1964

This week in 1964, five Sioux Indians claimed Alcatraz Island under an old treaty and remained there for four hours, in a brief forerunner of the 19-month occupation that was staged five years later in an ultimately successful protest of U.S. Indian policy. Activist and author Helen Hunt Jackson staged her protest in 1884 with “Ramona,” a propaganda novel she had hoped would “do for the Indian a thousandth part what ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ did for the Negro.” Written after visits to what remained of the missions and ranches of Old California, “Ramona” had some political impact but failed to end what Jackson called “the national disgrace” of the treatment of Native Americans. It was a bestseller, though, a melodramatic love story set in an era when California, long a possession of Mexico, was getting used to its new proprietor.

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The Senora Moreno’s house was one of the best specimens to be found in California . . . under the rule of the Spanish and Mexican viceroys, when the laws of the Indies were still the law of the land . . .

When the house was built, General Moreno owned all the land within a radius of forty miles--forty miles westward, down the valley to the sea; forty miles eastward, into the San Fernando Mountains; and good forty miles more or less along the coast. The boundaries were not very strictly defined; there was no occasion, in those happy days, to reckon land by inches. . . . and it had been a great pride and delight to the Senora, when she was young, to ride that forty miles by her husband’s side, all the way on their own lands, straight from their house to their own strip of shore. No wonder she believed the Americans thieves, and spoke of them always as hounds. The people of the United States have never in the least realized that the taking possession of California was not only a conquering of Mexico, but a conquering of California as well; that the real bitterness of surrender was not so much to the empire which gave up the country, as to the country itself which was given up. Provinces passed back and forth in that way, helpless in the hands of great powers. . . . Once a thief, always a thief. Nobody need feel himself safe under American rule.