Indian Labor In San Diego County, California, 1850-1900
By : Richard L. Carrico
Florence C., Shipek
Documentation of Indian wage labor in California has focused largely on the Central Valley, northern California, or metropolitan areas, particularly Los Angeles (Hurtado 1982, 1988b; Phillips 1980). With the exception of passing mention in the historical literature or as a section within a larger study, Indian labor in San Diego County has been neglected (Carrico 1990; Carrico 1985; Shipek 1977). The region comprising pre?1907 San Diego County embraced more than sixteen thousand square miles, with more acreage than Connecticut and Massachusetts combined. The role of Indian labor over such a large area warrants more detailed study.
The experience of San Diego County Indians varied from those Indians affected by the fur trade of the Great Lakes, the land rushes on the Great Plains, and the gold rush in northern California. Despite a US. –era population decline from about ten thousand in 1850 to about one thousand five hundred in 1900 (Shipek 1977, 1986), the Indian tribes of San Diego County played a varied and complex role in the economic structure of the county during that period. San Diego County included large portions of what are now Riverside and Imperial Counties and encompassed four distinct tribes: the Takic?speaking Luiseños, Cahuillas, and Cupeños of the north county region and the Yuman?speaking Kumeyaays, who were more southerly. As laborers tribal members continued to be the primary supply of labor to the Anglo?Americans, just as they had been earlier for the Spaniards and Mexicans. To a large degree it was the entry into the wage labor economy that allowed many Indians to persevere and persist. Their exchange of labor for food, supplies, and cash was a well?devised survival mechanism, not a sporadic activity.
By the time of California statehood in 1850 the Indians of San Diego County who had been in contact with the missions had developed a variety of adaptive mechanisms for dealing with the growing Anglo-American population of the region. Unlike most of the Spanish California missions, both San Diego and San Luis Rey Missions lacked sufficient land and water for agriculture near the missions and were unable to congregate the converted Indians (Shipek 1977, 1982). Instead, members of each band were brought to the mission for training and baptism. They then returned to their home villages, coming back to the two missions as a rotating labor force and for special ceremonies. The initial Spanish need for a large Indian labor force to construct the San Diego Mission and the Presidio (and later, Mission San Luis Rey) gave way to a reduced workforce. The Native people kept at the mission were those trained as craftsmen, unmarried girls and women, the sick and elderly, and those whose home territory had been occupied by these missions (Shipek 1977, 1982). At San Diego the Presidio also kept a Kumeyaay labor force, often drawing from a pool of imprisoned people. In the rugged mountains the southern Kumeyaays kept the Spaniards out of their homelands and close to the coast so that few southern inland Kumeyaays spent time at the mission (Shipek 1982, 1986).
In northern San Diego County the Luiseños and Cupeños had undergone a more benign experience with the Spaniards than that of their southern counterparts, the Kumeyaays at San Diego Mission (or even of the northern section of their tribe at San Juan Capistrano; Shipek 1977). In the seven decades following the founding of Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, members of traditional Luiseño leadership families served as the midlevel managers or middlemen between the mission and Luiseño bands. Pablo Tac, a Luiseño born at Mission San Luis Rey in about 1822, wrote in 1835 that the Spaniards appointed leaders "from the people themselves that knew how to speak Spanish more than the others and were better than the others in their customs" (Hewes 1952, 103). By learning the language of the intruders and accepting some elements of Spanish culture, the Luiseños were able to accommodate the mission while retaining most of their culture.
After the end of the Spanish empire and the collapse of the colonial system with mission secularization under Mexican control, both the Luiseños and Kumeyaays were effective in keeping the Mexicans from using the interior of southern California. Both tribes refused to be unpaid laborers for the Mexican rancheros and townspeople, and most abandoned the coastal strip. Both tribes also resisted the efforts of the rancheros and corrupt officials to control them and take their land. The tribes continued their long tradition of plant husbandry combined with cultivation of corn, beans, and squash in the mountains (and for the Kumeyaays, the desert also). To these foods they added wheat, watermelons, olive and Spanish fruit trees, and grape species, as well as domestic animals (dairy cows, cattle, sheep, horses, burros, pigs, and chickens).
The Kumeyaays attacked whenever a Mexican ranchero attempted to use any of the interior valleys for grazing cattle. Only those who lived at the coast or those in the more open inland valleys of northern Kumeyaay territory had learned Spanish and been trained in animal husbandry. By contrast, the Luiseño leaders first sent petitions and wrote protests to Mexican officials about the more abusive Mexican mayordomos. The Mexican officials interpreted these protests as the start of a revolt, and for fear of an inland uprising the Mexican rancheros clung primarily to their coastal lands.
Furthermore, of the twenty?one Indian land grants in Mexican California, seven were to Luiseños. The Cupeños, farthest inland of the Mission San Luis Rey jurisdiction, had the same treatment as the Luiseños and the same training. This training and the Luiseño petitions indicate that the Luiseño leaders had developed greater facility in dealing with the Mexicans as a result of unique training and treatment under Fray Antonio Peyri at Mission San Luis Rey (Shipek 1977). From this position the Luiseños and the Cupeños were in a more favorable position to deal with the entering Anglo?Americans.
With the entrance into California of the US. Army under Stephen Watts Kearney, followed by Anglo?American settlers, those bands along the emigrant trails began increasing their wheat, corn, and other plantings to sell food supplies to the emerging market of soldiers and emigrants I For those bands living near or along these overland routes, there was a short period of prosperity as the Luiseños, Cupeños, and northern Kumeyaays marketed their produce to the travelers or brought it into the burgeoning towns (Shipek 1977). The ability of the Cupeños to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by emigration was noted by judge Benjamin Hayes as early as January 1850, when he reported that they had planted extra. acreage of wheat, "induced probably by the demands of emigration" (Wolcott 1929, 59). In their efforts to supply a newly created market, the Luiseños and Cupeños were no less the entrepreneurs than the better?documented Pimas and Maricopas of Arizona, who developed a similar adaptive strategy to cope with the influx of emigrants across their lands (Harris 1960, 80?82; Hayden 1965). In fact, in 1849 would?be gold miner and argonaut Benjamin Butler Harris (1960, 95), having just passed through Pima territory, where he was fed and purchased foodstuffs, favorably compared the Cupeños to the Pimas.
The Indians of the inland southern mountain areas were not afforded such an opportunity at this time. Those mountains and valleys were not entered by settlers until about 1867, after the end of the Civil War. There was no road through the region until the stage road was built in 1869. The primary rush into these mountains began after the 1870 discovery of gold in the Cuyamacas (Shipek 1988, 1991).
Along the main roads and near the coast emigrants, dissatisfied with purchasing food and supplies from Indians, coveted the productive farms for themselves. Some asked to rent a piece, and the Indians, seeking further economic opportunity, obliged. After paying rent for a couple of years, some settlers filed a homestead document claiming all of the improvements as their own, including twenty? and thirty?year?old fruit trees and vines (Shipek 1988). In 1851 Congress passed an act creating the State Lands Commission which was c harged with examining Mexican land titles. This commission ignored its explicit instructions to seek out and determine Indian land rights, even though many papers concerning Indian land titles were sent to the commission (Shipek 1977, 1988). Another more direct method of acquisition of Indian land was outright appropriation, often by force. When Luiseño villagers left Pejamo, near Temecula, for their summer rounds, local whites entered the village, set fire to the homes, and took possession of the water supply and fields. In spite of protests from the Indians and their agent, William E. Lovett, the whites retained control of the land (California State Legislature 1866).
As the Luiseños and Kumeyaays lost their crop and grazing lands, and many of their central village areas, they turned to wage labor for sustenance. Because the Cupeños were on a major inland Mexican land grant and had filed a case in court, they were able to hold their crop lands longer than many Luiseños and Kumeyaays. They turned to a combination of wage labor and running the hot springs as a spa for visitors. By contrast, land loss occurred almost immediately near the coast, and the loss gradually spread inland over the next thirty to forty years. When executive order reservations were established in December 1875, the Luiseños and northern Kumeyaays who had worked for and cooperated with ranch owners, and had become better known, received modest tracts of land (Shipek 1988). Luiseño and northern Kumeyaay leaders played an active role in securing lands by retaining attorneys and pressing Indian agents to make their case before the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). These Indians subsequently received moderately sized tracts of land (Carrico 1990, 75?88).
In contrast. with the Luiseños, Cupeños, and northern Kumeyaays, who had learned Spanish, viniculture, and animal husbandry at the missions, the southeastern mountain Kumeyaays consistently resisted the Spaniards, Mexicans, and earliest Anglo?American settlers and had not learned the language of either Euro?American group. Although these Kumeyaays would gradually learn the techniques of accommodation to massive numbers of intruders into their land, their entry to this new dominant society was at a lower level than that of the missionized Spanish?speaking bands. Their initial reaction to the Anglo?American settlers was one of resistance, as it had been to the Spaniards and Mexicans.
The Kumeyaays were also different from the Takic?speaking Luiseño peoples immediately north of them in terms of tribal organization. Ger6nimo Boscana (1933, 19?22) notes that once the Luiseño captain (noot) and council decided on an action, it was announced, and all of the people obeyed. In contrast, neither the Kumeyaay captain (kwaaypaay) nor the tribal chief (kuchut kwataay) ever issued orders. They merely announced what they planned to do, and each family was free to follow or not as it pleased (Shipek 1982). In other words, the Kumeyaays were more individualistic and independent and were unaccustomed to being ordered to some action. The autonomy and individualism of the Kumeyaay significantly retarded the growth and viability of Mission San Diego de Alcala in southern San Diego County. It never achieved the success of Mission San Luis Rey in crop yields, livestock raising, or Native baptisms. Kumeyaay resistance to the Spaniards was so strong that after six years of an uneasy stalemate, southern Kumeyaays attacked the mission in November 1775, burned it to the ground, and gave California its first Catholic martyr, Father Luis jayme.
Kumeyaay resistance to missionization had been so strident and constant that in 1776, after destruction of the mission, Governor Pedro Fages noted what he called the Kumeyaays' "resistance to rational submission" (Englehardt 1920). From their mountain villages most southern Kumeyaays avoided contact with the Spaniards and thus with the acculturative processes. After the Mexican Revolution and the expulsion of Spanish rule, they were generally successful in resisting the Mexicans, who did not leave the coast without an army squad and did not actually use any of the inland rancho grants.
Even though these Kumeyaays had added wheat, watermelons, and fruit trees, among other Spanish crops, and domestic animals to their existing crop complex, they did not speak Spanish. They continued their resistance to encroachers on their lands during the US. period. But two smallpox epidemics in the 1860s and the overwhelming numbers of wellarmed Anglo?Americans who moved into the area after the Civil War greatly affected the tribe. The population was reduced from over two thousand to about two hundred persons by 1890, when the tribe finally came to the attention of the government and land was reserved for it after 1892. As a result of inadequate reservations, incursions by nonIndian cattle, and the white practice of providing food only to laborers (Shipek 1991), only about one hundred Kumeyaay people were still alive by 1910. Except for foothill reservations in the south composed of the tiny Sycuan and the larger Capitan Grande tracts, no other Indian reservations were established at this time. With no land reserved for Indians along the entire coastal plain and only two inland reservations, the southern people were further dispersed.
Given the differences in the ways that the northern people (including the Luiseños, Cupeños, Cahuillas, and northern Kumeyaays) and southern Kumeyaays were influenced by the Spaniards and Mexicans, the methods and timing of adaptation of the two populations varied. This was best reflected in the northern people's grasp of the importance of learning and conversing in non?Indian languages. Communicating initially through Spanish translators, and in later years by learning Spanish, Indian spokespersons retained power and status and came to gain even more through their roles as mediators and translators. With a welldeveloped system of middlemen who represented clans or villages, the northern groups traded with the Anglo?Americans, worked on their ranches as vaqueros, fit into households as domestics, grew and sold crops on the open market, and pursued myriad economic activities. In an attempt to retain Indian lands, Olegario Calac, a Luiseño leader, hired an Anglo?American attorney and, with Tomas, a northern Kumeyaay leader from Santa Ysabel, and possibly a Cahuilla leader, made a visit to Washington, D.C. (Shipek 1988; Carrico 1990, 83?84). In 1875 Olegario and other Indian leaders were successful in gaining formal executive order reservation lands. These leaders continued to file petition after petition on behalf of their people's claims, clearly understanding the power and necessity of written agreements.
AGRICULTURAL PURSUITS: INDIANS WORKING FOR THEMSELVES
One of the ironies?or perhaps more accurately, hypocrisies?of Indian life on the reservations was that the tracts set aside for the Indians were most often the least desirable lands (Shipek 1988), while at the same time the BIA mandated that reservation Indians practice agriculture. Large traditional villages and farmlands were generally excluded from reservation tracts; the Indians were provided with hillsides and rough terrain. At least one reservation was totally mislocated and lacked water on its steep hilltop tract. Even when the land was suitable for agriculture, water rights were ignored by settlers and not protected by the BIA, which seemed more concerned with the supposed rights of Anglo settlers.
Often the executive order reserving the agricultural land was ignored. Settlers pushed in and filed claims stating that they had lived there and put in the improvements, when in fact the plowed fields, orchards, and structures were the result of decades of Indian labor. In the fifty years between 1850 and 1900 Indian people practiced agriculture when it was feasible but often found the economic rewards minimal. This is not to say that they did not attempt farming or stock raising but rather that wages paid for labor on other's farms and ranches often exceeded the economic return of working reservation land. For example, from 1893 to 1910, Gregorio Omish, a Luiseño of Rincon Reservation, raised wheat and barley for sale, raised and sold livestock, picked grapes, cut and sold wood, hunted and sold quails, and worked as a laborer. Omish's journals for these years provide valuable insights into his and other tribal members' economic activities (Omish 1893?1910). Ever the opportunist, like most Luiseños, Omish worked at these various tasks as the season or market dictated. In 1895 Omish reported in his journal receiving only $1.00 for 100 pounds of wheat and $0.75 per 100 pounds of barley. At the same time, seasonal apricot cutters made between $0.80 and $1.50 per day (Peet 1949) for considerably less effort than was required for growing 100 pounds of wheat. It is easy to see why Indian people rejected the BIA's efforts to restrict them to the reservation and to agriculture as a primary economic pursuit. As a point of comparison between wages and costs, a man's suit sold for $6.50, a mare brought between $8 and $12, and a bucket of lard sold for $0.60 (San Diego Union 1895). Income derived from agriculture alone, even during the best of years, proved woefully inadequate.
A review of Omish's journal for the 1890s reveals that he and his tribesmen regularly raised and sold grain to a widely dispersed market. Although his major outlet was Philip Sparkman, who owned a store in nearby Valley Center, Omish also sold in the more distant communities of Escondido and Vista. As was common at the time, Sparkman gave Omish and others a line of credit/debit. Like all farmers, Indian people were at the mercy of nature, and it was during the worst of times that Indians suffered most. In the drought year 1857 the local newspaper reported that the southern California Indians experienced severe crop failure (San Diego Union 1857). In 1880 east county Indians were reportedly starving because of an extended drought coupled with severe snowstorms (San Diego Union 1880). Omish's entries reveal that 1898 was a terrible year for crops in northern San Diego County and that he sold only one sack of wheat, 400 pounds of hay, and no barley that year.
In response to such vagaries of weather and crop yield, Indian people diversified their efforts. Omish reports in his journal for 1895?1897 that to supplement his income, he sold a sorrel mare for $12.00 and a white mare for $8.00 in 1896, a dozen hens for $2.75 in 1897, and a variety of other livestock including cattle and hogs. His economic acumen was not restricted to selling farm products. Understanding the importance to Anglo?Americans of having a supply of fireworks on the Fourth of July, Omish purchased a large supply in San Diego in 1890 and sold them to rural ranchers and farmers.
In the particularly bad drought years or years of crop failures such as 1898, Omish's journal clearly depicts him and his neighbors switching their efforts from farming to cutting and selling firewood and to doing other jobs that took them off the reservation. These varied efforts represent far more than production and sale of petty commodities. They reflect an understanding of the evolving marketplace and the ability to seize opportunities. In contrast to some newspaper accounts of the time and later historical accounts, the Indian people of southern California were not sitting back waiting for government assistance; they were active at a variety of economic pursuits and sought mainly land rights, not handouts. In a particularly poignant petition to the secretary of the interior, the Luiseño leaders pleaded, "We do not ask, Mr. Minister, for the Government to give us money, nor blankets, nor seeds; only some lands for us to cultivate for the support of our families, and to raise our animals to work our lands, and that we shall be protected against the whites" (Painter 1886, 13). The diaries and correspondence of the 1860s?1900 suggest how little the government was willing to do for the Indians. BIA reports for the era reveal that between 1905 and 1909 only $50 were allotted for all of southern California, and those funds were earmarked for the disabled and the elderly (Shipek 1977).
AGRICULTURAL PURSUITS: INDIANS WORKING FOR OTHERS
With the fluctuating price of crops and the uncertainties of producing for the marketplace, many Indians did what their white counterparts did: they went to work for others as wage laborers. Data from the agricultural census of the era demonstrate that Indian farmers, like white farmers, spent at least one?third of the year working for others while still farming their own land. Ted Couro, a Mesa Grande Kumeyaay born in 1890, remembers that his people regularly ignored the agricultural specialists provided by the government because the government men knew little about the local soils and conditions. As Couro (1975, 3) notes: "Some of them wouldn't do a thing, they'd just leave it [the reservation land] alone. They'd go get a job somewhere else." Pioneer Mary Rockwood Peet (1949) reports that in the San Pasqual Valley of northern San Diego County, among other jobs, whites and Indians worked side by side as apricot cutters for the same wages. During the 1890s they received $0.03 a tray and, if they worked fast and long, could draw a wage of $1.50 per day, although $0.80 per day was a good average.
But Native people did not work simply as farmhands or seasonal pickers; their wage labor included a wide variety of jobs. In the north county particularly, Indian men worked as highly regarded and wellpaid ranch hands and vaqueros. Because of the skill and knowledge required to be a vaquero, the Indian cowboys were well respected and, in contrast to some of the more menial occupations, received payment on a parity with their Mexican and white counterparts. Dr. George McKinstry, a rancher near Santa Ysabel, was an Indian agent who manipulated the Santa Ysabel land grant for his own purposes and took Indian vineyards, crops, and orchards as his own. McKinstry (1859?1879, for 1861) regularly used Indian vaqueros, as did his neighbor George Dyke. Robert Kelly, of the Agua Hedionda?San Dieguito area, regularly hired Indians as vaqueros in the 1880s. Kelly considered them a highly skilled, integral part of his cattle operations. Like Philip Sparkman, the storekeeper at Valley Center, Kelly (1968) would loan them money if he thought them deserving, and he especially helped the sick ones. During the same time period another rancher, John Wolfskill, told his neighbors that he could trust his cattle with Silistino, a local Luiseño, when he would not trust a white man (Bevington 1925, 25). In a minority report arguing against the removal of California Indians to Indian Territory, Juan Jose Warner (1852) stated that Indians provided the main source of labor for San Diego County ranchers. Benjamin D. Wilson also noted that Luiseños "are the main source of vaqueros for the ranchos" (Caughey 1952, 129). A review of contemporary newspaper accounts, memoirs, and interviews conducted with Native American informants documents the dominance of north county Indian people as vaqueros, especially men from certain Luiseño, Cupeño, and northern Kumeyaay families who had earned the respect of white ranchers.
Besides working as vaqueros, Indian men were hired as herders and shearers, employment requiring skilled workers. In the 1870s?1880s, at a time when the hundreds of thousands of sheep outnumbered cattle in San Diego County, Indian sheepherders and shearers were common. In the Ballena Valley near Ramona, they drew a wage that varied from $0.50 to $0.75 a day for herding and $0.0450 a head for shearing (Foster 1874?1880). As an indicator of contemporary salaries, a skilled white carpenter received $1.00 per day, and unskilled workers drew a wage of $0.50 per day. Almost twenty years later Gregorio Omish reported in his 1898 journal that he earned $18.50 for an unspecified number of days shearing sheep at a ranch near the San Diego Mission.
In northern San Diego County, as Anglo?Americans continued to divert water from Indian land, Luiseño farmers hired their own ditchmaster and ditchmen to ensure that irrigation ditches were kept clean and flowing (Shipek 1977). In one instance Omish reported in his journal that the ditchmaster, or supervisor, a position of status and prestige, was a Luiseño who received $0.75 per day until the crops were harvested.
INDIANS AS NONAGRICULTURAL LABORERS
Even though a large number of San Diego County Indians worked in agriculture, either for themselves or for non?Indians, others worked at a variety of nonagricultural jobs. Often this type of work was hard physical labor, such as that performed by Istaako Alto, a Kwaaymii (a sub?sib, or sub?clan, of the Kumeyaays), who helped cut the Butterfield Stage road up Banner Grade and through the rugged east county mountains in the late 1850s. Earning tools instead of cash, Istaako used the tools to build a cabin in the Laguna Mountains for his family (Carrico 1976; Kline 1979, 113). Similarly, many Kumeyaay Indians of Campo helped cut the stage line from the desert floor to Mountain Springs, Jacumba, Campo, and National City. At about the same time in the Ballena Valley Indians were hired by the local doctor and dentist as messengers to deliver packages and medicines in the rough back country and to make adobes for white homesteads (McKinstry 1859?1879). Throughout the 1870?1890 period in a region always short on readily accessible timber, Indian woodcutters supplied much of the firewood to rural homes. In 1898 Gregorio Omish noted in his journal that he cut and sold cords of wood for prices that varied from $1.50 a cord in the hills near his Rincon home to $3.00 in the more distant town of Escondido.
Indian people in the urban environment varied in roles, wages, and status. Although north county Luiseños and Kumeyaays may have worked in the small towns and villages of that region, the bulk of documentation is for the larger city of San Diego itself. With its harbor, warehouses, and commercial districts, downtown San Diego offered economic opportunity to Native people. The relationship was, however, reciprocal: the city depended on the steady and reliable labor supply offered by local Indians.
As early as September 1853 Indians from nearby ranches were being sought as laborers to clear the San Diego River channel and to construct an ill?fated dike to divert the river. Their employment was sought because, as the San Diego Herald (1853b) noted, there was an insufficient labor supply available for such a large undertaking. Within two weeks the newspapers reported that 100 Indians were at work on the so?called Derby Dike and that they received $15 a month and rations (San Diego Herald 1853d). By comparison, the forty?nine white workers were paid $60 a month and rations. Consistent with the social and political system devised under the mission and Mexican rancho systems, Indian workers on the dike were supervised by traditional leaders, who were also responsible for the workers' welfare and good behavior.
Thirty years later, in 1881, the coming of the railroad to San Diego brought another labor boom to the area, one that was filled largely by local Kumeyaays from mountain rancherias of east San Diego and Indian settlements in National City. William and George Lyons, who were building the mountain portion of the line, noted that they paid their fifty Indian laborers $20 a month plus board (San Diego Union 1881a). William Lyons stated in January 1881 that the local Indians were the best laborers he had yet employed, and the newspaper reported that virtually all of the able?bodied men from the Conejo rancherla were off working on the railroad (San Diego Union 1881a). Six months later the contractor for the National City portion of the line west of the mountains said the Indians were "far superior to either white or Chinamen. He says that they work harder and more persistently during the working hours of the day and move more earth than the same number of white laborers do, all other things being equal, on any other section of the line" (San Diego Union 1881c).
The Indians also sought other kinds of nonagricultural labor. During San Diego's whaling and shipping boom of 1855?1865 local Indians worked as sailors on whalers and schooners, often with Native Hawaiians (San Diego Union 1856). In 1861 Judge Benjamin Hayes, an astute observer of the social and economic scene, wrote that Indian sailors received $15 a month to crew on the whaling ship Ocean and the same amount to work as blubber renderers at a whaling camp on nearby Ballast Point (Wolcott 1929, 234). These salaries were considered high, but the work was often hard, and life at sea could be dangerous. The pay was consistent with wages paid to non?Indians for the same tasks, and Captain Clark of the Ocean had replaced his white crew with Indians because of the Whites' drunkenness and poor work habits (Wolcott 1929, 231). Besides serving on the ships, Indian men worked as longshoremen and as general dockworkers. This form of employment at the docks and on ships continued for decades and was especially pronounced during the economic boom of the early 1880s, when the docks from San Diego to National City were manned largely by Indians (San Diego Union 1881b).
The urban labor market also offered employment for Indian women, who routinely worked as domestics, cooks, and laundresses in San Diego households. Considered more loyal and trustworthy than their Mexican counterparts, and often renowned for their hearty cooking, many of these women worked for decades for the same families, although rarely as live?in workers. In later life one white woman who grew up in such a household noted that her mother's Indian cook "was a genius at concocting mouth?watering tamales and green pepper dishes such as I have never tasted since then" (Tiffany 1973, 8).
Kumeyaay women from Campo in the southern mountains also exploited another economic opportunity. For almost a decade after the railroad linked southern California with the Arizona region, Pima and Maricopa pottery vessels from western Arizona brought a high price as California collectors entered into a Native and folk crafts period. In 1889?1890 the Southern Pacific Railway shut off the supply of pottery vessels from Arizona, which led to a doubling of their price and a scarcity of Indian wares. When made aware of this gap in trade, the women of Campo, who had a long tradition of ceramic manufacturing, switched from making utilitarian brownwares to producing vessels that closely resembled the Arizona wares. As the local newspaper noted, "They have succeeded well, and the ollas have been coming up of late by the wagonload. The fifty or more men and squaws took up the idea of decoration with interest, and say that they will soon be able to turn out as fine an olla as any other tribe on the coast" (San Diego Union 1890, 8). A decade later the Indian women of Mesa Grande were reported to have a thriving lace?making business (Forbes 1902; Lummis 1902). Lacemaking among these people is another example of the adaptation of a skill learned under the mission system and continued on as an economic opportunity.
FIESTAS AS ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES
Of all the economic aspects of Native culture, the importance of the fiesta as an economic function is probably the least understood. Most often portrayed as social gatherings, the traditional fiestas served several cultural functions. Indian fiestas were, and continue to be, an opportunity for families and friends to get together, to share stories, to dance, and to continue traditional elements of their culture. Beyond these cultural and social aspects, fiestas also had important economic functions.
Realizing neither the social nor economic place of fiestas in Indian society, Indian agents opposed them as a pagan waste of time and resources. Actually, nothing could have been further from reality. Gregorio Omish and others routinely used fiestas for economic purposes, and they were an integral part of the Indian economic system. Southern California Indians traveled to northern San Diego County to sell their surplus crops, just as north county Indian farmers took their excess crops into other areas for sale or barter.
Interviews conducted with elders by Shipek (1977), as well as information in Omish's journal, reveal that fiestas traditionally had a strong economic base and that both men and women drew cash wages for building booths and working at various tasks. Booths, or spaces for booths, were rented to Indian vendors, thus producing a source of income for the host band. Omish noted in his journal that he and Feliz Calac regularly attended and sold beef at such fiestas throughout the county. In one 1895 journal account Omish reported that he and Calac had set up a meat market at a fiesta and had earned $34.70 from the sale of two cows. At a time when 100 pounds of wheat brought only $1.00 and daily wage labor was between $.50 and $1.00, their efforts were well rewarded. The rewards were so great that at least one Rincon leader traveled to Los Angeles and San Diego to place advertisements for the fiestas in local newspapers.
CONCLUSION
Indian labor in San Diego County differed for the Luiseños, Cupeños, Cahuillas, and northern Kumeyaays, on the one hand, and the coastal and southern Kumeyaays, on the other. But in spite of differences, San Diego County Indians maintained their cultural adaptability (Boscana 1933; Rudkin 1956), which allowed them to move into entirely new situations with ease. For example, the Luiseños continued to use specialization as a vehicle for adaptation and practiced a form of situational management characterized by flexibility.