Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- I The miner's canary
- 2 Aboriginal fishery management
- 3 The Indian fisheries commercialized
- II Sun, wind, and sail, 1850–1910
- III The industrial frontier, 1910–1950
- IV Enclosure of the ocean, 1950–1980
- Conclusion
- Appendixes
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
3 - The Indian fisheries commercialized
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- I The miner's canary
- 2 Aboriginal fishery management
- 3 The Indian fisheries commercialized
- II Sun, wind, and sail, 1850–1910
- III The industrial frontier, 1910–1950
- IV Enclosure of the ocean, 1950–1980
- Conclusion
- Appendixes
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere. –
Felix S. Cohen (1953)The presence of the Indians … as far as it implies the absence of the whites, is the great protection of the supply of the Sacramento salmon.
– Livingston Stone (1872)The obliteration of Indian subsistence economies in California followed the arrival of Europeans with apocalyptic ferocity. During the sixty-five years after the Spanish opened their first mission in 1769, Indian population in the coastal strip between San Diego and Sonoma declined by 75 percent. Epidemic disease and military action under Mexican rule cut further into Indian numbers during the 1830s and 1840s; by the time Alta California fell to the United States, only 150,000 of the original inhabitants remained where more than twice as many had lived just eighty years before.
The scourge intensified under U.S. dominion as miners and farmers pushed into the most remote parts of the state to seek new livelihoods in “virgin” territory. Between 1845 and 1855 alone, two-thirds of the remaining natives lost their lives. By the time the worst of the gold fever had passed, only 50,000 still lived. The Indians were “burst into the air,” wrote Stephen Powers in 1871:
Never before in history has a people been swept away with such terrible swiftness, or appalled into utter and unwhispering silence forever, as were the California Indians … let a tribe complain that the miners muddied their salmon streams, or steal a few packmules, and in twenty days there might not be a soul of them living.
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- The Fisherman's ProblemEcology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980, pp. 41 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986