Thank you Olmanriver.

Olmanriver


I think you know that Estle Beard is one of my heroes. Without the book Genocide and Vendeta I wouldn’t have been able to put together the many verbal tales of the settling of the Long Valley and Round Valley into a cohesive story that finally made sense to me. His book dotted the “I” and crossed the “T”. for me.

About midway through the book, it hit me how horribly brutal the settlement of the west was. Just like many nouveau students of north coast history I wondered, why didn’t they just leave the Indian people alone. So I dug through the information that I already knew about my own folks migration west. Many of my own family was killed by Indians on their way to California. My 3G grandfather Cull and his son being among them. I also had a group of relatives that were attacked in Arizona on their way to California, only in that attack they were the survivors. It was my grandfather Middleton that had the Indian sneak down his chimney in the middle of the night. I’ve heard many fabled stories about that.

All of my relatives on my fathers side originate in California in the 1850’s. My 4G Grandfather Benjamin Taylor was a wagon master that brought the Branscombs to California. He owned a ranch in Sonoma County. My 3ggrandfather Benjamin Branscomb worked a ferry in the Marysville area. Then moved to Sonoma county and started a dairy that sold milk to the booming San Francisco area. Only later did they move to Branscomb California and build the small town with their wealth that they accumulated in Sonoma.

Once the migrants headed to California their die was cast. There was no turning back. The further west they came, the more persistent the Indian attacks on the migrants were. At some point the migrants were past the point of no return. They couldn’t turn back to civilization and make it home, and their desperation began. They had to make it to California, where they felt that there would be safety in numbers.

The safety in numbers that they sought turned out to be blood thirsty miners fighting over gold claims. The “civilization” turned out to be disease ridden filth, with little or no organization. The law was mostly by mob rule. ALL of my family members HAD to leave the Sacramento Valley to live. They had no choice.

Not everybody came to California for gold. They had heard about the great fertile land that could grow crops year around. By the 1850s most of the Sacramento Valley was being ranched, and farmed, by thugs and big time thieves and racketeers. Even the great John Sutter had a brutal and shady side to him. My family chose to move to the Laytonville area, to drive their stake and build themselves a life. They had ever reason to believe that the pony soldiers were going to keep the peace.

Little did they know that the very peace that they expecting from the pony soldiers turned out to be quite the opposite. In the attempt the round up the Indian people and put them on reservations, they only scattered them and caused mass starvation amongst them. The Indian people were hungry and bitter. Just like any human will, they turned against the white man and they felt that eating their cattle and horses was inarguably justified. The settlers needed their cattle for survival. Few settlers were in the class of the great cattle barons of the Sacramento Valley. They had what we would nowadays call an old MacDonald farm. The had a few chickens, they had a milk cow, a pig, and maybe a horse or two. The more successful of them had a few head of cattle that they hoped would bring them some prosperity. A few of those were people like Jack Farley, Jeremiah Lambert and Bob Poe.

When Jack Farley brought the high bred horses from Indiana to California he expected to breed and sell them to make his fortune. The people of Long Valley petitioned the Government for protection against Indian depredations. It was about that time that the pony soldiers left, almost completely, to fight the Civil war. Jack Farley and the ranchers of Round Valley were left with little or no protection. Without doing something about the Indian depredation they would have to leave the country. There would be no surviving without their animals and safety. After petitioning the government with little or no response they organized a group to force the Government hand in protecting them. The government authorized groups like the Eel River Rangers to round up the Indian people and put them on reservations. The Rangers only drove the poor Indian people into worse desperation. They fled in mass to the Long Valley, were they had in the past been treated fairly by the local ranchers.

Coincidently to the local Indian people showing up in Long Valley, a group of marauding Modoc Indians showed up from the north. The Indians banded together and started killing the cattle from local ranches. They killed Jack Farley’s horses. He he had most of his money tied up in them. That formed the mindset that the ranchers had to protect themselves. They took the group that they had already formed. They went after the Indians that had driven the horses to Horse Canyon. The Indians had killed the horses and were busy cutting up the meat when Farley and his group found them. There is rumors that I have heard that the ranchers killed hundreds of Indians. If that was true there would have had to have been far more ranchers than the four or five that have been named. There are still many inconsistencies. Among them, the date that this all happened. I have heard many dates, and I’m sure that it happened in the early 1860’s but I’ve never heard an exact date.

I believe that it must have been like the statement from Olmanrivers article said. “I can imagine Uncle Jack on seeing this--I'll bet he had red crosses in both of his eyes”. They started killing the Indians, at first with no remorse, then soon they started dreading the killing, but they went on to kill most of them. At some point they lost their stomach for the fight. They took the remainder of the Indians to the reservation in Covelo and took the babies home with them and raised them as their own children.

I have heard stories that some of the ranchers suffered great remorse for what they had done, but most steadfastly agreed that they had no choice. I also heard that Jack Farley became a great friend of the “Good Indians” and they had taught him their “Medicine”.

This is a compilation of the stories that I have heard and I have told it much as I heard it. Without justification or comment. I made the statement that the historical accounting was as: “The following story is just the fuzzy recollections of a person recalling stories about Uncle Jack.” To some, it was probably one of the best accounting of what really happened. But, I’ve heard many, many stories. Some much more brutal than this telling, and some that claim the Bloody Run was much exaggerated.

With the great respect that I have for Oldmanriver, I still put the story in the category of “one more story”. But, I want to hear all of them. I have deep gratitude for the research that River has done for the Indian People and my family, and the whole Eel River Valley. His research has been far more important to me than even Estle Beard. River has found deep truths, that I would have never have known without him. I most especially want to thank him for the great and kind things that he has done for the local Indian People. Some of us have the great privilege of knowing him personally. All I can say is you would like him. He walks the walk.