By Pat Murkland
RECAP: We explored last week in "Bees as Colonizers” how imported honey bees came with colonists to North America more than 400 years ago, spread throughout Native American homelands, and quickly began dominating populations of native wild bees. When people began pouring into California after the Gold Rush, honey production offered a new kind of gold rush in Southern California.
This week, bee tales.
Honey bees are used to pollinate almonds. A 1930s postcard shows San Gorgonio Pass almond trees in full blossom. Thousands of people came to enjoy the views of almond blossoms that filled the Pass in the 1930s. Back of postcard reads: "The breath taking beauty of blossom time at Highland Springs Guest Ranch in Southern California gives fragrant promise of luscious peaches from our own groves for pies, and for breakfasts drenched with rich fresh cream from our herd of pure bred golden Guernsey dairy cows." Courtesy of Banning Library District.
“Empty” Lands Taken
Inland Native American homelands with their sage landscapes especially beckoned to 1800s beekeepers. Many new beekeepers were ill people with lung diseases who had come to Southern California with the hope of regaining health. “He went where the land was wild and empty, virtually by necessity seeking out hillsides and protected valleys, where thrived numerous plants ideally suited to honey production. Here, free from coastal fogs, flourished the tubercular, and a little farther inland in the dry regions or peaceful uplands, bees and asthmatics did their best. Fruit farmer and stockman had not yet destroyed the natural vegetation which was the beeman’s destined profit.” 1
White sage grows in an Inland canyon that burned in 2020. (Pat Murkland Photo)
Note: Native American homelands weren’t “empty” lands, obviously, as they belonged to the First Nations, and the native plants provided food and numerous resources when they were “not yet destroyed” by the newcomers’ grazing cattle and the developing fruit and nut industries.
As more and more settlers encroached on homelands in the 1800s, and Native Americans began to be pushed onto reservations, fewer and fewer resources were available to the Native people.
Meanwhile native plants were taking a hit. As discussed last week, certain wild plants cannot reproduce without specific pollinators, including native bees. California deserts host more than 750 species of native bees, for example. 2 Wild sages such as qas'ily (white sage in Cahuilla), were a favorite of the 1800s beekeepers, who set out thousands of boxes with honey bee hives throughout the foothills and canyons. Honey bees began dominating wild bee populations and spreading non-native plants, while reducing native flowering-plant populations.
The beekeeping boom began to quiet down in the 1890s when available lands with wild sages declined. Planted groves such as almonds, which even today are pollinated with honey bees, began dominating the landscapes, especially in San Gorgonio Pass, which soon was home to many ranchers — and beekeepers.
Bees and Armed Troops
One typical beekeeper who got a little more sting than he had bargained for was Walter Hathaway. He left his job as a life insurance clerk in Milwaukee and came to Banning, California, in 1888. Like many arriving white-collar workers with professions too urban for frontier life, he cast about, needing to find a new line of business. His first try was a lumber yard, which quickly met its demise.
Next, Walter Hathaway and partners bought a bee ranch with 120 stands of bees at the mouth of what became later known as Hathaway Canyon. This is a Serrano site known as Nahyu (according to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1925) or na'iū (according to William Duncan Strong in 1929).3
Hathaway changed beekeeping partners to join with C.F. Jost, an early pioneer and his ranching neighbor in Potrero Canyon, home to Wanakik Cahuilla. Native Americans earned $1 a day working on the Jost ranch.4 The nearby bee ranch prospered and expanded, exporting honey to Europe.
In 1888, however, federal officials noted a problem: the bee ranch and other ranches were on lands that previously had been set aside for Morongo Reservation. Although the reservation lands (much smaller than present-day Morongo) had been set aside some years earlier, no one had really enforced the boundaries. Settlers continued taking Native American homelands for their own uses. Without marked boundaries, by 1886 settlers had taken nearly all Morongo Reservation’s available agricultural lands.5 They also claimed available water.
At that time, reservation lands were held in trust by the federal government, and federal Indian Agents were in control of tribal matters. Indian Agent John S. Ward managed to convince his higher-ups that the invaders should be evicted. U.S. President Grover Cleveland eventually agreed, and issued an eviction order.
Armed U.S. military troops evicted the intruders, including Walter Hathaway and C.F. Jost. As Hathaway later noted, though, they didn’t try to evict the 300 colonies of bees they found at his place.
(Postscript: Jost family members later were part of the posse chasing Willie Boy. And Walter Hathaway became Banning’s first mayor in 1913.)
St. Boniface Bees
1917 postcard showing groves near St. Boniface. Caption: “Exterior photographic postcard of an early panorama of Banning looking south from the hills behind the St. Boniface Indian/Industrial School toward Mt. San Jacinto.” Courtesy of Banning Library District.
The May 9, 1892, Los Angeles Herald newspaper glowingly described how “123 merry children,” many of them Native Americans, were learning labor skills in a Roman Catholic boarding school in Banning, California.6
St. Boniface Indian Industrial School had opened in 1890 to carry on the work of the California Roman Catholic missions, focusing on children. While the government day school teacher at nearby Morongo Reservation taught reading, writing, and arithmetic — the same subjects that settlers’ children were learning — the focus at St. Boniface instead was on the heavenly future of the children’s souls and their earthly future of providing a labor force. 7 After long hours of learning Roman Catholic liturgy, girls, for example, spent their time on domestic work such as cleaning, sewing, and cooking. The boys’ work included hard labor, carpentry, shoe-making, farming — and beekeeping.
The 1892 news article reported: “You may see them [the boys] cutting wood, tilling and cultivating the land and orchard, pruning the trees, irrigating and so on; for which purpose the thirty-five acres of orchard and forty-seven acres of land under cultivation afford ample opportunity.” By 1898, the school boasted of crops of pears, peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, apples, quinces, figs, olives, and almonds.8
The region by then was filled with fruit and nut ranches. Native American ranch workers learned beekeeping, and apiaries also became part of the groves flourishing on the reservation.
By the 1920s, Banning was one of the leading almond producers. Caption: “Interior photograph of the Banning, California, exhibit booth in the 1925 Southern California Citrus Fair. Mr. and Mrs. French Gilman are in booth displaying Banning almonds and statistics for acreage and dollar amounts for almond, prune, apricot and peach crops.” (Courtesy of Banning Library District.)
Bees in 2022
Although Southern California’s almond and fruit industries eventually declined, honey bees continue to dominate the landscapes today. Read in this article by Madena Asbell of the Mojave Desert Land Trust about how you can support native pollinators in your home garden, HERE.
Thank you for reading along. Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, led by Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that saves and shares Southern California Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts. We welcome your donations. (MORE INFO.) We welcome your EMAIL. Thank you from Editor Pat Murkland, April 13, 2022.
Baur, John E., The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870-1900, © 1959 Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, second edition, paperback 2010, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, p. 111.
Asbell, Madena, “Know Your Desert Pollinators and the Plants They Rely On,” April 9, 2020, online article for Mojave Desert Land Trust.
Gunther, Jane Davies, “Hathaway Canyon, Creek,” in Riverside County, California, Place Names: Their Origins and Their Stories, 1984, © Jane Davies Gunther, Rubidoux Printing Co., p. 226.
Hughes, Tom, History of Banning and San Gorgonio Pass: In two parts, 1938, Banning Record Print, pp. 28-29, 110, 134-135.
Bean, Lowell John, and Sylvia Vane, principal investigators for Cultural Systems Research, Inc., “Final Report, Expert Witness Document on Morongo Indian Reservation Water Case: Docket 80 A-2,” Mission Indians before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, report dated Sept. 18, 1991. p. 9.
Writer named as “Friend of the Indians,” “Mission Indians at Banning Being Taught. The Scholars Making Most Excellent Progress. How the Children Enjoy Their Work. The Visit Recently of Bishop Mora—lncidents of the Reception,” Los Angeles Herald, Volume 38, Number 28, 9 May 1892, p. 2. Digitized in UC Riverside California Digital Newspaper Collection. Accessed March 10, 2019.
Rathbun, Tanya L., “Hail Mary: The Catholic Experience at St. Boniface Indian School,” in, Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences. by Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc. 2006, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
St. Boniface’s Industrial School for Indian Boys and Girls, 1898 booklet, “printed at St. Boniface’s Industrial School, Banning, California,” p. 2.