Indians and the Colonization of Central California

My dissertation reexamines the history of New Helvetia, the Sacramento Valley rancho granted by the Mexican government to John Sutter in 1839. I argue for a new interpretation of New Helvetia as a different kind of colonial institution---one created as much by indigenous Plains Miwok and Valley Nisenan people as by the European, Native Hawaiian, and American settlers who are remembered as California pioneers. Natives and newcomers built, lived, loved, played, and worked in New Helvetia's many communities in the borderland of the Spanish/Mexican missions, Indian interior, and Pacific Northwest fur trade. I define New Helvetia as a multi-ethnic space: a conglomeration of Indian villages and immigrant settlements that were sometimes indistinguishable from one another and an engine of economic development shaped as much by Indian consumers as by international markets. New Helvetia's success was built not on Indian labor or even peonage, as was common elsewhere in Mexican California, but the active engagement of skilled, savvy traders who hoped to create and exploit new economic opportunities and connect to markets beyond California. The Plains Miwok were not too decimated by missionization or disease to resist New Helvetia. To the contrary, Indians developed valuable skills in the colonial California economy that enabled them to shape New Helvetia to their own purposes, which included first and foremost sustaining independent village life in the wake of tremendous disruption.;Plains Miwok and Valley Nisenan communities engaged New Helvetia in several important ways. Indian trappers in particular approached New Helvetia from a position of expertise and strength, having two decades or more of experience with fur trapping and trade with Mission San Jose and the Hudson's Bay Company. Indian fur trappers plied their specialized skills at New Helvetia, exchanging their labor for valuable trade goods---especially beads, which functioned as cash in the California Indian trade economy. Plains Miwok and Valley Nisenan women intermarried with the American, European, and Native Hawaiian settler men at New Helvetia and constructed novel households that helped anchor these newcomers to communities that provided companionship, security, and access to labor and valuable resources. More than simply temporary arrangements of convenience, these relationships helped revitalize Indian economies by linking Native communities to trade and were of central importance to the colonization of the California frontier in the 1840s. Muquelemne Plains Miwok horse raiders and traders built an independent economy in Central California that by turns cooperated and conflicted with New Helvetia.;This dissertation engages a growing field of historical literature that attempts to understand not just how Native peoples in what is now the American West were victimized by or resisted colonization, but how they actively shaped colonial institutions and lived within these new creations. It also engages an emerging anthropological literature that has broken away from earlier interpretations of California Indian culture that romanticized mythic, unspoiled "tradition" in favor of understanding California Indians as societies with histories of conflict and change. To that end I have used ethnohistorical methodologies to ground my conclusions in cultural specifics and explain Plains Miwok and Valley Nisenan cultural, political, and economic change over time.