As the controversy continues surrounding the ongoing campaign to canonize Junipero Serra, O.F.M., the architect of the Alta California mission system, a small group of scholars is revising the biased, self-serving, and at times inaccurate history of the missions written by the Franciscans and their supporters, which is being used to promote the canonization. The tightly written volume under review is the latest addition to the literature treating Spanish-Mexican-Indian relations in California.
George Harwood Phillips examines the adaptations made by the Yokuts and Miwoks living in the San Joaquin Valley during the 80 years following the Spanish colonization of California. He focuses on patterns of resistance and the restructuring of the region’s economy. A major theme is how the Indians modified their economy by raiding the herds of horses that belonged to the missions, pueblos, and later, ranches in the narrow coastal zone occupied by the Spanish, and using the horses as an item of trade and a source of meat. Phillips argues that the Yokuts and Miwoks adapted in ways that gave them greater independence, and retarded the development of the ranching economy in the Spanish-Mexican coastal zone by seriously reducing the numbers of tame horses. The horse raiding escalated in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Neophytes who had fled the missions assumed a leading role both in the raiding and in resisting Spanish-Mexican incursions into the valley.
Phillips has produced an important study, based on sound scholarship that blends conventional history with ethnohistory. He admirably explains interaction in the San Joaquin Valley from the perspective of the Yokuts, the Miwok, and other Indian groups. However, I wish to offer one concrete criticism that, although significant, does not detract from the solid scholarly contribution that Phillips makes. The author argues that Indian raids on the cattle ranches that were being carved out of former mission lands in the 1830s and 1840s weakened the ranchers’ financial stability, and also left them vulnerable to the expensive and drawn-out process of validating their land titles following the U. S. conquest of California during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).
Phillips relies on qualitative sources that emphasize the damage being done to the ranches by Indian raids, but he does not consult available quantitative sources that record the size of the livestock herds at the missions during much of the period he is concerned with. This evidence in some cases substantiates Phillips’ assertions, but in some cases does not. Phillips also does not take into consideration the possibility of exaggeration in reports of the impact of horse raiding, to generate additional military support from the local government. In a recent article, for example, María Arbeláez shows that Jesuit missionaries stationed in Sonora during the eighteenth century also complained about the loss of livestock and consequent loss of profits to Indian raiders, but mission inventories and reports prepared by the same missionaries did not support the claim of significant losses (Journal of the Southwest 33:3, 1991).
This criticism aside, Phillips has produced an important contribution to the literature on colonial California and Indian responses to the invasion of their lands.
