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Ethnography & Ethnohistory The Establishment of the Reservation The Establishment of the Reservation. The Chemehuevi at Twentynine Palms for many years were never mentioned in the reports of agents sent out by the United States government to visit the Indians of southern California, since they lived in an area between the routes usually used for travel and trade. Their neighbors to the west, on the other hand, were visited by a series of agents assigned to study the situation and report on what should be done about it. Everywhere settlers were squatting on the very spots where Indians had made their homes, near water and the plant and animal resources on which they lived. Various strategies for coping with the problem were suggested, but it was not until the mid-1870s that presidents, under pressure from Eastern reformers, began to set aside reservations on which Indians were invited to make their homes. Some fairly adequate reservations were established, but soon settlers began to complain about so much good land being set aside for people who were, in the opinion of the critics, unable to use it. Squatters began to move onto some of the best lands of the reservations. The fact that most of the reservation land had not been surveyed made it easy to claim that reservation boundaries did not include some of the choice sites on which the squatters moved, sometimes taking over buildings, fields, and livestock belonging to Indian families. In the early 1880s, Helen Hunt Jackson and Abbot Kinney were sent by the U.S. Congress to visit reservations and report back to Washington. Like others who reported on visits to the Indians of the area, they made no mention in their report of the Chemehuevis at Twentynine Palms. Matters came to a head in the late 1880s, when the Office of Indian Affairs ordered that squatters on the Morongo Indian Reservation be removed from the reservation by the county sheriff, whereupon the squatters sued the government. Since the political climate was such that they were apt to win their suits, Congress acted at last on recommendations made in 1883 by Jackson and Kinney. The Mission Indian Commission was established. It was provided with funds to visit southern California reservations and other Indian groups, and to make recommendations for improving the situation. Charles Painter, Albert K. Smiley, and Joseph P. Moore were named to the commission, and proceeded to southern California in 1890. It was they who finally recommended that land be set aside for the Indians at Twentynine Palms. Their report read as follows with respect to the people at Twentynine Palms: This Commission recommends that there be established a reservation known as the Twenty-nine Palms, to consist of the following lands, viz: The South-west quarter of Section thirty-three (33) in Township one (1) North, Range Nine (9) East, S.B.M.; and also the North-west quarter of Section four (4) in Township one (1) South, Range nine (9) East, S.B.M. There are three families here having three houses and some cultivated fields: The head man is Chimahueva Mike. They have plenty of water and can be comfortable here. There is sufficient tillable land for their needs; the balance of the land in the proposed reservation is valuable grazing land. The Indians were in possession of these lands as shown by the field notes as long ago as in 1852 (Mission Indian Commission 1892). At first thought, it seems impossible that any of the commissioners actually visited the land they were setting aside. Had they done so, they surely would have known that 160 acres of land in the desert would not have provided a comfortable living for three families, nor would they have thought there was "plenty" of water. On the other hand, the 1880s were a relatively wet set of years. It was a boom time in San Bernardino and Riverside, where the orange industry was off to a great start. At Palm Springs, orchards planted by settlers were flourishing, and great plans were being made for developing a number of sections. A decade-long drought began in 1894. The orchards died, and the developers grand plans came to nothing. It is possible that Twentynine Palms was green and flourishing in 1891, though it is unlikely that the commissioners went there. The establishment of the reservation, for which the Chemehuevi4 received a patent in 1895, placed them there under the dominion of the Mission Indian Agency. Had they lived closer to the agency, they might have been on the receiving end of occasional donations of food, farm machinery, and seeds. In fact, there is no record of any contact between Indian agents and Twenty-nine Palms until 1908, when Clara True was Indian agent. True saw to it that the reservation was surveyed, and tried to protect its water rights. On January 7, 1908, for example, she wrote the CIA, noting that at Twentynine Palms, "two days out in the desert, the few Indians have for several years not known their exact rights and have suffered cattle depredations by Americans who claim that the spring is not on Indian land. On what little investigation I can make in connection with the many things devolving upon me in the beginning of my work here, it appears that the cattle man may be within legal rights as the reservation is bounded by the San Bernardino Base Line the exact location of which must be determined before the Indians will know whether they have water or not. They have an ancient claim to the water and the intention of the reservation was to protect them but it seems doubtful if this is true (True 1/7/1908). She asked that Mr. Chubbuck of the Indian Irrigation Service to pass judgment on the issue, since he had been there to investigate and knew the problem. 4Some members of the group, at least, were part Serrano. Note the ancestry of Jim Pine, as described in Footnote 5. In later years, True wrote that she had made several expensive trips trying to determine the proper legal boundaries of the reservation, even getting the field notes of Col. Washington, who did an early survey. She noted, however, that they never found it possible to prove that he had made an actual survey, and concluded that he had probably made up the notes "second hand." In the end, she set up "corners" that the surveyor admitted were "probable but not entirely authentic" and claimed the water hole for the Indians (True 5/3/1942). She also discovered that the tribal cemetery was outside the reservation on land belonging to the railroad. She apparently initiated plans for the government to acquire the cemetery land for them by trade with the railroad. They received this land in 1911 (Trafzer 1997:83-84). Neglect by the Mission Indian Agency may have saved the Twenty-nine Palms people from pressure to allot the land to individuals. Indians at Morongo Indian Reservation, with which the Twenty-nine Palms people were probably in fairly close contact, having relatives who lived there, fought allotment fiercely, as did the other Coachella Valley Reservations. Morongo was finally allotted in the 1920s, but the Twenty-nine Palms people were able to continue owning their land in common (1997:83-84). From the point of view of the Twenty-nine Palms people now, as expressed by Trafzer et al. (1997), the establishment of the reservation transferred to the Indians 160 acres of marginal farm land in return for hundreds of thousands of acres rich in mineral and other resources that had been theirs in traditional times and were stolen by individual Americans with government concurrence. Even though it had probably become awkward for them to exercise their traditional custom of visiting places in what is now Joshua Tree National Park when it was time to harvest valued resources, their right to do so was probably implicit in the situation until the reservation was set aside. Now this right was restricted. In 1908, most of the people who then remained at Twenty-nine Palms Reservation moved to Morongo Reservation in the wake of the Office of Indian Affairs' determination that all Indian children should go to school. In this instance, they were forcibly enrolled at St. Boniface in Banning. Jim and Matilda Pine,5 a number of whose children were buried in the cemetery there, remained at Twenty-nine Palms, even though Clara True offered to get them land at Banning, Morongo Reservation or Mission Creek Reservation that was better for agriculture (Trafzer et al. 1997:85) 5Ramon has told the story of Jim Pine, whose father was Serrano: 'Akuuki' was the name of our relative long ago. ('Akuuki' also means 'ancestor'). But he was not a close relative of ours. He was a distant relative, but we called him 'Akuuki' long ago. He was from Twentynine Palms. That was his territory. He was the only one left there. (They probably left Twentynine Palms around 1909). He moved away from there. They just took it all. Today the Americans live there. They all live there. That was his territory. There also used to be many Serrano living there. They used to have an extensive territory. Nowadays no one lives there. They all turned into something else (Mexicans or white people) long ago. Nowadays many people like Mexicans and others live there today. The white people have nice houses there. They are very big. There is a road through there. It is very beautiful there now. That land looks different now. That was his home long ago, the home of 'Akuuki', as we called him. He lived there ... he married a Cahuilla woman. He took a wife. Her name was Mathilde. 'Akuuki' had a father who was Serrano. His father, the father of 'Akuuki' was a Mamaytam Maarrênga 'yam Serrano. And his mother was a Chemehuevi or something. Long ago that man 'Akuuki ' could speak Chemehuevi. And he also must have known how to speak his father's language (Serrano). He also spoke that. He spoke Serrano. He also used to sing in Serrano long ago. I don't know how long ago this was. And then he moved over here. He lived here for a little while. Then he moved to Palm Springs. He went and died there (and is buried in Palm Springs). I don't know how long his wife lived after that. And then she too died. She is buried here at Morongo, as they say. Mathilde was his wife. She is buried here. That is all (Ramon and Elliot 2000:281-282). |
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