Profiles the man called one of California's most important founding fathers, who fought for the rights of the Native Americans there while paving the way for California to join the United States.

General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was one of California's most distinguished citizens in the mid nineteenth century. A frontier cosmopolitan and visionary, Vallejo owned vast ranchos in northern California and wielded enormous political power throughout the province. While serving as military governor during Mexican rule, he established an open immigration policy that encouraged and facilitated the American entrada to northern California. Dissatisfied with the remoteness of Mexican sovereignty, Vallejo believed that only the United States could unleash California's untapped economic potential. Not even Vallejo's imprisonment by the unscrupulous John C. Fremont during the Mexican-American War deterred the General's pursuit of a political and economic relationship between California and the United States. Although Vallejo lost all his land to Yankee mortgage holders in the years following the conflict, he never abandoned his faith in the power of American democracy to transform human society. Alan Rosenus's richly textured biography uses primary sources to narrate Vallejo's rise to power, his dominance of northern California, and the expansion of his great land holdings. Included in this chronicle are vivid sketches of colorful historical figures like Fremont, Don Salvador Vallejo, Chief Solano, Thomas Larkin, and many others.

Native Americans who populated the various ranchos of Mexican California as laborers are people frequently lost to history. The "rancho period" was a critical time for California Indians, as many were drawn into labor pools for the flourishing ranchos following the 1834 dismantlement of the mission system, but they are practically absent from the documentary record and from popular histories. This study focuses on Rancho Petaluma north of San Francisco Bay, a large livestock, agricultural, and manufacturing operation on which several hundredÑperhaps as many as two thousandÑNative Americans worked as field hands, cowboys, artisans, cooks, and servants. One of the largest ranchos in the region, it was owned from 1834 to 1857 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, one of the most prominent political figures of Mexican California. While historians have studied Vallejo, few have considered the Native Americans he controlled, so we know little of what their lives were like or how they adjusted to the colonial labor regime. Because VallejoÕs Petaluma Adobe is now a state historic park and one of the most well-protected rancho sites in California, this site offers unparalleled opportunities to investigate nineteenth-century rancho life via archaeology. Using the Vallejo rancho as a case study, Stephen Silliman examines this California rancho with a particular eye toward Native American participation. Through the archaeological recordÑtools and implements, containers, beads, bone and shell artifacts, food remainsÑhe reconstructs the daily practices of Native peoples at Rancho Petaluma and the labor relations that structured indigenous participation in and experience of rancho life. This research enables him to expose the multi-ethnic nature of colonialism, counterbalancing popular misconceptions of Native Americans as either non-participants in the ranchos or passive workers with little to contribute to history. Lost Laborers in Colonial California draws on archaeological data, material studies, and archival research, and meshes them with theoretical issues of labor, gender, and social practice to examine not only how colonial worlds controlled indigenous peoples and practices but also how Native Americans lived through and often resisted those impositions. The book fills a gap in the regional archaeological and historical literature as it makes a unique contribution to colonial and contact-period studies in the Spanish/Mexican borderlands and beyond.

Antonio María Osio’s La Historia de Alta California was the first written history of upper California during the era of Mexican rule, and this is its first complete English translation. A Mexican-Californian, government official, and the landowner of Angel Island and Point Reyes, Osio writes colorfully of life in old Monterey, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and gives a first-hand account of the political intrigues of the 1830s that led to the appointment of Juan Bautista Alvarado as governor. Osio wrote his History in 1851, conveying with immediacy and detail the years of the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846–1848 and the social upheaval that followed. As he witnesses California’s territorial transition from Mexico to the United States, he recalls with pride the achievements of Mexican California in earlier decades and writes critically of the onset of U.S. influence and imperialism. Unable to endure life as foreigners in their home of twenty-seven years, Osio and his family left Alta California for Mexico in 1852. Osio’s account predates by a quarter century the better-known reminiscences of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Juan Bautista Alvarado and the memoirs of Californios dictated to Hubert Howe Bancroft’s staff in the 1870s. Editors Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz have provided an accurate, complete translation of Osio’s original manuscript, and their helpful introduction and notes offer further details of Osio’s life and of society in Alta California.

When in the early 1870s historian Hubert Howe Bancroft sent interviewers out to gather oral histories from the pre-statehood gentry of California, he didn’t count on one thing: the women. When the men weren’t available, the interviewers collected the stories of the women of the household—sometimes almost as an afterthought. These interviews were eventually archived at the University of California, though many were all but forgotten. Testimonios presents thirteen women’s firsthand accounts from the days when California was part of Spain and Mexico. Having lived through the gold rush and seen their country change so drastically, these women understood the need to tell the full story of the people and the places that were their California.

In the early 1870s, Hubert H. Bancroft and his assistants set out to record the memoirs of early Californios, one of them being eighty-three-year-old Don Jose Maria Amador, a former Forty-Niner during the California Gold Rush and soldado de cuera at the Presidio of San Francisco. Amador tells of reconnoitering expeditions into the interior of California, where he encountered local indigenous populations. He speaks of political events of Mexican California and the widespread confiscation of the Californios' goods, livestock, and properties when the United States took control. A friend from Mission Santa Cruz, Lorenzo Asisara, also describes the harsh life and mistreatment the Indians faced from the priests. Both the Amador and Asisara narratives were used as sources in Bancroft's writing but never published themselves. Gregorio Mora-Torres has now rescued them from obscurity and presents their voices in English translation (with annotations) and in the original Spanish on facing pages. This bilingual edition will be of great interest to historians of the West, California, and Mexican American studies.

The Squatter and the Don, originally published in San Francisco in 1885, is the first fictional narrative written and published in English from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population that, despite being granted the full rights of citizenship under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, was, by 1860, a subordinated and marginalized national minority.

This copious collection of reminiscences, reports, letters, and documents allows readers to experience the vast and varied landscape of early California from the viewpoint of its inhabitants. What emerges is not the Spanish California depicted by casual visitors—a culture obsessed with finery, horses, and fandangos—but an ever-shifting world of aspiration and tragedy, pride and loss. Conflicts between missionaries and soldiers, Indians and settlers, friends and neighbors spill from these pages, bringing the ferment of daily life into sharp focus.

Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide. Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials’ culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book.