Willie Boy (played by Martin Sensmeier) and Carlota (Mainei Kinimaka) flee into the desert after the death of her father in the new film “The Last Manhunt.” (Courtesy of “The Last Manhunt.”)
By Pat Murkland
Her story lies within a famous story that is nearly 113 years old — the saga of Willie Boy and the famed “last Western manhunt” from Banning, California, to the High Desert in late September-early October 1909 — history that remains controversial to this day.
We’re talking today about Carlota Mike, the young Chemehuevi woman who was at the center of the tragedy. There is no known photograph of her. Vagueness and fiction have surrounded Carlota for nearly 113 years. Her name. Her age. Her life. Her love for Willie Boy. Her death. Even how and where she was laid to rest.
This adds up to more than a century of layer after layer of embellished stories about the oldest daughter of William Mike. He was the Chemehuevi leader and shaman at the Oasis of Mara in Twentynine Palms.1
The 1909 newspapers served the story of a posse chasing the murderous Indian villain Willie Boy, even stoking fears he was leading a Southern California uprising. More crimes and bad behavior were added over the years. Harry Lawton portrayed Willie Boy as violent2 in his 1960 “nonfiction novel,” Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt. A big-screen spin came with the 1969 Robert Redford movie, “Tell Them Willie Boy is Here."
Carlota (played by Mainei Kinimaka) and Willie Boy (Martin Sensmeier) in a scene in “The Last Manhunt.” (Courtesy of “The Last Manhunt.”)
Now, here’s a film telling the Native American history and testimony of the tragic story of Willie Boy and of the deaths that followed his forbidden love for Carlota. Here’s “The Last Manhunt,” led by Jason Momoa, and featuring Indigenous writers and cast. “The Last Manhunt” will be shown this week in a private tribal screening, and then on Friday, May 27, 2022, in a world premiere at the Pioneertown Film Fest.
The Chemehuevi community, including relatives of Carlota Mike, supported the production of this film. Tribal members had roles in the movie. Singers from the Chemehuevi and Colorado River Indian Reservations sang Salt Songs as part of the historical representation of the people. Clifford E. Trafzer, UC Riverside distinguished history professor and Costo Chair of American Indian Affairs, also served as a consultant. His most recent book about the manhunt, Willie Boy & the Last Desert Manhunt (2020, Coyote Hill Press), tells the story based on his years of continuing scholarly research to include Native American voices and testimony in the historical record of Willie Boy.
Cultural law
Cliff Trafzer explains that for many years Native Americans kept their Willie Boy story private, passing the stories through tribal Elders. “Joe Mike Benitez, the grandson of William Mike, explained that Nuwuvi cultural law prevented people from speaking much about the dead or even uttering their names. To do so risked bringing illness or death to those violating tribal laws. Joe explained that his uncles refused to utter a word about Willie Boy. Traditional law forbade his family from speaking of Willie Boy, and the trauma of losing their father and sister through violence weighed heavily on them.”3
In more recent years, Elders began sharing and opening up to historians, including James A. Sandos and Larry E. Burgess, authors of The Hunt for Willie Boy: Indian Hating and Popular Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). The movie “The Last Manhunt” attempts to bring that history to a wider audience.
Looking for Carlota
We explored some details of Carlota’s life (and death).
Her name: Carlota’s father, William, was born into the Timtimmon family, also called the Timpemoningtit or Timpingmoneytite family, according to Trafzer. 4 The preferred family name, through English speakers, eventually became Mike. This family name is said to be Boniface in many versions of the Willie Boy story, and it’s further said that’s because family members attended St. Boniface Industrial School in Banning. The small former Roman Catholic boarding school, which focused on teaching “industrial” or blue-collar labor to Native American children, was thriving in 1909 near the Gilman Ranch where the Willie Boy saga began. (We haven’t found family names in what school records remain, but we’re still looking.)
Carlota Mike’s first name is variously said to be Carlota, Carlotta, Isoleta, Mary Nita, Lolita (1960 “nonfiction novel”), and further fictionalized as Lola (1969 Hollywood Western movie). Family members, including William Mike’s late grandson, Joe Mike Benitez, said her name was Carlota, Cliff Trafzer told us.5
Her age. Carlota Mike’s age see-saws in the 1909 news reports and embellished Wild West tales that follow; she’s often portrayed as a child victim of Willie Boy’s brutal kidnapping. In October 1909, Carlota was 16 years old, nearly 17.6
“She was certainly no longer considered a child,” Cliff Trafzer writes.7 “At the age of eleven or twelve, she had completed her female puberty rites, which prepared her for womanhood in the Chemehuevi world.”
According to the family history: Earlier, Carlota had run away with Willie Boy. Yet it was still an era of traditional and arranged tribal marriages, and tribal laws held that they were too closely related. Their families searched for them, then separated them, banishing Willie Boy. It was later in Banning at the Gilman Ranch, where the Mike family went to work at the fall harvest, that the pair met again.
After an argument with Willie Boy, father William Mike lay dead. Carlota and Willie Boy fled the Gilman Ranch in Banning into the night. The ensuing posse chase captured national headlines. Under an intense public spotlight, the posse reported that Willie Boy killed Carlota because she was slowing down their escape, and later killed himself.
The posse’s story is overturned in the Native American history: Carlota went willingly with Willie Boy. Willie Boy didn’t kill the young woman he loved; the posse did. (Her autopsy points to a more probable accidental shooting from a distance by the posse, according to researchers James A. Sandos and Larry E. Burgess.8 ) Willie Boy also didn’t kill himself, according to Native American histories; he escaped the posse and lived quietly for years afterward in Nevada.
Her grave: Misreported by the usually reliable findagrave.com as being at the Chemehuevi Indian Cemetery in San Bernardino County. (Her age is also wrong.) Burial site also misreported in Tom Hughes’s 1938 book, History of Banning and San Gorgonio Pass: In Two Parts, as being in the Banning, California, town cemetery.
In a 2021 trip to the Moravian Church headquarters and archives in Pennsylvania, Gregg Schafer, pastor of the Moravian Church on the Morongo Reservation, found and shared a 1909 report from the Rev. William H. Weinland: The deaths of father and daughter brought him into a little closer touch with the Chemehuevis, Rev. Weinland reported, “for I held both funerals in our church, and both victims were given a last resting place on our Moravian cemetery.” Holding a full church ceremony for the two and burying them in the Moravian cemetery was a kindness from a strong ally of Native Americans.
Cliff Trafzer tells how the family held their traditional Yagapi or Cry Ceremony on the reservation, with the help of Jim Pine, the Serrano leader at Mara, and other Native Americans. “The people would have sung Salt Songs during the wake for Mr. Mike and Carlota. Traditionally, a lead singer, usually a Chemehuevi shaman, led a group of male singers in the ancient song complex that sang the soul into the Milky Way and brought the living back to life on earth through the Salt Song Trail.” 9
Last October, Cliff Trafzer, Gregg Schafer, Dorothy Ramon Learning Center leaders Ernest and June Siva, researcher Sean Milanovich, and myself met at the Moravian Church.
And we visited the graves of William and Carlota Mike in the Moravian Cemetery nearby, along with the graves of some of their family members and some of Ernest Siva’s and Sean Milanovich’s relations.
Rest in peace, Carlota and William Mike. Your story will be told.
Visiting the graves of the ancestors under a view of Ayaqaych (San Jacinto Peak). (Pat Murkland Photo)
Thank you
Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, led by Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), saves and shares Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts. We welcome your EMAIL. Thank you from Editor Pat Murkland, May 25, 2022.
Clifford E. Trafzer, Willie Boy and the Last Western Manhunt, © 2020 By Clifford E. Trafzer, Coyote Hill Press, Camano Island, WA, p. 68
“Once Lolita lunged into a cholla cactus. The gray, spiked balls snapped off, clinging to her bare legs. She fell to the ground and wept hysterically. Willie Boy knocked the cactus balls off with his rifle butt. Pulling the cap from the canteen, he held it to her lips. She came up spluttering, striking at the canteen, which tilted, a trickle of water spilling into the parched sand and vanishing. Angrily, he struck her.” Harry Lawton, Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt © 1960 Harry Lawton, Second edition April 1976 by Malki Museum Press, p. 40.
Clifford E. Trafzer, Willie Boy and the Last Western Manhunt, p. xxi
Clifford E. Trafzer, Willie Boy and the Last Western Manhunt, pp 35-36
Personal conversation at Dorothy Ramon Learning Center in Banning, October 2021.
As supported by the inscription on her authentic grave marker.
Clifford E. Trafzer, Willie Boy and the Last Western Manhunt, p. 53.
James A. Sandos and Larry E. Burgess, The Hunt for Willie Boy: Indian-Hating and Popular Culture, © 1994 by University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, Publishing Division of the University.
Clifford E. Trafzer, Willie Boy and the Last Western Manhunt, p. 170.