Indians and intruders in central California, 1769-1849

by George Harwood Phillips

With the beginning of Spanish colonization in 1769, the lives of the Indians of California changed drastically. The Spanish mission system, established along the Pacific Coast, required that local Indians abandon their traditional homes, live near the missions, follow Christian religious customs, and work in the fields to raise European crops and livestock. Unable or unwilling to adapt, many of these coastal people fled to the interior, where they reordered their lives. Spaniards, and later Mexicans, probed the San Joaquin Valley in search of these runaways and the horses they often took with them. In league with the Miwoks and Yokuts of the interior, who never had been colonized, the former mission Indians resisted these incursions vigorously. By the time of the American conquest, they were raiding Mexican ranchos for horses and mules. George Phillips demonstrates conclusively that the decline of the rancheros began not with the American military conquest but as early as 1830, when ra