California Standoff: Miners, Indians and Farmers at War 1850-1865

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Description

Butte County mining camps and foothill farms were an active front within the California Indian wars. The use of centuries-old tribal tactics, Butte Creeks, the Mountain Maidu tribelets’ warriors, resisted settlers’ seizures in their territories. Making a strategic shift, in 1857, they acquired bases within the neighboring Yahi’s Deer Creek Canyon. They merged with renegades and Yahi fighters, known as Mill Creeks, whose raids had terrified Maidu and Tehama County farmers through the mid-1850s. Meanwhile, quarrels between miners and farmers and with John Bidwell continued as Civil War loyalties undermined unity against the Indian raiders, now out of Deer Creek. In 1863, Bidwell urged the Interior Department to expunge Butte County of the entire Maidu—with the exception of his own workers, most commonly Mechoopda Maidu. After centuries of self-governance, this independent tribelet needed to labor for him on their very own historic territory. A couple of Mechoopdas, remembering the dignity of autonomy and self-sufficiency, joined in Mountain Maidu raids on Bidwell’s ranch. Bloody Butte County conflicts culminated in 1865 with that county’s final round of Indians’ and settlers’ mutual retaliatory killings.

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