8
Enforcing the White Man’s West through Violence in Texas, California, and Beyond

Anglo-Americans relied on violence to take possession of the West. Upon completing that conquest, they also used it to smother challenges to their ascendant economic and political hegemony and, in the words of historian Richard Maxwell Brown, to “preserve their favored position in the social economic and political order.” While Brown did not focus on whiteness in his discussion of vigilante violence, clearly it provided the underlying basis on which “their favored position” had been constructed. Seemingly law-abiding citizens therefore could at times embrace lynchings, vigilantism, and mob violence to allegedly protect societal values and a status quo implicitly based on ideas of white racial superiority and privilege.¹ Violence therefore provided the most powerful tool for marginalizing non-white peoples and protecting the white man’s West.

Violence as part of the western experience has long been recognized as integral to the settlement and development of the region.² Indeed, it saturated every aspect of the conquest of the West, including the defeat of Indian peoples at the hands of the military. To be sure, non-Anglos, including American Indians and Hispanic outlaws, employed violence, resisting American expansion and trying to retain control of their lands and territory. Yet these rearguard actions proved too little to defeat the domination of white Americans and the social and economic order their arrival presaged. As western communities grew, violence remained critical to creating and enforcing the dominance of whites over non-whites, marking both spatial and psychological boundaries in the process. From Texas to Washington State, Anglo-Americans employed violence to smother challenges to their control; and vigilante movements, in various times and places, targeted American Indian peoples, African Americans, Hispanics, the Chinese, and in rare instances even European ethnic groups. Anti-Chinese violence, for example, left Chinese men dead in riots in Denver, Colorado, and Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the 1880s.³ Anglo-American residents of Tacoma, in the fall of 1885, forcibly evicted their entire Chinese population, driving them into the cold rain.⁴ In Idaho, thirty-one Chinese miners perished in an ambush by Anglo assailants. Yet the Chinese endured in all these places, often successfully finding a better life for themselves, even though there could be little doubt of the subservient place they occupied in American society.⁵ In Bisbee, Arizona, on the morning of July 12, 1915, armed vigilantes wearing white armbands rounded up Hispanics, Eastern Europeans, and supporters of the radical labor union the Industrial Workers of the World, loaded them onto railroad boxcars, and dumped them in the desert of western New Mexico. Their only crime was their status, deemed less than truly white like their Anglo neighbors.⁶

As these episodes suggest, violence against non-whites materialized throughout the West, but the tone and scope of such violence were first set in two places: California and Texas. This should not come as a surprise. Both places figured prominently in the early stages of the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West, and both contained fairly dense populations of American Indian peoples and Hispanic residents, both of whom had a long history in the region. In addition, Chinese immigrants presented another challenge in California, and in Texas African Americans struggled against slavery and, later, segregation. In places, American Indian peoples faced nearly complete eradication, and the Hispanics, including the old elite, saw their power and influence circumscribed through political and economic chicanery and the violent imposition of a kind of de facto segregation.

The violent conquest and transformation of Texas began in the 1830s. For white southerners like David Crockett and Sam Houston, both down-on-their-luck former politicians, Texas beckoned with the promise of restored prosperity and the hope for a new beginning. Glowing accounts predictably painted the Mexican state as an expansive Garden of Eden, with rich soil and a long growing season. Yet Texas remained a land of potential, under-populated and underdeveloped. Fortunately, for ambitious Anglo-Americans this state of arrested development could be attributed to the supposedly inferior and indolent Mexicans. Injecting a little Anglo-American vigor in the state would no doubt work wonders. Armed with this swagger and the belief in Mexican inferiority, white Americans began pouring into Texas (often dragging African Americans slaves with them). These newcomers soon led calls for a revolution against Mexico.

The Reverend A. B. Lawrence of New Orleans, in the introduction to an 1840 guidebook on Texas, praised the successful Texas revolution for freeing the new nation from “that besotted and priest-ridden nation [Mexico].” The overthrow of religious backwardness and tyranny by Anglo-Texans, he claimed, promised to develop a once marginal territory into a new and prosperous nation: “The prospects of Texas in [the] future are as fair as a fertile soil, a genial climate and healthful regions can render a country.”⁷ Thus the westward march of Anglo-Saxons would continue, sweeping away savagery and indolence and making Texas literally bloom, or such seemed the promise of an allegedly vigorous Anglo society.

While Anglo-Texans unself-consciously considered themselves superior, in truth the imposition of white supremacy faced the multiracial and multiethnic reality of Texas. Violence would be needed to eliminate the Indian presence, force Tejanos (Hispanic Texans) into a subservient status, and ensure the subordination of African Americans as slaves before 1865 and as inferior citizens after that date.

There can be little doubt that life along the Texas frontier was violent. The Texas Republic had been born through violence, but Texians (as they still called themselves) found themselves surrounded by enemies. To the south, Mexico threatened constant invasion, irritated by a treaty that had clearly been negotiated under duress, and to the west the powerful Comanche and Kiowa empire controlled the Texas plains. These threats caused Texans to create an official volunteer army, but a variety of paramilitary groups also emerged, most notably the Texas Rangers. In the words of historian Gary Clayton Anderson, Texans embraced a “ ‘culture of war’ or a persisting belief that violence against people was necessary for nation building.”⁸ Texans therefore turned to violence to solve the challenges posed by the presence of Indians and Tejanos in the republic/state.

Figure 8.1. Texas Rangers with dead bandits, October 8, 1915. The famed Texas Rangers straddled more than the US-Mexico border. They also patrolled borders of race and ethnicity, protecting Anglo-American values from challenges by Hispanics, Indians, and African Americans. At no point did the challenge become greater than in the years of the Mexican Revolution, when the border became a very violent place. Their legacy as either gallant and fearless heroes or the tools of white supremacy continues to be contested today. Courtesy, Robert Runyon Photograph Collection, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Anderson argues that Texans relied on violence to conquer and dispossess American Indian peoples through a process he believes amounted to ethnic cleansing. If Indians would not abandon Texas peacefully, then violent conquest could be the only outcome, and for nearly fifty years (far longer than anywhere else in the West) attacks and counterattacks between Anglos and Indians gradually forced Indian peoples out of Texas.

As an independent nation from 1836 to 1845, the Texas government, at least on paper, controlled the lands to the west. Unlike other western territories, the independent nation could set the course of its Indian policy without interference from easterners or the federal government, giving Texas lawmakers a free hand to deal with the presence of Indians in their republic. In general, they envisioned a Texas without reservations and Indians. However, despite the scribbled lines on a map, in reality Indian peoples controlled most of Texas; as settlers pushed up the Trinity, Colorado, and Brazos Rivers, they invariably came into conflict with Indians like the Caddos and Wichitas and, beyond them, the plains tribes. Even after annexation, the state (unique among western states) maintained control of its public domain. Thus the federal government, which typically conquered the land and negotiated with Indian peoples through the treaty process, played little role in mediating in Texas until after the Civil War. During the 1850s the federal government did establish two small reservations on the upper Brazos, but vocal Texans demanded the removal or extermination of these Indians.

John R. Baylor, a politically ambitious newspaper owner, led the charge to destroy the reservations in Texas. His paper, provocatively titled The Whiteman, advocated the destruction of the reservations and the extermination of Indians who resisted. By 1858 an increasing number of Texans agreed with the vitriolic newspaperman. Baylor organized petition campaigns in frontier towns like Weatherford, Jacksboro, and Gainesville to ask authorities to close the reservations. Soon, several hundred Indian haters—including influential pioneers and former rangers like George Erath—and rough ne’er-do-wells gravitated to Baylor’s cause. Not content to fight solely with words, he formed a vigilante group, which adopted the legitimate-sounding name “Jacksboro Rangers.” These “rangers” cowed local law enforcement and began a campaign of terror against reservation Indians. The attacks began in the spring of 1859 when a group of Baylor’s men took up positions outside the reservation, eventually killing and scalping an Indian letter-carrier. Robert Neighbors, a respected Indian agent and advocate of Indian rights, decried the attack and demanded that a US marshal arrest the perpetrator, one Patrick Murphy. Despite the support of federal troops and armed Indians, the marshal’s attempt to arrest Murphy in Jacksboro failed, and the marshal left with little more than his life. The Whiteman soon published the rangers’ justification for their actions. Their manifesto declared, “We regard the killing of Indians of whatever tribe to be morally right.”⁹ Baylor and his rangers now advocated open genocide of all Indian peoples—including the peaceful Caddos—and the establishment of a Texas without an Indian presence.

On May 23, Baylor’s mob assaulted a reservation village and murdered an elderly Indian couple. The reservation erupted in violence. Enraged Indians attacked Baylor’s drunken mob. Federal troops, commanded by Captain Joseph Plummer, joined in on the side of the Indians. Baylor’s men, their alcohol-fortified courage failing them, soon turned and ran. Fewer than 50 Indians and a handful of federal troops had sent Baylor and his roughly 300 men scurrying away. While Baylor had clearly lost the battle, he did win the war when federal officials relocated the Indian residents to Indian Territory in July. Bereft and penniless, over a thousand eastern Comanches, Caddos, Wichitas, Shawnees, Delawares, and Tonkawas left the Brazos agency and their homes behind.¹⁰ A few months later, Patrick Murphy and an accomplice murdered Agent Neighbors in broad daylight on Fort Belknap’s muddy main street. Terrified of drawing Murphy’s ire, townspeople left his body where it fell until nightfall.¹¹ Violence had proven its effectiveness, eliminating both a reservation and its staunchest defender.

Ironically, the actions of the Jacksboro Rangers actually made the frontier less secure. The removal of reservation Indians and the buffer they provided, along with the start of the Civil War, presented the Comanches and Kiowas with an opportunity to push back against invading whites and attack Anglo settlements. With many of the best rangers fighting for the Confederacy, the frontier became an even more dangerous place for settlers. Moreover, the lack of control provided a refuge for those seeking to avoid conscription in either the Union or the Confederate Army and an opportunity for rustlers and outlaws, including Baylor’s rangers. Indeed, much of the violence blamed on Indians may well have been the work of these groups. Blaming outlaws for violence, however, did not play well politically; nor did it help keep Texans out of the killing fields of the Civil War. Governor Francis Lubbock (elected in the fall of 1861) used the perceived threat of Indian attacks to form “frontier regiments,” which could not be sent out of state to fight—despite demands from Confederate officers and officials to do so. Many of these regiments proved ineffective and incompetent, as a small battle between Kickapoo Indians and Texans near modern-day San Angelo demonstrated. The well-armed Kickapoos, migrating to Mexico to escape drought and violence on the plains, routed the Texans and sent them fleeing for their lives.¹²

Yet the lawlessness, violence, and possibility of Indian attacks (real or imagined) so greatly terrified settlers that in places, the line of settlement retreated eastward more than 100 miles, and northwestern counties like Wise and Jack became untenable for settlers. Governor James Throckmorton (elected in 1866 but replaced following the Reconstruction Act of 1867) claimed that 162 Texans had been killed by Indian attacks with another 43 taken captive between May 1865 and July 1867. Caving to pressure from angry Texans like Throckmorton, federal troops adopted some of the techniques of the ranger groups, and the US Department of War reestablished and expanded a line of forts along the frontier, many of which had been abandoned during the war. The string of refurbished or new forts included Forts Richardson, Griffin, Concho, McKavett, Clark, and Duncan and, farther west, Forts Stockton, Davis, and Bliss.¹³ While too far apart to prevent attacks, the forts would eventually provide jumping-off points for successful campaigns against plains Indians.

The encroachment of settlers and the decline of the bison threatened the independence of Comanche and Kiowa peoples on the southern plains. By the late 1860s a younger, angrier, and more violent generation of warriors arose, including Quanah Parker. These younger warriors had heard plenty of promises from federal Indian agents, but promises could not restore bison or feed hungry people. The resulting raids in 1868 were some of the most violent on record, a sure sign of the anger and desperation of some Kiowas and Comanches.¹⁴

As attacks continued, President Ulysses S. Grant found his administration under pressure to act, including from Texas’s new Republican governor, Edmund J. Davis. Following a near miss at the hands of a Kiowa war party, General William Tecumseh Sherman (head of the US Army’s Division of the Missouri, which essentially covered the West) felt compelled to act. Embarrassed and angered by the episode, Sherman came to agree with Texans’ belief that the plains Indians needed to be destroyed, but only if the political situation changed.

He soon got his chance. An attack by a band of Kiowa on the Lee family, living along the Clear Fork of the Brazos, left the parents and a young child dead. Two daughters and a son were taken captive. This attack helped end efforts to arrive at a peaceful compromise and gave Sherman free reign to loose the dogs of war.

An empire that had flourished for a century, resisting the advances of Spaniards, Mexicans, and Texans alike, now faced an impossible prospect: resisting the advance of a powerful industrial nation that had essentially enveloped it. Up until this point, Americans’ lack of interest in the Great Plains (the Great American Desert, as Pike and Long declared), the internal conflict of the Civil War, and Grant’s peace policy had largely kept soldiers out of Comanche territory. That suddenly changed, and the Comanches and Kiowas now faced a powerful new foe. The United States Army, though still learning how to fight plains Indian peoples, nevertheless had imposing advantages in technology, resources, and communication. In the words of historian Pekka Hämäläinen, “The U.S. Army that moved into Comanchería was an adversary unlike any Comanches had encountered.”¹⁵

The ensuing “Red River War,” combined with drought and the decline of the bison, crippled the tribes of the southern plains. Invoking a total war strategy similar to the one employed against the South in the Civil War (not surprising since both Sheridan and Sherman had helped the Union Army develop the strategy), troops began to press closer and closer into Comanche territory and, when they located villages, to attack everyone. In the fall of 1871, Sherman sent Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and the Fourth Cavalry and two companies of the Eleventh Infantry deep into the Llano Estacado, the heart of the Comanche empire.¹⁶ The following spring, Mackenzie with 300 soldiers located and attacked a village of Kwahada-Kotsoteka Comanches, killing 24 warriors and taking 124 women and children captive, as well as 3,000 horses.

Finally, on September 28, 1874, Mackenzie and his men attacked a village in Palo Duro Canyon. At the first sign of the soldiers, the Comanches, Cheyennes, and Kiowas in the village fled. Rather than pursue them, Mackenzie instead ordered the tepees, the food, and over a thousand horses destroyed. Deprived of their most important resource by the droves of buffalo hunters, hounded and hunted throughout their territory, and facing the prospect of starvation, the most militant of the Comanche bands and their allies had no choice but to surrender. Within a year, even Quanah Parker’s band would give up and accept life in Indian Territory.¹⁷ The conclusion of the Red River War spelled the end of a powerful Indian presence in Texas, just as residents and state officials wanted. The vast sea of grass would remain solely for white settlers. Texans embraced a Texas without reservations and largely without Indians. It had been a bloody half-century, with victims on both sides, but in the end Texans won. Prolonged violence had accomplished its goal of dispossessing the Indians and making all of Texas a white man’s country.

Unlike Indians, Tejanos would endure. Nevertheless, Anglo-Texans wanted to ensure that the vast majority of Tejanos, who ostensibly had rights to citizenship and equal participation, remained in an inferior and subservient position. Violence and legal manipulation therefore played a role in marginalizing Texas’s Tejano population.

With the exception of a smattering of sailors like Richard Henry Dana in California, Texas provided the first opportunity for Anglo-Americans to encounter the peoples of the former Spanish empire. These newcomers, in the words of historian Arnoldo De León, “saw very few redemptive attributes in the Tejanos; and aside from patronizing compliments about hospitality, courtesy and other amenities, their remarks and opinions tended toward disparagement.”¹⁸ Anglo-Texans denounced Tejanos for their often mixed-race ancestry, their dark skin, the primitive conditions in which they lived, their alleged lack of ambition and work ethic, and their supposed savage cruelty and sexual depravity. Earlier in the nation’s history, African Americans and American Indians had been accused of possessing many of these same negative attributes. Indeed, upon encountering a new dark-skinned population, Anglos attempted to force Tejanos into familiar categories of non-whites and to marginalize them as a racial “other.”¹⁹ These native Texas Mexicans became “foreigners in their native land,” fewer in number, handicapped by a language barrier, and increasingly despised by the incoming population of Anglos.²⁰ By denying whiteness to the vast majority of Tejanos, Anglo-Texans could feel justified, even relieved, in placing them in a subservient position. The problem, however, lay in the Tejanos’ unwillingness to stay in that position. The tool most often employed to affect their subservience would be violence.

Tejano men in particular became the target of violence. Texans accused these men of being loyal to Mexico rather than Texas and of opposing slavery. Anglo-Texans sometimes attacked them simply because Tejanos owned things the newcomers wanted. This violence originated at the dawn of Texas independence—despite the assistance and leadership of Tejanos like Juan Seguín during the revolution.

On many occasions Anglo-Texans had driven Tejanos from their homes on the flimsiest of pretexts, but the fear of Texas Hispanics aiding in a slave rebellion in Colorado County in the fall of 1856 aroused a particularly violent response. Slaves in the county, authorities suspected, were working with local Tejanos to organize and lead a slave revolt. In the dark of night, slaves on several plantations would rise up and murder all Anglo men and children, sparing only the women to use for their own nefarious purposes. Following this bloody assault, the fugitives and their Tejano allies would fight their way to Mexico. In response to this feared insurrection, local authorities arrested all Hispanic Texans in the area and gave them five days to leave the county. The black leaders of the plot faced a sterner punishment: 3 were hanged, over 200 were whipped, and 2 were beaten to death.²¹ The fervor over the plot exposed Anglo fears of violence, distrust, and rape that underlay ordinary existence. Slaves and Tejanos, both supposedly violent and sexually depraved, might live in close proximity, but they could never really be trusted.

Suspicion of the Tejano population in the state endured throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, and the task of dealing with the perceived threat of their treachery and deceit fell to the Texas Rangers. While Anglos have long celebrated the Rangers as larger-than-life heroes, Tejanos and Mexicans had a very different view, seeing the group as staunch defenders of white supremacy who indiscriminately lashed out at innocent people because of the color of their skin.²² The early, all-volunteer rangers certainly ran the gamut, from brave and heroic to those who did little more than parade around in boots and a hat and finally to those, like Baylor’s men, who hid behind the legitimacy of the “ranger” idea but acted little better than common outlaws.

In the turbulent 1870s, the state revived and professionalized the Texas Rangers, transforming them into the statewide law enforcement arm of the Texas government. Like all law enforcement entities, the Texas Rangers strove to protect their communities and those communities’ values. Given that white supremacy was a community value, it is not surprising, then, that the Texas Rangers fought in defense of it. In an era of heightened racial tension, an era redolent with violence, the Rangers walked a fine line between legitimate law enforcement and vigilantism. Fears of Mexican raiders and the “terrifying image whites conjured up of cruel Mexicans” justified Ranger attacks on and intimidation of Tejanos, especially in the Rio Grande valley.²³ Certainly, many incidents of Ranger violence against Hispanics occurred, as illustrated in numerous crackdowns. Once every generation or so, Rangers lashed out violently against Tejano and Mexican residents of the border, attacking both suspected criminals and civilians—the line between guilty and innocent often became too fine for the Rangers to distinguish.

In 1859 Rangers targeted Juan Cortina and his supporters. The trouble began when Cortina wounded an Anglo sheriff in Brownsville after the sheriff called him a derogatory name, but underlying tensions transformed the incident into a larger social movement. Cortina and his growing number of supporters denounced the theft and violence directed against them and demanded real rights and justice. Anglos, however, saw Cortina and his followers as outlaws and ungrateful degenerates who deserved stern punishment. Suspicion continued through the Civil War years (many Tejanos faced accusations of disloyalty to the Confederacy, and some paid with their lives). The following decade, the Rio Grande border became a killing field over the rights to unbranded, maverick cattle. Anglo ranchers claimed the cattle for themselves and accused Tejanos of rustling the animals and moving them into Mexico.

One of the most violent and bizarre episodes occurred near El Paso, Texas, in the 1870s and involved, of all things, the control of salt. For decades Paseños—Mexicans and Mexican Americans living on either side of the Rio Grande near modern El Paso/Juarez—had harvested salt from the Guadalupe Salt Lakes to use in cooking and preserving food and as an item of barter. Anglo entrepreneurs, however, harbored grander and more profitable visions for the lakes. Vast amounts of salt aided in the smelting of silver, and great silver strikes dotted the West in the 1870s. Seeing a way to profit from this growing market, Austin banker George B. Zimpelman and his son-in-law Charles Howard asserted a legal claim to the lake in 1877—ignoring the old claim and habits of area residents. Zimpelman and Howard demanded that Paseños pay for the salt they took from the lakes. Sides formed quickly along ethnic and class lines, with Anglo business interests and their supporters on one side and Hispanic residents on the other. The Texas Rangers and the local sheriff, Charles Kerber, supported Anglo claims to the area, while local Paseños took to the field to defend their rights. These peasant villagers proved more than able to defend themselves, having battled Apache Indians for decades and more recently fought against Confederate efforts to steal their produce and livestock.²⁴

The dispute over salt grew and mingled with local politics. Finally, in 1877 Charles Howard was captured and nearly murdered by an angry Paseños mob. Escaping with his life, he vowed revenge on those he felt had caused the humiliating episode, most notably his political rival Louis Cardis, an Italian immigrant and competing businessman who drew support from local Hispanic residents. On October 10, Howard apparently murdered Cardis in a local store (he claimed the killing was self-defense).²⁵ In the wake of the killing, Anglo residents pleaded for protection from “an ignorant, prejudiced, and bloodthirsty Mexican mob.”²⁶ The US military, however, stayed out of the growing violence, prompting Howard to call for the intervention of the Texas Rangers. Finally, Texas governor Richard Hubbard responded and decided to send Texas Ranger John B. Jones to investigate the situation. Jones met with Paseños leaders but secretly began organizing a company composed mostly of Anglo-Texas Rangers, which he placed under the command of Lieutenant J. B. Tays. With Tays in charge, Jones left for Austin. Tays struggled to find enough Anglos to fill a twenty-man Ranger company and soon turned to recruiting a few Paseños he deemed trustworthy. In the end, according to historian Paul Cool, Tays’s “detachment was a mixed bag of young and old, of Anglos and ‘law-and-order’ Paseños, of community pillars and man-killers.”²⁷

In December 1877 Howard, who had fled the area, returned. Protected by the Rangers and his friend Sheriff Kerber, he set out to stop the harvesting of salt on the lakes he considered his property. His party arrived in the town of San Elizaro on December 12, 1877. Accompanied by the Rangers, he strode into the stronghold of local resistance and demanded the arrest of those responsible for stealing “his” salt. Instead of complying with his demands, locals attacked Howard and his protectors. Under a cloud of gunfire, the men retreated to some nearby buildings and a siege began. Following nearly a week of the siege, the embattled band surrendered on December 17. After surrendering, Howard and two other men were summarily executed by the enraged rebels. The surviving but now unarmed and humiliated Rangers left town with their horses and nothing to show for their efforts.²⁸

The deaths of the three Anglos at the hands of the mob brought an immediate response, with soldiers coming from several posts as well as an increased Ranger presence. Sheriff Kerber asked for other volunteers, and soon twenty-seven rough characters led by Grant County deputy sheriff Dan Tucker and John Kinney (the latter a rather notorious outlaw who would later feature in the Lincoln County War) came in from Silver City, New Mexico. Many of these men came in search of a paycheck and the opportunity to plunder. Tays and his Rangers, Sheriff Kerber, and an unknown number of other men began to terrorize the Hispanics of the area, raping, plundering, and murdering those residents unfortunate enough to cross their path. The arrival of federal troops finally calmed the violence, but tensions and anger endured for years.²⁹

The bloody “salt wars,” in which Tejanos stood up for their rights against those who sought to deprive them of their traditional resources, only to be crushed in an orgy of violence, was but one example of similar riots. A decade later a similar riot occurred in Alpine, Texas, another at Rio Grande City in 1888, and two riots in the city of Laredo in 1886 and 1899.

The Mexican Revolution, if anything, increased tensions and distrust between Anglos and Mexican Americans, as demonstrated in the 1915 “bandit war.” This explosion of violence emerged from long-simmering tensions and the “Plan de San Diego,” a conspiracy, perhaps supported by Mexican president Venustiano Carranza, to start a war along the US-Mexico border. The ostensible goal was to recapture territory lost in the Mexican-American War of 1846–48 and restore dignity to Tejanos who had long suffered under Anglo rule. Carranza apparently used this plan to hurt his enemy, Francisco “Pancho” Villa, in the northern border area. Most troubling for Anglo-Texans was the provision that called for the murder of any Anglo man over age sixteen. Essentially, the plan advocated an all-out race war in South Texas, and, regardless of how impractical, it exposed the distrust between Tejanos and Mexicans on one side and Anglos on the other. While the date of this alleged uprising (February 20) came and went, the situation remained tense.³⁰

Violence finally erupted in July 1915, as an armed force of Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande onto American soil. Texas Rangers, supported by volunteers and two dozen US cavalry troops, patrolled Cameron and Hidalgo Counties in search of the “bandits.” On July 9 a foreman on the massive King Ranch killed one of the alleged gunmen. Three days later, at a dance near Brownsville, two Cameron County police officers, both Tejano, were gunned down, and on July 12 a band of gunmen robbed Nils Peterson’s store near Lyford, Texas. On July 20 eighteen-year-old Bryan K. “Red” Boley died after being shot twice by an unknown Hispanic assailant. Paranoia grew to panic in the wake of Boley’s murder, with Texas governor James Ferguson demanding an increase in federal troops—a request the government largely ignored, believing the governor had exaggerated the severity of the situation. With no other alternative, Ferguson used emergency funds to create a new Ranger company, Company D, and put Henry Lee Ransom—a lawman with a long record of suspicious assaults and shootings in his past—in command. Over the course of the next several weeks, murders and robberies continued, culminating in a battle at the King Ranch’s Norias sub-headquarters on August 8, 1915. Outnumbered at least four to one, a handful of soldiers, members of law enforcement, and ranch hands fought off at least sixty of the militants. While it appeared inevitable that the defenders would eventually be overwhelmed, the death of the bandits’ leader siphoned off the attackers’ courage and ended the assault. Now realizing the severity of the situation, the federal government finally sent army reinforcements to help patrol the border, while Rangers launched search-and-destroy missions against suspected guerrillas as well as forcing Mexican refugees back across the river.³¹

Given the level of violence and tension along the border, the Rangers acted to the best of their abilities to protect property and lives, but racist attitudes and their zeal to punish the bandits invariably led to incidents that took their toll on innocent people. For example, following the attack on an elderly rancher, James B. McAllen, Rangers sought the assailants. Unable to locate those responsible, they instead shot two Tejano farmers who had reluctantly provided assistance to the Mexican gunmen. The worst extra-legal violence occurred between September 24 and 27, when fourteen Mexican and Tejano corpses turned up, alleged victims of the Rangers. In October, however, the “bandit war” ended when relations between the United States and Mexico improved after President Woodrow Wilson threw his support behind Carranza.³²

In the years since the “bandit war,” blame has fallen on the Rangers. To be fair, the Rangers responded to an unprecedented level of violence and the fear of an armed insurrection with measures intended to protect civilians. Moreover, every death of a Tejano or Mexican national has been attributed to the Rangers, obscuring the fact that other groups of Anglo vigilantes and law enforcement took the field and certainly bore some of the responsibility for the murders of innocent people.³³ Nevertheless, by targeting Hispanic residents of the border, in this case at least, the Rangers reified the views of their detractors as violent defenders of white supremacy.

At a fundamental level, the Rangers’ actions in these various encounters reflected their society, a society that placed Indians, African Americans, and Hispanics in inferior positions. Keeping these groups in their place not surprisingly fell to law enforcement, especially the Texas Rangers; they could be either heroic or evil, depending on one’s perspective. At the very least, since many of the people the Rangers apprehended were of Mexican descent, a deep and long-simmering distrust of the Rangers has endured.³⁴

Like Tejanos and American Indians, African Americans also became the targets of violence, especially in East Texas. Prior to the Civil War, the important economic position slaves occupied meant they faced little organized violence (undoubtedly they faced a great deal of personal violence, both physical and psychological, as a way of keeping them in line). Certainly, rumors of slave insurrection were often met with massive retaliation, as the 1856 insurrection in Colorado County demonstrated. After the Civil War, however, the situation changed dramatically, and newly freed African Americans faced decades of horrific violence intended to deprive them of their hard-won rights and newfound status.

This violence originated from two main causes. First, Texas Democrats hoped to smother the Republican Party in the state, and open wounds between Union troops (occupying the South after the war) and Confederates still festered. African Americans and a small number of white Unionists played an important role in supporting the Republicans and their reconstruction efforts. Second, violence offered white supremacists a tool they could employ to keep African Americans in a subordinate status. Texas still needed its African American population, but keeping them in their place could preserve white supremacy. These goals and the use of violence to achieve them went well beyond Texas, encompassing all of the former Confederacy in the decade after the Civil War, but reconstruction and anti-reconstruction “redemption” efforts played somewhat differently in the Lone Star State.³⁵

As in the rest of the South, Texas experienced the emergence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. In the words of historian Kenneth W. Howell, “It is certain that the Klan and other terrorist groups were responsible for the murder and mayhem that plagued the state. Despite the best efforts of the Republican government in Texas, these groups continued to wreak havoc on blacks and white Unionists.”³⁶ East Texas in particular became a killing ground as the Klan and other groups swept through the area, intimidating and killing anyone who opposed them. Texas also became home to a large number of white Democrats who had left the Deep South in search of a new start. These newcomers helped ensure that the Democratic Party would have no difficulty in reasserting control over Texas, which it accomplished by 1873. However, blacks comprised the majority of the population in many of the cotton counties in East Texas, and, if they were allowed to vote unmolested, these areas would remain Republican. Violence therefore endured in these counties long after the statewide “redemption” of the Democratic Party.³⁷

Texas, however, differed from other former Confederate states in many important aspects, for it straddled the boundary between South and West, one bowlegged boot in each region. During the turbulent years of Reconstruction, Texans still faced the possibility of Indian attacks on frontier settlements. The relatively unpoliced frontier and international border with Mexico also gave outlaws and other opportunists plenty of room to operate. A few thousand federal troops could not patrol such a vast territory. Further, to the best of their abilities, African Americans, American Indians, and Tejanos fought against repression in the state, making the era of Reconstruction, in the words of Arnoldo De León, “the most violent in Texas history. During this time, Central Texas was embroiled in a wide variety of violent episodes growing out of troubles from the Civil War and Reconstruction, outlaw activity, vigilantism, community feuds, agrarian radicalism, and political agitation . . . It was in this era that the colored thread of multiracial society posed the greatest challenge to white racial order.”³⁸ Smothering that challenge and thus preserving white supremacy and therefore the white man’s West became paramount.

Certainly, anti-black violence reached its worst manifestations in East Texas, the section of the state with the highest population of African Americans, but the attitudes forged in the Cotton Belt made their way to the Texas frontier. To lessen confrontations between Anglo-Texans and black soldiers, the US Army stationed these “buffalo soldiers” at frontier outposts like Fort Concho, near San Angelo, Texas, and Fort McKavett, near Menard, Texas. Buffalo soldiers, in fact, occupied forts throughout the West, but they nevertheless faced the most animosity from Texans, who viewed them as racially inferior symbols of the occupying federal government and the hated Republican Party.

Repeatedly throughout the 1870s, black soldiers died at the hands of white frontiersman. In 1870 Private Boston Henry died in a confrontation with John Jackson, a white man living near Fort McKavett. As Jackson fled the scene, he shot and killed Corporal Albert Marshall and Private Charles Murray. Eventually apprehended, Jackson faced trial for the trio of murders, but the white jury quickly acquitted him of any wrongdoing. Two years later, two more soldiers died in an ambush near Rio Grande City, Texas. A grand jury indicted nine men, with one brought to trial. This lone defendant was also acquitted by the jury.³⁹

Two of the worst and most dangerous episodes of violence between soldiers and Anglo-Texans occurred in San Angelo in 1878 and 1881. A group of rough cowboys and buffalo hunters tore a black sergeant’s stripes off his uniform. In retaliation for this humiliation, angry black soldiers entered the saloon, and both sides quickly opened fire. During the battle, one white hunter died. Nine troopers faced prosecution and one, William Mace, received the death penalty.

Three years later, on February 3, 1881, a local sheepherder named Tom McCarthy murdered a black trooper in a San Angelo saloon. Soldiers soon apprehended the assailant and turned him over to the sheriff. Sheriff Jim Spears set McCarthy free, pending an examination trial. Enraged by this and numerous other slights, the soldiers posted a handbill in the town declaring: “We, the soldiers of the U.S. Army, do hereby warn the first and last time all citizens and cowboys, etc., of San Angelo and vicinity to recognize our right of way as just and peaceable men. If we do not receive justice and fair play, which we must have, some one will suffer—if not the guilty the innocent. ‘It has gone too far, justice or death.’ ”⁴⁰

A group of soldiers crossed the Concho River and entered the town, searching for McCarthy. Colonel Benjamin Grierson, the commanding officer of Fort Concho (and a Union war hero), sent a detachment to bring back his angry men, promising them that McCarthy would stand trial.

McCarthy was, in fact, held without bond the following morning, and tensions may well have abated at that point had not an unfortunate case of mistaken identity occurred. Tom McCarthy, it turned out, had a twin brother named Dave. Dave picked the wrong day to visit San Angelo. Someone spotted him and assumed that Tom had been released. When news of this sighting reached the soldiers, a large number grabbed their weapons and headed into town. Although no one died in the ensuing riot, the irate soldiers fired at least 150 rounds into area businesses. The troops dispersed when Grierson ordered bugle calls and drum rolls to indicate he planned to send a much larger group of soldiers to restore order.⁴¹

Meanwhile, Captain Bryan Marsh, commanding a detachment of Texas Rangers, warned Colonel Grierson that any soldier, black or white, caught leaving the fort and entering San Angelo would be shot.⁴² Grierson, more to keep the peace than out of fear of facing fewer than two dozen rangers, temporarily confined his men to their barracks, and tensions cooled. McCarthy, after being indicted and transferred to Austin for trial, was absolved of any wrongdoing. These incidents proved that no white man would be convicted of killing a black soldier, an injustice that no doubt lingered in the minds of black troopers.

Tensions between white Texans and black soldiers seemed to cool throughout the 1880s and 1890s, perhaps because of the end of Reconstruction and the rigid imposition of Jim Crow. The years of relative calm, however, came to an end with the nineteenth century as long-simmering tensions between civilians (both Anglo and Hispanic) and black soldiers resurfaced. In March 1899, in the South Texas city Laredo, officer José Cuellar severely beat a black soldier for associating with a Hispanic woman, causing soldiers thereafter to travel in groups and carry weapons. That fall another officer, Willie Stoner, attempted to arrest a soldier for carrying a butcher knife but was prevented from doing so by the soldier’s friends. Later that evening a group of perhaps 40 soldiers ambushed Stoner and beat him. Some local residents, both Anglo and Hispanic, demanded the removal of the soldiers.⁴³ On August 13, 1906, a group of armed whites opened fire on soldiers from the Twenty-fifth Infantry in Brownsville, Texas, in retaliation for the attempted rape of a white woman by a black soldier. Only one man perished in the gun battle, but, following a decision by President Theodore Roosevelt, 167 troopers were kicked out of the army for not revealing the identity of the alleged rapist. Eleven years later, in the East Texas city of Houston, a riot between black soldiers and white law enforcement left 20 people dead, including 15 whites (5 of whom were policemen), 1 Tejano, and 4 black soldiers. One hundred and eighteen soldiers faced court-martial for the incident. Nearly 30 received the death penalty, another 53 others received life terms, 7 were acquitted, and the remainder received sentences of varying lengths. Justice in Texas proved anything but colorblind, and not even a uniform could protect someone from the effects of violence.⁴⁴

Whiteness provided an intellectual justification for the treatment of all these groups, and, indeed, even poor Anglo sharecroppers faced opprobrium as somehow less than fully white. In the early twentieth century some wealthy Anglo-Texans pondered sterilization for poor whites. Edward Everett Davis, a researcher active in the 1920s and 1930s, condemned cotton agriculture for attracting blacks, Mexicans, and inferior whites to Texas. His novel White Scourge posited that both cotton and inferior whites were a “white scourge” on the state’s culture and society. The historian Neil Foley, playing off the title of Davis’s novel, suggests that the real scourge was the idea of whiteness itself, an idea that conveyed and justified privilege and power to a select few.⁴⁵

Anglo-Americans, the vast majority of whom entered Texas from the slaveholding South, encountered a multiethnic and racial society in Texas and, not surprisingly, set out to impose a color line between themselves and “non-white peoples.” In the end, they attained nearly complete control over the state. Jim Crow laws kept African Americans in a subservient position, and a kind of de facto segregation kept Tejanos down as well. American Indians, whose presence had long shaped Texas, were forced north to Indian Territory, leaving behind only place names and ghosts. Anglo-Texans’ control of the political system aided in this conquest, but violence ultimately allowed for the imposition of whiteness in Texas, and because of it Texas truly became a white man’s country.

Like Texas, California seemed destined to figure prominently in the future of the United States, and, like the Lone Star State, it had a preexisting and problematic population of American Indians and Hispanic peoples. Unlike Texas, however, the transformation of California into a place dominated by Anglo-Americans occurred at a meteoric pace. The hopes and appetites unleashed by James Marshall’s discovery of gold in the winter of 1848 at John Sutter’s sawmill created a situation in which violence would be used against anyone standing in the way of a hundred thousand prospectors’ dreams. Given that California had only recently passed into American control, the area’s considerable population of Californios (Hispanic Californians) and American Indians now found themselves in these prospectors’ way—their land claims, their traditions, their legal rights, and, in the case of Indian peoples, their lives were of little interest to these newcomers. In the frenzied atmosphere of desire and greed unleashed by golden dreams and with rudimentary legal institutions to check the worst of human nature, it is not surprising that many Anglo-Americans relied on violence to secure their piece of California.

The terrible story of the fate of California’s Indian population is well-known to most students of western American history.⁴⁶ Vilified as “uncivilized savages” who served no purpose and represented only an obstacle to progress and riches, California Indians faced devastating disease outbreaks, enslavement, political disfranchisement, forced exile on the margins of society, and a state-sponsored policy that sanctioned hunting them as little more than vermin.⁴⁷ Anti-Indian racism, obviously, was far older than the United States, but Anglo-Americans singled out California’s Indians with a level of scorn and disgust almost unprecedented in American history.

Many Indian peoples in the area survived traditionally by digging roots, a subsistence strategy that demonstrated to Anglo observers their overall laziness and supposed savagery and gave rise to the derogatory nickname “diggers” to describe these people—a name that described their activity and degeneracy and certainly hinted at another commonly used term for African Americans.⁴⁸ Indeed, “diggers” and “niggers” shared a common blackness that marked them as inferior in white eyes. Anglo-American observers decried their filthy appearance; their dark, almost black complexions; and their supposedly animal-like behavior—blackness, of course, represented the polar opposite of whiteness and was even less desirable than the noble “red” of the supposedly more attractive Indian peoples.⁴⁹ Hinton Rowan Helper, in his 1855 book Land of Gold, typically characterized the digger Indians as “filthy and abominable,” concluding that “a worse set of vagabonds cannot be found bearing the human form.”⁵⁰ Men, he continued, did little work, and the gathering of grasshoppers and roots fell to the women—a gender division that again demonstrated supposed Indian inferiority. California Indians, devouring insects and scraping for roots with sticks, in short, did not mesh with the romantic, noble savages of the Great Plains, who, despite their savagery, hunted and fought on horseback—the world would hardly miss such useless creatures, or at least that seemed the inescapable conclusion from observations like Helper’s. Nor could California Indian peoples, who lived in very small bands, mount the spectacular resistance plains Indians peoples attempted, although they did try to fight back as best they could.

The arrival of Americans to the California goldfields and the overall conquest of the area proved catastrophic to indigenous peoples. The pre-contact Indian population of California totaled approximately 300,000, but by 1848 that population had declined, mostly from disease, to 150,000. The Gold Rush of the 1850s brought a population apocalypse as the Indian population plummeted by over 80 percent, to around 30,000. Disease, dispossession, and homicide lay behind the demographic collapse.⁵¹

In the early years of the Gold Rush, settlers desired Indian labor as an antidote to the chronic labor shortage that plagued the newly acquired land. Indians had, in fact, long labored for Mexican economic and religious elites, and, indeed, until the massive influx of people following the discovery of gold, Indians offered one of the only large labor pools in California—a fact not lost on men like John Sutter. Sutter, for example, employed Indians to perform a variety of tasks, including harvesting his wheat crop, in the years before and after the discovery of gold. While Sutter paid them in currency and goods, he also relied on violence to maintain the loyalty and subservience of his Indian workforce. He occasionally whipped, jailed, and even executed Indians who disobeyed his orders.⁵² Sutter’s abuse of Indians foreshadowed the coming problems of the Gold Rush.

The dismal treatment of Indians received official sanction with the California legislature’s passage in 1850 of An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, an Orwellian title for an act that essentially allowed whites to coerce “unemployed” Indians into laboring for only food and clothing. Since few Indians fit the category of “employed” in the conventional sense, essentially, any Indian could be pressed into service. Many found themselves working for little or no food, and Indian children in particular became victims of kidnappers who sold them as slaves. In Northern California during the first two years of the rush, some miners forced hundreds of Indians to labor in the placer diggings. Newer miners, jealous of the extra labor Indians provided, systemically murdered them in an effort to drive this labor force off the diggings, a strategy that ultimately proved effective.⁵³ Being forced to labor as slaves by some miners, only to be attacked by other miners, illustrated the wretched and hopeless condition of these Indian laborers.

By the early 1850s California Indians found themselves increasingly pushed to the margins of society, and their traditional subsistence strategies became untenable as mining destroyed salmon runs, feral pigs consumed the acorns many Indians relied upon, cattle replaced wild game, and miners tore up the land. Stealing livestock therefore became one of the only ways to stave off starvation, but inevitably it brought swift and powerful retaliation. When Indians killed livestock, whites responded with raids that usually killed Indians.⁵⁴ California’s Indians, Hinton Rowan Helper predicted, “must melt away before the white man like snow before a spring sun. They are too indolent to work, too cowardly to fight.”⁵⁵ Indeed, Helper continued, once their labor was no longer necessary, whites would have no use for them, and, inevitably, their penchant for stealing would lead to their extermination. “Some of these miserable people,” he blithely explained, “have been cruelly butchered by the whites for indulging their propensity to make free with other people’s property.” Rather than condemn murder as a punishment for minor transgressions, Hinton laughed off the cruelty as a side-effect of progress and blamed the victims for their own murders. Inevitably, he concluded, California’s Indians would be crushed under the “advancing wheels” of civilization.⁵⁶ Indeed, Helper’s prediction had already started to come to pass.

While overmatched and scattered federal forces mostly tried to keep the peace, the majority of conflicts with Indians involved volunteer vigilante groups and state-sponsored militias. On October 25, 1850, California’s first governor, Peter Burnett (who recall also championed black exclusion in both Oregon and California), authorized El Dorado County sheriff William Rogers to call up “two hundred able bodied Militia” to locate and punish Indians who had been preying on cattle in the area. Over the next several weeks, Rogers and his men waged a series of attacks on Indians (most likely Miwoks) and claimed to have killed more than a dozen. The expedition, however, proved too expensive, and Burnett, on the advice of Brigadier General William M. Winn, commander of the state militia, ended the expedition.⁵⁷ The governor remained convinced that Indians posed a threat to Californians. In his message to the state legislature in January 1851, Burnett explained that settlers could not tolerate Indian raids on their livestock because the raids invariably hurt them financially. Since Indian raids would never stop, “A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct,” the governor argued.⁵⁸ Despite the fact that he resigned as governor soon after, Burnett’s call for genocide did not go unheeded.⁵⁹

From the late 1840s through the 1860s, California’s Indian peoples became the target of indiscriminate and widespread attacks at the hands of white vigilantes. One of the first major attacks occurred in 1849 at Clear Lake. A group of Pomos, who had been virtually enslaved by two whites, Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, struck out against their tormenters and murdered them. In retaliation, a group of 75 volunteers attacked a Pomo village, killing nearly all its inhabitants. In 1853 whites from Crescent City fell upon a Tolowa village and again spared no one.⁶⁰ These attacks marked only the beginning of a longer war of extermination.

Some of the most egregious attacks occurred in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties in northwest California. The New York Century published an article in May 1860, which was reprinted in the San Francisco Bulletin, on a series of attacks on Indian villages in Humboldt County. The paper noted, “The [white] perpetrators seem to have acted with a deliberate design to exterminate the Indian race. Their butchery was confined to women and children, the men being absent at the time.”⁶¹ A December 1860 attack by local vigilantes killed more than two dozen Indians. The Bulletin devoted a great deal of coverage to the slaughter of 200 Indians in February 1860 in Humboldt County. In response to the paper’s condemnation of the attack, Humboldt County sheriff Barrant Van Ness argued that the attack was justified given the losses stockmen had endured in addition to the death of rancher James Elleson, ostensibly at the hands of Indians. Finding federal soldiers unwilling or incapable of stopping Indian depredations, Ness explained, stockmen had no choice but to form a militia force. “Now,” he explained, “they are heavy tax-payers, and they are losing all they possess. So, they get desperate, and perhaps are prompted to deeds of desperation.”⁶²

Major Gabriel J. Raines of the US Army filed a report with the assistant adjutant general denouncing the attack as unprovoked. Visiting the site of the massacre, he “beheld a spectacle of horror, of unexampled description—babes, with brains oozing out of their skulls, cut and hacked with axes, and squaws exhibiting the most frightful wounds in death which imagination can paint—and this done . . . without cause . . . as I have not heard of any of them [white settlers] losing life or cattle by the Indians. Certainly not these Indians, for they lived on an Island and nobody accuses them.”⁶³ The events of the “Mendocino war” attracted the attention of the California legislature, which set up a Special Joint Committee to investigate the attacks. The committee’s report concluded, “Accounts are daily coming in . . . of the sickening atrocities and wholesale slaughters of great numbers of defenseless Indians in that region of the country.”⁶⁴ The legislature did nothing to stop these attacks.

At least 8,000 California Indians met a gruesome fate at the hands of various bands of white vigilantes and militias in the first two decades of California statehood.⁶⁵ As the historian Richard White has observed, while extermination of Indian peoples was never the official policy of the United States, on occasion Anglo-Americans “could put [genocide] into practice,” and indeed in California they largely succeeded.⁶⁶

Those Indian peoples who survived disease, starvation, and murder found themselves forced onto California’s cultural and geographic margins. Efforts to set aside reservations for Indians began as early as 1851 with the arrival of a three-person federal commission. Three federal officials—Redick McKee, George Barbour, and Oliver Wozencraft—negotiated a series of treaties with California Indians, setting aside over 6.5 million acres on eighteen reservations, but at the request of California’s congressional delegation the treaties went unratified.⁶⁷

Leaving millions of acres in the hands of Indians would never be palatable to land-hungry Anglo-Californians, and almost immediately the treaties ran into trouble as state officials turned against the treaty process. The California state legislature voted against the treaties and asked the state’s congressional delegation to lobby against their ratification. Following the defeat, another effort was undertaken to create five reservations, each of which was not to exceed 25,000 acres. By 1869 only three reservations had been created: Tule Lake (which replaced the reserve at Tejon Pass), Round Valley, and Hoopa Valley.⁶⁸ The vast majority of the state’s Indian population existed without any form of federal protection, surviving as best they could in a hostile world.⁶⁹ In the coming decades they endured this legal twilight, scrounging for work and food on the margins of society.⁷⁰ The dominant white population had made it abundantly clear that Indians had no place in California’s white society.

Hispanics, though not as severely mistreated as the Indian population, nevertheless faced widespread discrimination and hostility in California. At first the Gold Rush seemed a potential windfall for the Californios, Mexicans, and Chileans who found themselves in a perfect position to benefit from these discoveries, given their close proximity and the relative ease with which they could make the journey to California, especially when compared with the arduous transit Anglo-Americans in the eastern United States faced. However, these various Hispanic miners quickly found themselves battling against Anglo miners and leaders who sought to force them off their claims and place them in an inferior status. According to historian Susan Johnson, “Anglo-American opposition to Mexicans in the mines took three basic forms: individual incidents of harassment; mining district ‘laws’ that excluded Mexicans and other non-US citizens from particular areas; and a statewide foreign miner’s tax, approved in 1850, that charged foreign miners twenty dollars a month to work the placers.”⁷¹ In a blatant violation of the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which specified that former citizens of Mexico would be extended citizenship in the United States, Californios had to pay the foreign miner’s tax, despite having lived in California for their entire lives, while most European and Australian miners did not pay the tax.⁷² The message rang clear: California’s gold belonged to whites only.

Hispanic and Chinese miners, subjected to the foreign miner’s tax, also found themselves the targets of violence intended to chase them away from the goldfields completely. By the early 1850s Anglo miners in Calaveras and nearby counties began to clear out Hispanic settlements, claiming that they provided shelter and support to bandits like the famed Joaquin Murrieta. An armed vigilante group attacked the largely Hispanic “Yackee Camp” (named after the Yaqui Indians who first established it). They promptly lynched one Mexican man, whom they believed to be a bandit, before moving on to the nearby Cherokee Camp, where they lynched and shot two more Mexican men. As one miner explained, Hispanics were not welcome in the goldfields, and it was the duty of every American to take the Mexican’s “horse, his arms” and tell him to leave the area. A meeting in the town of Double Springs ended with the resolution to make it “the duty of every American citizen . . . to exterminate the Mexican race from the county.”⁷³ Such attacks solidified Anglo control over the goldfields and presaged the loss of land and control for Hispanics in California as they drowned in a deluge of new immigrants from the East who had no interest in preserving their tenure on the land.

Ostensibly citizens, Californios could vote, hold public office, testify in court, and own land. Yet Anglo-Americans soon recognized that sharp class divisions split the society of Mexican California. The ranchero elite occupied the top position of society, owning vast tracts of land. Claiming a white, Spanish ancestry, they comprised the gente de razon (people of reason). Smaller rancheros, farmers, artisans, and skilled laborers occupied a tiny middle class, and the bottom of Mexican California’s class system belonged to Indian laborers and mestizos (mixed Hispanic and Indian peoples). Many of these laborers functioned as slaves in all but name, and allegedly their lack of intelligence and fondness for menial labor made them gente sin razon (people without reason), who depended on the ranchero elite to protect them in similar fashion to the supposedly patriarchal arrangement between southern white landowners and African American slaves.⁷⁴ Racial differences therefore helped construct and reinforce the class system of old California. Not surprisingly, Anglos judged Indians and mestizos by their supposed blackness.⁷⁵ Significantly, their darker skins and inferior social status made them easy targets for violence, while the “whiter” and wealthier ranchero elites were largely spared violent attacks on their property or persons—although not always. The wealthy Berreyesa family, for example, lost their grant and saw three family members lynched by Anglos.⁷⁶ The rancheros rarely faced such violence, but they would nevertheless see their lands wrested from them by newcomers.

Since citizenship in the United States also remained tethered to notions of race, Californios, especially the elite ranchero families, bragged of a European, and thus a “white,” ancestry. Claiming whiteness enabled elite Californios to better integrate into the new social order unleashed by the Gold Rush and California statehood. Anglo-Americans, however, never entirely accepted this assertion and argued that even the elite families of California society were inferior. Writers like Richard Henry Dana praised the beauty of Spanish women and their fair complexions while nevertheless denouncing them for a supposed lack of morals. Californio men as well supposedly lacked the vigor and ambition of Anglo-Americans, in the view of Dana and writers like Alfred Robinson in Life in California.⁷⁷ This lack of ambition and vigor justified Anglo conquest of the region, but the white identity of the elite also made Californio women acceptable marriage partners for ambitious Anglo men. These marriages could prove advantageous for both sides. Anglo men, thanks to their new wives, married into families with often extensive landholdings, instantly making them wealthy and powerful. Mexican families often benefited from the political and business acumen of their new Anglo in-laws. Sociologist Tomás Almaguer observes that having an Anglo son-in-law helped when dealing with “unscrupulous lawyers, merchants, and others who preyed on the ignorance of the Californios.”⁷⁸ A son-in-law could turn on his new family, however, taking control of the estate.

If greedy sons-in-law did not take the estates, many other avaricious newcomers were seeking to wrest control of valuable land from the Californio elite. Many of these families faced years of costly legal battles to maintain control of their land grants, despite the Land Law of 1851 in which Congress acknowledged the validity of those grants. In many instances the Californio rancheros won their cases but ended up losing control of their grants to bankers and even the attorneys they hired to defend them in court. In addition, squatters killed their cattle, destroyed their orchards, and lived on their land. Horace Carpentier, for example, swindled the Peralta family out of their 19,000-acre grant on San Francisco Bay, erecting the city of Oakland on his newly acquired land.⁷⁹ Within a generation of Anglos’ arrival, most of the once powerful and proud ranchero elite no longer owned anything of value except their names. Overwhelmed by new immigrants, they joined other Californios and immigrants from Mexico as a shrinking minority of the population. In Los Angeles, Californios comprised over 82 percent of the population in 1850, but by 1880, confined to barrios, they had slipped to only 19 percent of the city’s population.⁸⁰ Statewide, a similar situation prevailed. As early as 1850, as the first waves of Gold Rush immigration washed over California, Hispanics (both Californios and immigrants from elsewhere) accounted for only 11 percent of the state’s total population. By 1900 they accounted for less than 2 percent of the population and trailed the American Indian and Chinese populations. Moreover, the bulk of the population congregated in Southern California, and the fairly equal sex ratio (roughly the same number of men as women) made them even less of a threat to Anglo-American male occupations than the Chinese.⁸¹ Violence, deceit, and the sheer number of newcomers conspired to steal California from Californio control.

Anglo-Americans, relying on violence and the legal system, successfully wrested control of California from Indians and Hispanics. Simultaneous with efforts to defeat Indians and strip Hispanics of their land and status, Anglo-Americans perceived a new threat coming from across the ocean: the Chinese. Whites would again employ violence and legal manipulation to control what they feared had become a new Chinese threat.

The Chinese, like most immigrants, crossed the ocean to find opportunity. China had been torn apart by numerous factors, including European imperialism and the opium trade, famines, and warlordism. Few young Chinese men—especially the millions comprising the peasant classes—could expect any marked improvement in their fortunes. The discovery of gold in California and a steamer ticket across the Pacific, however, offered hope of a better life. Chinese migrants, most hailing from Guangdong Province, typically purchased tickets from unscrupulous credit brokers, who charged outrageous interest rates or demanded a share of the profits they made in the “Gold Mountain,” but, given these young men’s poverty, most accepted the bargain. Upon reaching California’s shores, Chinese workers invariably took out more loans from Chinese merchants to pay for passage to the goldfields in the Sierras. In the words of Richard White, these “were free laborers [not coolies or slaves] who carried their own small mountains of debt to the Golden Mountain.”⁸² Mortgaged to hope, these Chinese migrants often had to pay off the cost of their passage before they could make money for themselves.⁸³

Stepping off the boat on the shores of California brought these Chinese immigrants to a new world where they encountered a society dominated by Anglo-Americans. This society, according to the historian Najia Aarim-Heriot, “was an inegalitarian, multiracial society . . . [in which] competition for scarce resources, and an unequal distribution of power had shaped a two-tiered racial hierarchy, which in turn had shored up the establishment of white supremacy.”⁸⁴ In other words, white Americans had grown to believe that they alone controlled the nation, with Indian peoples, African Americans, and Hispanics on the wrong side of the color barrier and therefore confined to subservient and inferior positions in society. Whiteness made these groups an “other” and provided a precedent for circumscribing the position of the Chinese. The categorization of non-white instantly made the Chinese foreign outsiders, and Anglo-Americans feared their continued presence in the United States would only “lead to greater [racial] heterogeneity and latent racial strife,” according to Aarim-Heriot.⁸⁵

Much of the fear over the presence of the Chinese stemmed from their economic potential. Indians, Californios, and African Americans lacked the numbers to effectively challenge white supremacy in the state, but with a seemingly endless supply of people coming from the world’s most populated nation, the Chinese posed a threat. Economically, the Chinese offered the potential labor source California had long lacked—one editor went so far as to compare the role of Chinese labor in the state to that of African labor in the South—but critics, especially those sympathetic to working-class whites, warned that too many Chinese immigrants would provide unfair competition and drive whites out of work. Working men and labor union activists came to fear the Chinese because of their alleged docility, their clannishness, and their apparent willingness to work for low wages. In the words of the historian Elliott West, the Chinese represented “free labor’s ultimate nightmare: a race of automatons used by monopolists and labor bashers to undercut wages or cast out honest workers altogether.”⁸⁶ Critics argued that their docility and lack of independence provided proof that the Chinese could not exist in the United States, since their very presence hurt free, working whites and threatened democracy itself. Other traits as well marked the Chinese as incompatible with American society, at least in the minds of their detractors. They, again according to West, “were America’s most anomalous people. In language, dress, foodways, religion, and customs they seemed beyond the pale, and with their vast predominance of men, they lacked what all other groups, however different, had in common: the family as their central social unit.”⁸⁷ Initially, this “vast predominance of men” developed from the nature of their immigration, but opponents of Chinese immigration soon realized the potential benefits of an all-male immigration and in fact encouraged it.

Chinese immigrants envisioned themselves as sojourners, coming to America for a brief period to make money on the Gold Mountain before returning to their homeland. The “sojourner myth” helped Chinese gold seekers break free of the “Sinocentric” belief that China stood at the center of the world, and thus no good Chinese man would ever leave his homeland. A sojourner might leave but would one day return. Facing mistreatment and told of their incompatibility with American civilization, the Chinese also held onto the sojourner myth to ease the sense of isolation caused by being strangers in a strange land; subsequently, most acted as foreigners with no intention to permanently set down roots.⁸⁸ The ubiquity of the sojourner myth largely ensured that the vast majority of Chinese immigrants remained male; moreover, married women traditionally served their in-laws and would not leave them behind to accompany a husband to California.⁸⁹ Moral Chinese women, in short, did not wander far from home, and good Chinese men did not stay away any longer than necessary.

The great gender imbalance (and Anglo-American taboos on race mixing) meant that Chinese men could find few sex partners in the Gold Mountain. Invariably, this led to the rise of Chinese female prostitution. Indeed, the vast majority of Chinese women in California worked as prostitutes. The 1860 census showed that of a total population of 681 Chinese women in San Francisco, 583 served as prostitutes. Excluding girls under twelve and women living with a male head of household, this meant that 96 percent of the Chinese women who worked for wages worked as prostitutes.⁹⁰ Being a Chinese woman in America, for all intents and purposes, meant being a prostitute—and that at least was the impression etched into the minds of whites. Prostitution, along with the equally scandalous vice of opium smoking, played into negative representations of the Chinese and supported the arguments of those opposed to Chinese immigration.⁹¹ Taken as a whole, therefore, critics made a persuasive case that the Chinese did not belong in America and, as sojourners, did not want to stay permanently anyway.

The absence of women was certainly a result of Chinese cultural beliefs, but encouraging their continued absence became official government policy with the passage of the little-known 1875 federal Page Law. The brainchild of California congressman Horace F. Page, the legislation did not interfere with the immigration of Chinese men (who, after all, provided an important labor source for industries like the railroads) and instead focused on the immigration of Chinese women. Government officials, under the law, now possessed the power to prevent any Chinese woman from immigrating to the United States if they suspected her of being a prostitute or participating in any “lewd” or “immoral” activity. Whether intentionally or not, immigration officials effectively used their powers to prevent any woman, even married women, from entering the United States. This prohibition ensured that the temporary and overwhelmingly male character of Chinese immigration would continue, allowing corporations to hire men for low wages and house them in bunkhouses and other substandard arrangements that families would not tolerate. Further, without a population of women and children to support, the state would not need to offer educational facilities or other services. Finally, by denying the arrival of women, Chinese immigrants could not establish viable communities and could not have children who would, thanks to the recent ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, be citizens at birth. Companies could therefore exploit Chinese labor, and ordinary Americans could rest assured that when employers no longer required their labor, these immigrants would return to China.⁹²

Lacking citizenship and therefore legal rights, the Chinese became easy targets of violence, especially in the placer mining areas of the state. White miners had long used violence, intimidation, and the legal system to ensure their control of the best locations. As Aarim-Heriot notes, such tools essentially made “whiteness the test of access to the mines and to California at large.”⁹³ The Chinese, like African Americans and Hispanics before them, were denied access to the best goldfields, and violence played a key role in protecting this white dominance. Forbidden from working the best areas, the Chinese occupied marginal diggings and areas that whites had already mined and abandoned as unprofitable—often purchasing seemingly worthless claims from white owners for inflated prices.⁹⁴ One Amador County newspaper noted that a group of Chinese miners successfully worked a creek that flowed through the town of Jackson. It was an area that had been “worked over at least a dozen times.” Yet the Chinese miners made “from $2.50 to $8 per day” each.⁹⁵ Such results, though not typical, occurred throughout the goldfields, and Chinese miners continued to work the placer diggings as late as 1858, long after most white miners had given up on placer mining.

Often, however, Anglo-American miners drove the Chinese out of the placer diggings altogether. The first widespread violence against the Chinese presence in the mines occurred in May 1852 in the town of Columbia in Tuolumne County (where a few years earlier French, Mexican, and Chilean miners had vociferously opposed the imposition of the foreign miners tax). White miners in the town banded together to pass several resolutions barring the presence of Pacific Islanders and Chinese in the district around Columbia while attacking the monied interests (“shipowners, capitalists, and merchants”) who imported these “burlesques on humanity” to turn a profit at the expense of free, working white men. Most ominous, they also resolved to form a vigilance committee to ensure that Chinese miners could not contest their placer diggings. The Alta California denounced these miners as “entirely without precedent or parallel in their hatred and hostility for the Chinese.”⁹⁶ As the paper and the other defenders of the Chinese would soon learn, more than a few Anglo-Americans agreed with the people of Columbia.

In the same year, along the American River, sixty white miners attacked Chinese miners digging at Mormon Bar. As they ransacked the camp and beat the Chinese, a brass band played music, a riot apparently more enjoyable with musical accompaniment. Later, white miners in El Dorado County turned back any wagons or stagecoaches carrying Chinese passengers. Nearby, at Weber Creek, an angry mob burned the Chinese camp. The year 1852, therefore, set the tone for the way the Chinese would be treated in the California goldfields.⁹⁷

Out of this came the imposition of a new foreign miners tax. Unlike the earlier 1850 tax, which had levied a substantial twenty-dollar-per-month tax, the new tax amounted to a more reasonable three dollars per month. This tax, though blatantly discriminatory, did not deter the Chinese. On at least two occasions, angry Chinese miners refused to pay the tax and attacked the tax collectors. On both occasions the tax collector survived, but at least one Chinese man perished. Most Chinese miners, however, paid the tax and went about their business. Anglo miners, for their part, complained that the real purpose of the tax had been to scare foreigners away from gold mining altogether, thus leaving whites firmly in control of the diggings, but the new tax, they felt, did not sufficiently punish the Chinese and thus did not force them out of gold mining as hoped. Instead, the tax remained, providing much-needed revenue for the young state of California.⁹⁸

Chinese miners remained ever vigilant to the possibility of whites turning against them and forcing them out. Thus they relied on smaller mining equipment, preferring, for example, the portable gold rocker to the immobile but larger and thus more profitable sluice boxes white miners employed. These portable tools enabled them to flee a district very rapidly and set up a new site just as quickly. Seemingly less disturbing of surrounding soil and much less efficient and profitable than the sluice boxes, the gold rocker came to be seen as a sign of Chinese inferiority. White miners feminized the Chinese miners, laughing at their small tools “which they handled like so many women,” scratching at the soil so feebly.⁹⁹

Californian (indeed American more generally) attitudes toward these incompatible others left them on the outside. Controlling this immigration, circumscribing their places in society once they came here, and finally closing the nation to the Chinese entirely became goals of a growing and vociferous anti-Chinese movement. The first salvo against Chinese immigration had been the Page Act, but for foes of Chinese immigration, that act did not go nearly far enough. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act provided a legislative “solution” to Chinese immigration, barring nearly all Chinese people from entering the United States. Even after the passage of the act, violence—both small- and large-scale—remained, as riots in Seattle, Denver, and Rock Springs, Wyoming, illustrated.¹⁰⁰ This violence imposed lines of control that enforced the unbridgeable “otherness” of this most anomalous group of people.

Taken together, Texas and California demonstrate how violence reshaped the West and protected the privileges of whiteness. The virtual extermination of Indians from both states, coupled with the denial of political rights to Hispanics and Chinese—and in the case of Texas the imposition of slavery and, later, segregation—ensured that the rule of whites would remain unchallenged. Violence therefore proved a vital tool in the creation of the white man’s West.