Author: Albert L. Hurtado
Publisher:
Published: 1988
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780300041477
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During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when vast numbers of "white" settlers poured into California, the native Indian population was decimated through disease, starvation, homicide, and a declining birth rate. In this prize-winning book, Albert L. Hurtado focuses on the Indians who survived this harrowing time. Hurtado considers the ways in which native life and culture persisted, how the survivors integrated their lives with "white" society, and how the now-dominant "whites" related to the Indians living and working with them. Hurtado takes a fresh look at the role Native Americans played in shaping frontier California. The Indians emerge from this study not merely as victims of white rapaciousness but as an active historical influence, serving as both a resistance force to white incursion and as prime shapers of the agricultural work force.