other part of the county is linked.

The Tejon Ranch

What is generally known by the name of the Tejon ranch includes the rancho el Tejon (the ranch of the badger), rancho Castac (the lake ranch), rancho Los Alamos y Augua Caliente (the ranch of the cottonwoods and the warm water), and rancho la Liebre (the ranch of the jack-rabbit), com- prising in all upward of 150,000 acres of mountain, valley and mesa land along the western slope of the Sierras reaching from the middle of the county to its southern border.

General Beale bought the old Spanish grants which the different ranches represent from the original owners, who were unable or indisposed to do anything with them, and following the removal of the Indians he made the great sweep of fairly well watered land into a magnificent stock ranch. In the very early days Colonel Vineyard ran sheep on the ranch, selling out his flock to Solomon and Philo Jewett when the latter first came to the county in 1860. The drought of 1864 was the indirect cause of the formation of the partnership of Beale & Baker, which figured as the owner of great flocks in the early days of the county's history. Baker had been in the sheep business near what is now Burbank, in Los Angeles county, but the shortage of feed drove him north into the mountains, and he entered into a partnership with General Beale. For about seven years the partnership continued, the flocks of sheep growing meantime to 100,000 or 125,000 head. Indian herders and shearers were employed then as at later dates in the history of the ranch. In 1874 W. J. Hill, Dave Rivers, and State Senator John Boggs, comprising the firm of Hill, Rivers & Co., leased the ranch. About that time the stock kept there included 60,000 head of sheep, 10,000 head of cattle and 200 horses. Hill. Rivers & Co.'s lease expired in 1880, when General Beale bought the stock. J. J. Lopez, who was in charge of the sheep under the Hill, Rivers & Co. regime, recalls that they used to get fifteen to thirty cents for the wool in those days, delivered at Los Angeles, and it took about ten days to haul it there in wagons. Wethers were worth from $2.50 to $3 per head, very much more than an acre of land. The dry year of 1877 and the termina- tion of the lease to Hill, Rivers & Co. determined the policy of reducing the number of sheep on the Tejon ranch, and in 1879 Lopez was sent to Montana with 16,000 head of sheep. The drive consumed six months, led through mountains, over deserts, by long trails where the way was unknown and the water bad and far to find, and where treacherous Indian tribes demanded all the diplomacy to which Don Jose's Castilian blood had made him heir. The long drive is famous in the annals of the Kern county sheepmen, few of whom are strangers to the long trail, and as a reward for his efficiency, when Lopez returned he was placed in charge of both sheep and cattle. For about eighteen years R. M. Pogson was general superintendent of Tejon ranch, J. G. Stitt following him.

Truxtun Beale followed the methods of his father in the treatment of the Indians at Tejon. and the great ranch with its unsurveyed acres, irregular

HISTORY OF KERN COUNTY

lines, Indian homes beside the ranch house and the patriarchal air that broods over the place continued until 1912 to furnish a picturesque and romantic reminder of another age in the midst of a state and a county that are rapidly becoming the most aggressively modern in the world. But Truxtun Beale, shortly before the closing of these pages, sold the Tejon ranch to a Southern California syndicate that now is engaged in testing the water supplies with the ultimate intention of irrigating so much of the land as possible and devoting it to more productive cultivation.

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History of Kern County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Part 4

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog] Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company Number of Pages: 1682

Author: Morgan, Wallace Melvin, 1868- [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Los Angeles, Cal., Historic record company
Number of Pages: 1682