Secret Files

As settlers continued to arrive along the North Coast of California and move in on what had been traditionally Indian lands, trouble when from being jus’ violent confrontations on the local front, to the creation of legal proceedings. This of course left the Native population at a serious disadvantage.

In April 1849, the Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, wrote that the miners realized “it will be absolutely necessary to exterminate the savages before they can labor much longer in the mines with security.” Less than three years later, the newspaper declared the native peoples “must fade before the Saxon race as the cloud in the west before the light and heat of a greater power.” 

The Alta California was owned and edited by Edward Kemble and Edward Gilbert, and began as a weekly in January 1849, becoming the city’s first daily paper in January 1850. In 1867, Mark Twain sent his letters from his tour of the Holy Land to the paper, letters which were later republished as “The Innocents Abroad.”  The paper ceased publication in 1891.

By 1851, the federal government appointed three commissioners to negotiate treaties with the California Indians. By the end of the year, 18 treaties had been negotiated with 139 tribes. 

These treaties set aside 7,488 acres of land strictly for Indian use and amounted to a third of California. During the first two months of 1852, the California Legislature discussed the treaties and concluded the agreements “committed an error in assigning large portions of the richest mineral and agricultural lands to the Indians, who did not appreciate the land’s value.” 

The Legislature instructed the U.S. senators from California to oppose ratification of the treaties and called for the federal government to remove Indians from the state as they had done in other states. President Millard Fillmore submitted the 18 California treaties to the U.S. Senate for ratification. 

The California senators were recognized, and the Senate went into secret session to discuss the treaties. The Senate failed to ratify the treaties during the session, and ordered them placed in secret files, where they remained until 1905. 

Hard to imagine the Senate keeping such secrets.