Chapter Thirteen

Agreements between governments meant little to the inhabitants of the lands Mexico ceded to the United States. The people were isolated as they had always been. Few of the men who created the agreements had ever visited the frontier, nor did they wish to do so. Few of them understood the people or the needs of the frontier; their main concern was the relationship between officials in Mexico City and Washington, D.C. The agreements could solve conflicts between governments, they could not solve the growing personal conflict between Mexican American and Anglo American in the ceded territory.

Anglos flooded into the territory that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred to the United States. Their way had been prepared by the thousands of American settlers who had lived in the territory for a generation or more. But unlike earlier colonists, these new settlers came as conquerors. In most areas they were vastly outnumbered by Mexicans who had recently been given citizenship and, supposedly, equal rights. The Anglo settlers most likely felt insecure as a minority and so they, the conquerors, setout to subdue the conquered. Mexican Americans soon found that they were discriminated against and treated like aliens in lands they felt rightfully be longed to them. Their land was taker from them; their political power, or the potential for it, usurped, and their social position threatened.

Only in New Mexico did the Mexican Americans retain the veneer of their prewar prominence. And even in New Mexico lands which had been in families for centuries soon began to fall into Anglo hands-the traditional owners un able to document ownership or unable t( pay the heavy taxes charged against them. In many instances unscrupulous Americans systematically set out to separate people from their land for their own profit and power. Even the U.S. government was less than fair as it set out to acquire land for the public domain Throughout most of the Southwest, the Mexicans were supplanted, left without the most menial tasks. A new stereotype emerged-a stereotype of the Mexican American as an unskilled worker, uninterested and incapable in politics or education.

As we have seen, Anglos on the frontier had frequently demonstrated feelings of superiority toward the Mexicans. Their arrogance engendered feelings of hostility and bitterness among Mexicans who were the target of Anglo prejudice. Mutual animosity was increased by the transfer of Anglo prejudice against Negroes to the Mexican Americans. This happened early in Texas, where American settlers brought black slaves with them to the new colonies. The prevailing attitude was summed up by an Anglo Texan when he stated in 1856: "The people are as bigoted and ignorant as the devil's grandchildren. They haven't even the capacities of my black boy.... You can't drive them out, because there ain't nowhere to drive 'em... and it'll be fifty years before you can outvote 'em" (Forbes, 1964: p. 17).

Not infrequently, American immigrants did try to drive Mexicans out of the territory as they had driven out the Indians. In 1853, a "citizen's committee" of Austin, Texas, forced twenty-five Mexican families out of town (Forbes, 1964: p.86). By 1856, there were no more than three hundred Mexican families in all of Arizona-a substantial reduction even in such a sparsely populated region (McWilliams, 1949: p.82).

After the Civil War, prejudice became all the more prevalent. A large number of men and women, loyal to the defeated Confederacy, fled to the territories of the Mexican Cession-especially to Texas and Arizona. These southern immigrants treated the Mexican American with contempt. They saw a chance to create an all-white colony in unsettled Arizona. The Mexican Americans were subjected to new extremes of discrimination. Governments in Arizona went so far as to pass ordinances outlawing Mexican fiestas which had been guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In the midst of growing hostility and bitterness, a new society began to develop in the Southwest. Like the society of post-conquest Mexico and the society of the same frontier three centuries earlier, it was born of conflict between two peoples. And like those earlier societies, the conflict would lead to a unique fusion of cultures-a fusion often overlooked by those who see only the existing conflict. The meeting of Mexicans and Anglos changed the lifestyle and culture of both. The new society began to emerge in the violence of the postwar period and matured with the building of an economic empire-the New Southwest.

California: Forty-Niners

Events in California provide a dramatic example of the processes that created the New Southwest. The discovery of gold in California-the treasure that had eluded Spanish explorers and Mexican settlers for so many centuries-did little to ease the tensions between Mexico and the United States. The gold of American California was of no value to Mexico. But its discovery and the subsequent gold rush did much to mold the new society.

Small amounts of precious metals had been found throughout the frontier regions from the earliest days of Spanish settlement. The Spaniards, and later the Mexicans, operated a highly profitable mercury mine at New Almaden (near San Jose) in California. Arizona was known to have rich silver deposits and only the ferocity of the local Indians had prevented the development of these mines. Settlers in New Mexico and California continually panned the rivers and streams, finding small quantities of gold. The search for gold had provided the initial motivation behind the settlement of the bleak desert of New Mexico. It began in earnest when Juan de Oñate led his colonists to a new home on the shores of the Rio Grande. But neither Oñate nor any of the men who followed him found the mythical treasure that would have ended forever the Spanish crown's multiplying financial worries. The amounts discovered never seemed to be sufficient to meet the needs of governments who sponsored the exploration. Reportedly, a Mexican herdsman named Francisco L6pez discovered sizable quantities of gold near Los Angeles in 1842 (McWilliams, 1949: p.134). But the real bonanza continued to elude the Mexicans as it had the Spanish.

Then, in the winter of 1848, James Marshall contracted to build a sawmill for John Sutter's settlement in the Sacramento Valley. On January 24, he noticed some shiny yellow rocks in the millrace that ran from the river to the mill. On closer examination, the rocks proved to be gold nuggets and there were more-many more. The mother lode, the richest gold-bearing area the world has yet known, had been discovered.

Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the discovery a secret. In Mexico City, the treaty to end the war was still being negotiated. The two men believed that if the knowledge of gold in California leaked out, Mexico would be unwilling to sign away her rights to the province and the peace would be jeopardized. Moreover, they were selfish; they did not want to share the fortune the gold would bring. They succeeded for a few days-long enough for Mexico to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But it was futile to expect such a discovery to remain secret. The news was spread by word of mouth, first among the families of the Sacramento Valley and later in cities all over the continent. Newspapers picked up the tale and published the news. Soon a full-scale gold rush was on.

Men came to California from all over the world to claim a share of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of gold. The population grew rapidly. In 1848 there were only an estimated 15,000 non-Indians in all of California (Cleland, 1962: p. 134). A federal census of 1850, while most certainly inaccurate, placed the population at 93,000 and a state census two years later counted 260,000 non-Indian Californians (ibid). Almost without exception, the newcomers headed for the gold fields.

The first immigrants, Chilean and Peruvian miners, sailed up the Pacific Coast and arrived in the summer of 1848 (McWilliams, 1949: p. 127). They were soon followed by miners from Sonora in Mexico. Before long, men from Europe and the eastern United States began to head for California. They faced a long journey and a difficult one, no matter which route they chose. They could travel overland, across the North American continent, but the journey took many months (giving other gold prospectors a head start) and the travelers faced constant danger of attack as they passed through Indian territories. At the other extreme, the gold prospectors could sail south from New York, around the tip of South America and up the Pacific Coast to California. But the Straits of Magellan made for dangerous sailing and the journey often took longer than the overland route. A few adventurous souls crossed the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico, where they faced harassment by Mexican officials (chapter 12), the dangers of malaria and yellow fever and an unpleasant trip through unfamiliar jungle and across hard-to-scale plateaus.

It soon became apparent that the Isthmus of Panama offered the best route to California. Prospective miners sailed from East Coast ports to Panama and trekked across the narrow strip of land uniting two continents. Once on the Pacific side, they secured passage on a ship bound for California. Greedy men fought and even killed for hard-to-get space on the ships. Many of the less ferocious were stranded for weeks, even months, in hot and humid Panama where malaria was a constant threat and boredom dulled their spirits.

The Anglos who finally reached California were tough, aggressive men, somewhat reminiscent of the fur trappers of an earlier era. They flooded into the territory and soon outnumbered the Spanish-speaking miners who had preceded them. Initially, the Anglos were at a disadvantage in the gold fields. Whereas some Spanish-speaking immigrants brought mining skills with them, the Anglo prospectors had little or no mining experience. They were mostly young men, some barely out of their teens. They had worked at various trades except mining, and so they had to learn that skill from the Spanish-speaking miners. In this way they learned of the batea, a flat-bottomed pan with sloping sides used to take gold from the rivers and streams. Later, when large gold deposits were discovered and miners began to take gold from dry mines, the Anglos learned of the arrastra, a mill that pulverized rock so that the gold could be removed from quartz. And they learned of using mercury to refine the gold-the same patio process that the Spaniards had used to refine silver three centuries earlier.

Thus the success of California mining was directly linked to the knowledge imparted by Mexican and South American miners. Even California mining law followed the Spanish and Mexican traditions, in that a man's right to a property depended not on purchase but on the discovery and development of a mine: merely "staking a claim" and working it established ownership of the land.

Anglo prospectors probably resented their dependence on the knowledge and techniques of Spanish-speaking miners. Such dependence must have been a blow to the pride of men who considered themselves superior to the men who taught them. Then too, the Anglos saw the Mexicans-and they considered all Spanish-speaking people as Mexicans-as undesirable competition in this matter of making one's fortune. They claimed that California was American now and the yield of its gold fields belonged solely to Americans. The Mexicans, on the other hand, were not willing to give up the claims they had staked and the profitable mines they had developed.

For a time the conflict seethed beneath the surface. The two groups were separated by distance, as Spanish-speaking miners had concentrated in the southern part of the mother lode and Anglos in the northern part. But eventually, the Anglos began to invade the southern mines, forcing a confrontation. When California passed a discriminatory foreign-miners' tax, compelling all who were not American citizens to pay heavier taxes on their claims and on the yield of their mines, violence erupted. Mexican miners revolted, expressing in their actions all the pent-up bitterness and hostility they felt. The Anglos, superior in numbers, retaliated with equal violence. During the next few years, scores of Mexican miners were lynched and murdered. Many of the survivors abandoned their claims and fled.

Those who remained in the mother lode found new barriers raised against them. Mining camps were split into two sections, Mexican and American. Segregation had come to the gold fields. From that time on, Mexican and Anglo miners regarded each other as enemies. The contradiction of this trend could be seen in isolated camps. Mexican-driven mule trains brought supplies to the communities. Anglo miners greeted the Mexican drivers as the dearest of friends. The discrimination and mutual hostility of the more densely populated mining towns was unknown.

The gold rush affected all of California, not just the mother lode. The prosperity of the area certainly meant that California was granted statehood earlier than it would have been had gold not made the territory so profitable. This served to make the transition to American rule easier for many wealthy Californians who had an opportunity to participate in forming the new government. The citizens of California went over the head of their military governor and called a convention to draft a state constitution. Among the delegates were men like Mariano Vallejo, Jose Antonio Carrillo and Pablo de la Guerra-all wealthy ranchers. The constitution was ratified by popular vote in November 1849, and California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850.

More important, the focal point of the new state shifted from south to north with the gold rush. San Francisco was transformed almost overnight into a sprawling and boisterous city. It was the port of entry for all those mad dreamers who rushed to California in search of gold. New arrivals set up their tents on the hills or built temporary shelters from castoff wood. From a distance, this San Francisco must have looked more like a huge army encampment than an established city. Permanent housing was in great demand and real estate values and rents soared. It cost as much as a thousand dollars a month to rent one room (Cleland, 1962: p. 143). San Francisco pulsated with activity; it soon became the new cultural center of California and the new crime capital as well. It developed a reputation for wicked-ness that lived on for a century after the gold rush ended.

Cattle Barons

In southern California, previously thriving towns were virtually abandoned. But the ranches of the area flourished. The food needs of the gold fields proved an economic boost to hundreds of Mexican-American ranchers. Mushrooming populations created a tremendous demand for meat in the gold country. Ranchers, driving their cattle north, soon discovered that they could demand and receive anywhere from twenty dollars to a hundred dollars a head (Cleland, 1962: p. 150). Wealth was new to most of the ranchers, who for years had struggled just to survive. Suddenly, many of the ranchers began to spend everything they earned. They lavishly adorned their homes-in the manner of the hacendados two centuries earlier. They spent fantastic sums of money on their clothing-as much as three thousand dollars for a single outfit-giving rise to the statement that the rancher "wore his whole rancho on his back." They continued to live from day to day, giving little thought to the future. They achieved great heights and when the bubble burst they had a long distance to fall.

The bubble did burst, and very soon. Cattle ranchers in the plains states began to ship beef to California. It was of better quality than that offered by southern California ranchers. Moreover, it was cheaper, for the midwestern promoters knew they would have to undercut the price of California cattle in order to sell. Soon the demand for local beef dwindled and died. By 1853, the California ranchers could not give their beef away in the mining areas. The ranchers, reduced to poverty, found that nature also conspired against them. In 1861 floods killed thousands of head of livestock (Cleland, 1962: p.156). The wet year was followed by two years of drought, which may have killed up to three million cattle (McWilliams, 1949: p.91). During these same years, swarms of locusts devastated the pastures.

This series of catastrophes ruined many of the ranchers. It furthered the breakup of the great land grants. The process had begun shortly after the end of the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo forced the United States to recognize the legitimate land titles of Mexican Americans. But the Federal Land Grant Act of 1851 violated the spirit of the treaty. It ordered that all land titles held under Spanish or Mexican grants must be submitted to a board for verification and stated that claims not submitted within two years would be automatically forfeited. California, with its rich agricultural lands, was the chief target of this act. Between 1852 and 1857 the board examined more than eight hundred claims, involving some twelve million acres of land (Cleland, 1962: p. 151). Of these, five hundred were approved; the remainder, either rejected or withdrawn, became the property of the U.S. government and were sold at auction to the highest bidder.

Verifying a claim was a long, involved process, for most of the grants were vaguely described, seldom recorded on paper, fragmented by inheritance. Many of those who could verify their title to the land were ruined by the expense of doing so. If they managed to avoid bankruptcy and keep their land, the ranchers faced stiff, unrealistic laws which were designed to force them off the land. In the early 1870s, a new law compelled them to fence their property, thus ending the tradition of the open range and imposing on the rancher the added burden of buying feed for the livestock. In 1886, the California Supreme Court further injured the ranchers by upholding the English law of riparian water rights-that is, the law proclaiming water is owned by the individual landowner rather than by the community. It meant that an owner could dam up the water, literally parching his neighbor, who was often forced to sell his land for next to nothing.

These laws, combined with increasingly heavy taxes, completed the destruction of Mexican-American ranchers in southern California. Only a very few held on. Most lost their land-which was bought at low cost by Anglo speculators-and were left to drift, aimless and poverty-stricken. It was a story repeated time and again across the frontier.

A Violent Land

The result was hostility, bitterness and violence. Lawlessness was a common state of affairs in the years following the war. Both Mexicans and Anglos turned to violence to vent their anger-violence directed against their own groups as well as against each other. Robbery, murder, torture, intimidation were daily occurrences in nearly every town. For a time, the mining camps of California held the dubious record of being the most violent communities in the land. They attracted criminal elements from many countries. They offered asylum and anonymity far from the reach of police in New York or Mexico City, London or Buenos Aires. San Francisco, the gold rush port of entry, was notorious for its gambling dens and saloons and boasted an appallingly high crime rate. Arson was common in the mining areas and devastating fires raged through mining camps. In 1851, fire completely gutted Stockton, and a year later, a large part of Sacramento burned to the ground (Cleland, 1962: p .142).

In many of these towns, earful citizens, in desperation, took the law into their own hands. As early as 1849, citizens of San Francisco formed a court and seized and tried the leaders of one lawless band. In 1851, the first vigilance committee was formed. Its members, the vigilantes, acted as a sort of citizens' police force. They ran down criminals, real or imagined, and brought them to trial before the committee. The vigilance committee pronounced sentences and carried them out. It executed some criminals, exiled others, and jailed or whipped still others. In time, the vigilance committee became almost as fearsome as the lawless elements.

Lawless men among the Anglo immigrants had their counterparts among Mexican elements of frontier society. Some Mexicans also took the law into their own hands. They were feared, as bandits, by both the Mexican and Anglo-American citizens of the borderlands. The governments of both Mexico and the United States sent troops to track down the Mexican outlaws. But the bandits were usually successful in eluding their pursuers. Some earned fame as folk heroes in the history of the Southwest.

Joaquin Murieta was such a person. With his lieutenant, Three-Fingered Jack, Murieta terrorized the Mexican population of southern California ranches and towns from 1851 to 1853. He was eventually killed in an ambush. His death reduced the terror in the region but by no means ended it.

Joaquin Murieta

In the 1850s a Mexican-American bandit-hero roamed through Calaveras County in California. His name was Joaquin Murieta. According to legend Murieta had been a peaceful gold miner until Anglos jumped his claim and killed his brother.

In his attempt to avenge himself on the "gringos," Murieta was soon credited with nearly every crime committed in California. He was often compared to Robin Hood. However, his activities often brought retaliation against innocent Mexican Americans.

The California legislature posted a $1,000.00 reward for his capture and sent a special force to track him down. After months of chasing bandits across the mining region the rangers killed a Mexican American who was thought to be Joaquin Murieta, although there was some question as to the identity of the dead man.

Texas: The Lawless Society

The entire frontier was a lawless place in the aftermath of the Mexican American War. But Texas experienced the most severe eruptions of violence of any of the territories.
Tensions, always so much a part of Texan history, came to a head with the so-called Cart War of 1857. Mexican ox carts had been hauling several million dollars worth of goods a year between San Antonio in Texas, and Chihuahua, Mexico. Anglo Texans, wanting to take over the lucrative trade, systematically tried to force the Mexicans out of business. They harassed the cart trains and stole the goods. Eventually, a few of the more persistent cart drivers were killed. The Mexican government protested and the Cart War ended abruptly when U.S. troops began to escort and protect the carts. The incident, short-lived but brutal, added to the existing taste of bitterness.

But violence continued to disrupt Texas. In July 1859, a Brownsville deputy sheriff arrested a Mexican American who was a vaquero on the ranch of the Cortina family. Juan Cortina saw the arrest and the beating and chose to avenge it. He shot and wounded the deputy and freed the prisoners from the local jail.

In 1877, on the heels of Cortina's capture, still another war broke out-the Salt War. The difficulty arose over a salt mine, located a hundred miles east of El Paso. For years, the mine had been worked by Mexicans and Mexican Americans and the workers had been allowed to gather, without charge, enough salt for their personal needs. But the mine changed hands and its new owners, Anglo entrepreneurs, decided to charge for the salt. The news was greeted by threats of assassination and accusations of discrimination. When the Texan who claimed ownership of the mine killed an Italian politician who was fighting for the rights of the salt gatherers, the Mexicans revolted. An angry mob killed three Anglos and caused thousands of dollars worth of damage. The Anglos, in retaliation, killed many Mexicans. The revolt was futile, for in the end the Mexicans had to pay for the salt they gathered. But it was typical of the Mexican-American experience in the years following their adoption as American citizens.

Mexican Americans and Anglos shared the responsibility for the violence that plagued the frontier following the Mexican-American War. However, there can be no doubt but that the Mexican Americans were frequently pushed into violent actions as a last resort as they became victims of a discriminatory and hence oppressive Anglo society. They were soon outnumbered and out powered. As a minority in his own homeland, the Mexican American became fair game-an appropriate scapegoat to take the blame for lawlessness and an appropriate target for further violence. As we have seen, the Anglos drove the Indians out of Texas, or exterminated them. They tried to drive Mexicans out of Arizona and Texan towns. They also found means of running Mexican ranchers off their lands in Texas, New Mexico, and California and there harassed the Spanish-speaking miners.

These tactics were not enough to satisfy people bent on completely subduing the Mexican Americans. After mid-century, lynching became a common outlet for anti-Mexican sentiment, justified, according to its adherents, as the only means of dealing with Mexican banditry. The vigilance committees of California and the Texas Rangers gave lynching a semiofficial status-an aura of official support for this most lawless act. The tragedy was that many victims were labeled as bandits and then were lynched for minor crimes or crimes they had not committed at all. The Texas Rangers became famous for their wanton killing and lynching of innocent Indians and Mexican Americans.

Anglo immigrants to the territory of the Mexican Cession made a conscious effort to rid the territory of most Indians and Mexican Americans and to reduce the remaining population to a fearful state. But these same Anglos soon found that they needed the Mexican American, for he was to be the backbone of the economy that emerged in the New Southwest-the backbone of an agricultural empire.

The New Economy

The agricultural empire began to develop in the years immediately following the Civil War. It was the direct result of the urbanization of the Atlantic seaboard. Industry drew thousands of Americans to the cities. Small farms were abandoned-the very farms that had long supplied meat and vegetables to urban markets-and the household gardens that most families had maintained disappeared. The cities, forerunners of the sprawling megalopolis, could not provide food, and traditional sources were drying up.

Some areas of the Mexican Cession boasted ideal agricultural land: particularly East Texas and the central valley of California. Irrigation promised to reclaim thousands of acres in other regions. A few men saw that these regions had the potential for feeding the nation. They saw that they could build immense fortunes from agriculture, if only a few problems could be solved.

The first problem was to find a means of transporting agricultural products from the frontier to distant cities. This need added impetus to the demand that railroads be built to connect the two extremes of the continent. Soon, the plan was put into action. But the building of a railroad across the Southwest created a tremendous demand for labor. That labor was provided by Mexican Americans. Most of these laborers living on or having been separated from their land, worked for wages on the construction of the railroad. This same course would solve the second problem: where to get enough labor to meet the needs of large-scale commercial agriculture. For when the railroad was finished in the 1880s, few of the men who had worked on it could return to their old way of life. Instead, they sought jobs on the new commercial farms or in the mines.

There were still problems to be solved. Railroads offered a means of transportation, but until the refrigerator car was introduced, the produce of the southwestern farms often spoiled before it reached the distant cities. Moreover, the Southwest, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, was sparsely populated as it always had been. The existing labor supply was not large enough to grow and harvest the volume of crops demanded by eastern cities. Thus commercial agriculture developed slowly; only the introduction of a large body of cheap labor would get it off the ground.

By the end of the century the outlines of the dominant new economy were evident-an agricultural economy, with farms owned by Anglos and based on Mexican labor.

REFERENCES

Cleland, Robert Glass. From Wikierness to Empire: A History of California. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1962.

Forbes, Jack D. The Indians in Amesica's Past. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

McWilliams, Carey. North from Mexico. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949.

Samora, Julian, Joe Bernal, and Albert Pena. Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas
Rangers. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.