Morongo Roundup, painting © David Fairrington, from the Siva Family Collection, after a photo made in the 1950s by cowboy and rancher Lewis Robertson of Banning.
Meeting kaváayu' (Cahuilla) and wa'uuraavi' (Serrano)
By Pat Murkland
One of the first times that Cahuilla people met the horse was in 1774. Juan Bautista de Anza became lost in his quest for an overland route from New Spain (Mexico) to the rich northern lands that Spain also claimed for itself — that is, Native American homelands in what is now California. Anza and his small scouting party blundered into Coyote Canyon on the western side of the Santa Rosa Mountains, close to the current boundary of Riverside and San Diego counties. There, Anza and his men met some Cahuilla people, communicated via gestures, and camped near their village called Willi' (1). Anza marveled in his diary at Cahuilla skills, noting how hunters threw curved sticks at rabbits, and never missed. (2) As for the Cahuilla, many years later, archaeologists found art carved as a pictograph on a boulder in the hills. It was a horse and rider.
Photo of rock art courtesy of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.
The Horse’s Gifts
Horses gallop and trot throughout Native American artwork. These wild horses by Billy Soza Warsoldier of Soboba Reservation punctuate events in Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s Gathering Hall, in this case a reading of Dorothy Ramon’s Serrano stories by family members Ernest Siva and Carolyn Horsman at the 2017 Native Voices Poetry Festival.
The horse fired the imagination. In the horse, Southern California Native Americans discovered a useful partner that helped them ride into resiliency. The horse offered amazing new mobility and new ways to adapt and thrive during turbulent times, when more and more people kept arriving in California to overrun Native American homelands and traditional ways. While horses and cattle offered hides, meat, bones, hooves, and other useful resources that wild hoofed animals had given the people since the time of Creation, in a very short time, Native Americans jumped across cultures to master skills in horse-riding, training, and equine and cattle management, along with roping, branding, and roundups. Indians became the first cowboys.
Invasions
The challenges offered by the new hoofed resources quickly became apparent. In 1775 Anza led 240 people and about 1,000 horses and cattle about 1,400 miles from Mexico to what later became Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco. The December 1775 expedition, ill-prepared for the freezing winter temperatures, stopped at Willi' again, this time for the freezing travelers to huddle around fires while a woman labored in childbirth. The expedition priest baptized the first immigrant child born in California, Salvador Ignacio. (3)
Many years later Cahuilla Elder Katherine Siva Saubel would angrily recall the story passed down to her through the generations, how the expedition’s large herd trampled its way through the canyon, eating everything in reach, and destroying and damaging many more important resources in an already tough winter. (4)
Livestock would continue transforming and pressuring the Native landscapes as cattle roamed across open ranges and competed with wild animals for forage. By the 1830s, varied counts place a half-million cattle in California, and non-native plant invaders such as black mustard already were spreading and overtaking native plants in Southern California. (5)
Riding Horses into Sovereignty
From Riverside County, California, Place Names: Their Origins and Their Stories, © 1984 by Jane Davies Gunther, Rubidoux Printing Co., Riverside, CA
Once horses and cattle came traveling overland, large numbers soon followed, along with sheep and other livestock. Missions gradually expanded their ranchos until the coast from present-day Sonoma to San Diego was lined with grazing cattle. (6) By 1819, cattle from Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, just east of current downtown Los Angeles, were roaming miles away at modern-day Rancho Cucamonga (7) and even as far inland as the San Gorgonio Pass, where some ancestors of the present-day cowboys in the Morongo (Reservation) Cattlemen’s Association may have first jumped into the saddle.
After the missions faded and rancho lands began splitting up and changing hands among different immigrants in the mid-1800s, Native American cowboys often were in demand as essential workers at the new ranches springing up throughout Southern California. Importantly, they also became independent producers, running their own cattle for profit. This grew into a major Native American industry.
Roundups
Horses became an integral part of reservation life. Some children began learning to ride just as they were learning to walk. Cattle roamed freely and in doing so became wild. Rounding them up on steep slopes amid seemingly impenetrable brush required great skill. But then again, Native people had hunted wild hoofed animals such as deer, bighorn, and pronghorn antelope, for generations, and without horses.
Morongo Roundup, 1946, Dorothy Ramon Learning Center archives.
Morongo’s cattle roundups were one annual spring tradition that drew hundreds of people to the reservation for decades, to help with the roundup, sorting, and branding. Women prepared feasts for the workers, and children watched from the corral fences until they became old enough to participate. Reporter Ruth Little wrote in the May 30, 1955, Daily Enterprise newspaper that it seemed as though everyone was missing from the Morongo Reservation until she drove along a winding road into Potrero Canyon.
“Then,” she wrote, “as we reached the small grass-carpeted forest of black walnut and cottonwood trees surrounding the corral, the din crescendoed into bedlam.” It seemed everyone was there, from grandparent to infant. And so were hundreds of bellowing cattle and a blazing fire with about 40 branding irons in its coals.
Newspapers including the Los Angeles Times routinely covered these big roundups and their market impacts. Morongo roundups continued into the 1970s.
The Brush Poppers
Dorothy Ramon Learning Center in 2009 celebrated Native American cowboys, and at the annual Dragonfly Gala honored two famed cowboys, the now-late Rodney Mathews of Morongo Reservation, and George Tortes of Santa Rosa Reservation, then the last surviving “Brush Popper.”
Rodney Mathews was a lifelong member of the Morongo Cattlemen's Association. He was nominated by then Morongo Tribal Chairman Robert Martin, himself a cowboy, for his longtime leadership in the Cattlemen's Association and for his cowboy skills.
Rodney Mathews, center, with wife Eunice, receives Dragonfly Award from Learning Center President Ernest Siva in 2009. (© Carlos Puma for the Learning Center)
Along with George Tortes, Harry Quinn remembered some other “Brush Poppers” of the Santa Rosa Mountains: James "Jim" Wellman; Clarence Contreras; Hank Lichtwald; Calistro Tortes; Arthur Guanche; Ernest Arnaiz; Castro "Chihuahua" Tortes. “This group herded cattle in the Santa Rosa Mountains, including the Pinyon Flats, Pinyon Alto, and Palm Canyon areas,” he remembered. “While many had their own cattle, they also all rode for Mr. Jim Wellman. As a kid I had the opportunity to meet many of these cowboys in the Pinyon Flats area where Jim Wellman had his 101 Ranch.
“At that time the area was considered to be open range and if you did not like cattle in your yard, it was up to you to fence them out. This area was covered in thick brush, yuccas, cactus, and pinyon pines and gave the cattle a lot of places to hide. It was up to ‘The Brush Poppers’ to flush the cattle out of their hiding places and drive them to the corrals. I can remember watching riders trying to flush cattle out of the redshank up on the slopes of Santa Rosa Mountain.” (8)
Ernest Siva: Watch out! A story
Notes
1. Willi' place name from Katherine Siva Saubel, interview with Pat Murkland, 1999.
2. and 3. Herbert Eugene Bolton, Anza’s California Expeditions, V. 2. “Opening a land route to California: diaries of Anza, Díaz, Garcés, and Palóu,” 1930, University of California Press, Berkeley.
4. Pat Murkland, “First Contacts,” in “Family Album, Part 1,” The Press-Enterprise newspaper, Oct. 10, 1999, p. 5.
5. and 6. Richard A. Minnich, California’s Fading Wildflowers: Lost Legacy and Biological Invasions, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, © 2008 by the Regents of the University of California.
7. Lowell John Bean and William Marvin Mason, The Romero Expeditions: Diaries and Accounts of the Romero Expeditions in Arizona and California, 1823-1826, Ward Ritchie Press, Los Angeles, © 1962 by the Palm Springs Desert Museum, p. 99.
8. Harry M. Quinn, “The Brush Poppers: A Cowboy Memory,” Heritage Keepers newsletter, © Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, Autumn 2009, V. 6, No. 3.
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Pat Murkland, Editor. Sept. 2, 2020
Dorothy Ramon Learning Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that saves and shares Southern California Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts. Join us at dorothyramon.org and Dorothy Ramon Learning Center on Facebook.