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A Square Deal in Lake County: Anderson v. Mathews (1917), California Indian Communities, and Indian Citizenship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2019

Khal Schneider
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Abstract

In 1917, California's Supreme Court upheld the Eastern Pomo man Ethan Anderson's right to vote. The court recognized that Anderson lived and worked like his white neighbors and, most importantly, did not live in “tribal relations” and was subject to local jurisdiction. But Anderson, his lawyers, the opposing counsel, and the court never denied that he was a member of an Indian community. In fact, local authorities and the federal government had long acknowledged that Indian communities existed in Lake County, and they had both legitimized small Indian community landholdings as the homes of self-sufficient Indian laborers. Now, as Indian citizenship seemed to signal to local and federal authorities more claims on the state, both denied responsibility for those communities. Although citizenship seemed to stand as the categorical opposite of “Indians, not taxed,” Anderson's vindicated voting rights was not an end point of a successful program of assimilation, but one aspect of Indians’ ongoing pursuit of community security through their engagements with local and federal authorities.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 263 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2019 

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References

Notes

1 State of California, The Political Code (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney, 1916), 236, 240.

2 Anderson v. Mathews, 174 Cal. 537 (1917).

3 California Supreme Court, Ethan Anderson v. Shafter Mathews (Anderson v. Mathews), “Brief of Petitioner,” Nov. 16, 1916, California State Archives, Sacramento.

4 Unites States Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (ARCIA), 1910, 60; United States Census Office, Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States (Except Alaska) at the Eleventh Census, 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894).

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13 H. B. Churchill to Alexander, Jan. 6, 1916, Records of the Round Valley Agency (RRVA), box 42, RG 75, National Archives at San Francisco (NARASF).

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19 Novak, William J., “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America” in eds. Jacobs, Meg, Novak, William J., and Zelizer, Julian E., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 87–119Google Scholar, 95.

20 On “flat” state power, Thomas Biolsi, “Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle,” American Ethnologist 32:2 (May 2005): 239–59.

21 Ethan Anderson, “Application for Enrollment in a Nonreservation School,” Sept. 30, 1910, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Dickinson University, http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/ (accessed Sept. 30, 2017); Barrett, S. A., “The Ethno-geography of the Pomo and Neighboring Indians,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 6:1 (1908): 186Google Scholar.

22 F. E. Leupp to Frank F. Flint, Jan. 5, 1909, Central Classified Files: California Special Files (California Special), box 9, Record Group (RG) 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (RG 75), National Archives, Washington, DC (NARADC); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Federal Manuscript Census, 1880, Lake County, California.

23 “J. B. McClure to Joe Huse, et al.,” Oct. 21, 1879, Lake County Book of Deeds, vol. 11, p. 228, in Sacramento Area Office, Tribal Group Files, 1915–1972 (TGF), box 13, RG 75, NARASF.

24 McClendon, Sally, “Pomo Basketweavers in the University of Pennsylvania Museum Collection,” Expedition 40:1 (1998): 37–38Google Scholar; Barrett, “Ethno-Geography,” 186–90.

25 Indians of Upper Lake to CIA, Sept. 21, 1893, Special Cases, 1821–1907, box 49, RG 75, NARADC; on kin groups, see Kunkel, P. H., “The Pomo Kin Group and the Political Unit in Aboriginal California,” The Journal of California Anthropology 1:1 (1974): 7–18Google Scholar.

26 Special Agent, Reno to Commissioner of Indian Affairs (CIA), Aug. 13, 1912, RRVA, box 24.

27 Hurtado, Albert L., Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 104–6Google Scholar; Lindsay, Murder State, 215–17, 248; Madley, An American Genocide, 120–27.

28 On the treaties, see Banner, Stuart, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 163–94Google Scholar.

29 On Round Valley, labor, and California Indian communities, William Bauer's, work is indispensible. Bauer, William J., , Jr., We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California's Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

30 Superintendent of the Census, “Population By Race, Sex, and Nativity,” The Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census: Population of the United States by States and Territories, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 379.

31 W. S. Turner to Rev. Burchard, July 23, 1875, RG 75, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1880, National Archives Microfilm 234 (M234), Reel 46.

32 “Petition of Citizens of Lake County,” July 21 and 22, 1875, M234, Reel 46; A. E. Noel to CIA, Aug. 2, 1875. M234, Reel 46; Burchard to CIA, July 30, 1875, RRVA, box 1.

33 McLendon, “Pomo Baskets,” 38.

34 “John Dennison, et al. to … Trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church,” Jan. 16, 1893, Lake County Book of Deeds, 42, p. 411, in TGF, Box 13; M. H. Alexander to E. A. Hutchinson, July 6, 1915, RRVA, box 51.

35 Mathes, Valerie Sherer, Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women's National Indian Association (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012), 180–91Google Scholar, 245; Mathes, “The California Mission Indian Commission of 1891: The Legacy of Helen Hunt Jackson,” California History 72:4 (Winter 1993/94): 338–59; Hyer, Joel R., “‘It Was My Duty to Protect the Indians’: Senator Thomas R. Bard and the Removal of the Cupeños From Warner's Ranch,” Journal of the West 46 (Fall 2007): 32Google Scholar.

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37 Kelsey, Report of the Special Agent, 24–25; HR 16957, The Congressional Record, 59th Cong, 1st sess., 5302; Land Division, Office of Indian Affairs, “Lands Purchased for California Indians with Money Appropriated by the Acts of June 21, 1906 and April 8, 1908,” n.d., Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: Sacramento Area Office, Coded Records Relating to Programs and Administration, 1910–1958, RG 75, NARASF.

38 Schneider, Khal, “Making Indian Land in the Allotment Era,” Western Historical Quarterly 41:4 (Winter 2010): 429–50Google Scholar; Miller, Larisa, “Counting Context: C. E. Kelsey's 1906 Census of Nonreservation Indians in Northern California,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 38:2 (2014): 41–66Google Scholar.

39 C. T. Coggeshall to CIA, Jan. 18, 1911, Records of the Upper-Lake Ukiah Agency (RULUA), RG 75, NARASF.

40 Kelsey to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Dec. 13, 1912, California Special, box 13; Kelsey, “Guidiville Indians,” 1913, TGF, box 19, RG 75, NARASF.

41 Kelsey to CIA, Oct. 31, 1910, Central Classified Files, 1907–1937: Ukiah (CCF), box 1, RG 75, NARASF; Kelsey to CIA, Apr. 24, 1907, California Special, box 1; Kelsey to CIA, May 26, 1911, California Special, box 7; Kelsey to CIA, Oct. 2, 1909, California Special, box 13.

42 “Charles E. Hardisty and Della L. Hardisty to the United States of America,” Jan. 8, 1909, Lake County Book of Deeds, 42, p. 411 in TGF, box 13.

43 Kelsey to CIA, Oct. 31, 1910, California Special, box 7.

44 “Schedule Showing Indians of the Upper Lake Band,” Aug. 17, 1908, and Map of Assignments at Upper Lake, n.d., California Special, box 12.

45 “Robinson Rancheria,” n.d., TGF, box 22.

46 Tanis Thorne, “The Death of Superintendent Stanley and the Cahuila Uprising of 1907–1912,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 24: 2 (2004), 233–58; see also Thorne, El Capitan: Adaptation and Agency on a Southern California Indian Reservation, 1850 to 1937 (Banning, CA: Malki-Bellena Press, 2012), 82–89.

47 Anderson to Walter McConihe, Nov. 29, 1916, RRVA, box 47.

48 On the nationwide end of the “golden age of agriculture,” see Danbom, David B., Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

49 Anderson to McConihe, Nov. 29, 1916, RRVA, box 36.

50 Vaught, David, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 40Google Scholar, 132, 191; “Jesse W. Daw and Edna Daw to the United States of America,” May 20, 1907, deed copy in TGF, box 28.

51 California Development Association (San Francisco), Annual Report, 1910, 41; California Department of Agriculture, Bulletin 10 (1921): 754; Bulletin 11 (1922): 444, 445; Dispatch-Democrat (Ukiah), Feb. 16, 1912, Nov. 27, 1914; Ukiah Republican Press, Dec. 23, 1910, Aug. 25, 1911, Aug. 14, Oct. 16, Oct. 30, 1914, Nov. 5, 1915, Nov. 26, 1915.

52 Eva Schnell to Hutchinson, Jan. 23, 1915, RRVA, box 50.

53 Ukiah Republican Press, April 10, 1908.

54 Ethan Anderson to Hutchinson, Mar. 9, 1916, RRVA, box 44.

55 Ukiah Republican Press, Apr. 16, 1915.

56 John Harris to CIA, Apr. 29, 1909, CCF, box 1.

57 McConihe to CIA, Dec. 21, 1916, RRVA, box 40.

58 Charles Gunter et al. to CIA, Nov. 8, 1913, California Special, box 23.

59 Anderson to McConihe, Nov. 29, 1916, RRVA, box 36; ARCIA 1917, 37–38.

60 CIA to Hutchinson, Nov. 19, 1914, RRVA, box 49; Hutchinson, “Annual Report, 1915,” RRVA, box 37; on Mount Hermon, see Cornelia Taber, California and Her Indian Children (San Jose, CA: Northern California Indian Association, 1911); Mathes, Divinely Guided, 140–45.

61 Emma Alexander to McConihe, Dec. 2, 1916, May 22, 1917, RRVA, box 166.

62 Alexander to Hutchinson, April 29, 1915, RRVA, box 41.

63 Allie Elgin et al. to “Indian Agent,” Nov. 21, 1914, RRVA, box 41.

64 Thomas Wilson to CIA, 1911, RRVA, box 4.

65 Agents investigated adultery as part of the “registration of genealogy” that determined who stood to inherit an allotment or claim other reservation resources. Biolsi, Thomas, “The Birth of the Reservation: Making the Modern Individual Among the Lakota,” American Ethnologist 22:1 (Feb. 1995): 30, 42–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 California, Political Code, 236, 240.

67 Wilson to Duncan, July 18, 1911, RRVA, box 27; Wilson to CIA, Aug. 10, 1911, RRVA, box 4.

68 Wilson to CIA, Apr. 24, 1912, RRVA, box 4.

69 CIA to Hutchinson, Nov. 19, 1914, RRVA, box 49.

70 F. G. Collett to Dorrington, Nov. 29, 1916, Investigative Records of Col. Lafayette Dorington, Special Agent, 1913–1923 (IRDSA), box 2, RG 75, NARASF; T. B. Wilson to Collett, Sept. 16, 1913, RRVA, box 28; Hutchinson to CIA, Jan. 4, 1915, RRVA, box 49; CIA to McConihe, Dec. 27, 1916, RRVA, box 48.

71 United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing: 1910: Reports v. 6, sec. 2, 148–53.

72 Ned Posh to H. Gilchrist, Jan. 29, 1915, RRVA, box 41.

73 Reprinted in Ukiah Republican Press, Feb. 11, 1916.

74 Alexander to Wilson, Aug. 14, 1914, RRVA, box 45.

75 Wilson to Mrs. C.A. Johnson, June 21, 1912, RRVA, box 27; Clardy to CIA, Aug. 18, 1909, RRVA, box 4.

76 Coggeshall to CIA, Sept. 11 and Nov. 26, 1910, Jan. 30 and Apr. 13, 1911, RULUA, box 1; Coggeshall to Kelsey, Aug. 28, 1910, RULUA, Box 1; Coggeshall to Philemon Toepfer, Aug. 17, 1910, RULUA, Box 1; Lake County Bee, June 23, Dec. 22, 1910.

77 Coggeshall to Kate McGee and Mary Jenkins, Nov. 24, 1910, RULUA, box 1.

78 Wilson to Alexander, Sept. 1913, RRVA, box 28.

79 H. B. Churchill to Alexander, Jan. 6, 1916, RRVA, box 42.

80 Hutchinson to Alexander, Jan. 22, 1916, RRVA, box 41.

81 U.S. Webb to Stewart Queen, Jan. 19, 1917, RRVA, box 45; McConihe to Collett, March 30, 1917, RRVA, box 45.

82 “Schedule Showing Indians of the Upper Lake Band,” Aug. 17, 1908, and Map of Assignments at Upper Lake, n.d., California Special, box 12; M. H. Alexander to Hutchinson, July 6, 1915, RRVA, box 51; George Vicente to Indian Defense Association, Feb. 14, 1928, California League for American Indians Records (CLAI), box 8, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Northern California Indian Association, 15th Annual Report (1910) (San Jose, CA: Muirson and Wright, 1910), 13; Ethan Anderson, Sam Allen, Frank Miller, Tom Johnson, and Qunisebo Shiden, Aug. 6, 1915, IRDSA, box 11.

83 Application for Voting Registration to the Lake County Clerk, n.d., IRDSA, box 2; Anderson, “Dear Friend,” n.d., IRDSA, box 2.

84 CIA to Collett, Sept. 22, 1916, IRDSA, box 2.

85 Anderson v. Mathews, “Brief of Petitioner,” Nov. 16, 1916; Anderson v. Mathews, “Points and Authorities for the Defendant,” Dec. 4, 1916.

86 Anderson v. Mathews, “Stipulation of Facts,” Nov. 16, 1916.

87 Robert Duncan to Hutchinson, Oct. 3, 1916, RRVA, box 50; Anderson v. Mathews, “Points and Authorities for the Defendant,” Dec. 4, 1916.

88 Anderson v. Mathews, “Brief of Petitioner,” Nov. 16, 1916.

89 Ethan Anderson v. Shafter Mathews, 174 Cal., 537.

90 Chauncey Shafter Goodrich, “The Legal Status of the California Indian,” California Law Review 14:3 (Mar. 1926): 161, 166, 170.

91 Shafter Mathews to McConihe, June 20, 1917, RRVA, box 47.

92 E. B. Merritt to McConihe, Sept. 21, 1917, RRVA, box 47.

93 Lipps to Martin, April 12, 1933, box 211.

94 Fifty-First Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), 69–71.

95 Anderson to McConihe, Dec. 19, 1916 and April 11, 1917, RRVA, box 47; McConihe to Anderson, July 2, RRVA, box 47.

96 “Constitution and Bylaws for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians of the Big Valley Rancheria,” Jan. 15, 1936, Indian Reorganization Act Era Constitutions and Charters (IRAECC), University of Oklahoma, http://thorpe.ou.edu/IRA.html (accessed Sept. 30, 2017); “Constitution and Bylaws of the Upper Lake Pomo Indian Community, Oct. 22, 1941,” IRAECC; Federal Register, June 29, 1937, 1109.

97 Matal, Joseph D., “A Revisionist History of Indian Country,” Alaska Law Review 14:2 (1997): 283–351Google Scholar; E. H. Coulson, “Map of Indian Reservations in the United States, 1948” (Washington, DC: Office of Indian Affairs, 1958), University of North Texas, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth288638 (accessed Sept. 20, 2017).

98 Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, “Survey of the Conditions of the Indians in the United States,” Dec. 2, 1940, 77th Congress, 1st sess., vol. 38, 22117–118.