This book reveals how powerful undercurrents of sex, gender, and culture helped shape the history of the American frontier from the 1760s to the 1850s. Looking at California under three flagsathose of Spain, Mexico, and the United StatesaHurtado resurrects daily life in the missions, at mining camps, on overland trails and sea journeys, and in San Francisco. In these settings Hurtado explores courtship, marriage, reproduction, and family life as a way to understand how men and womenawhether Native American, Anglo American, Hispanic, Chinese, or of mixed bloodafit into or reshaped the roles and identities set by their race and gender.

Hurtado introduces two themes in delineating his intimate frontiers. One was a libertine California, and some of its delights were heartily described early in the 1850s: " Gold] dust was plentier than pleasure, pleasure more enticing than virtue. Fortune was the horse, youth in the saddle, dissipation the track, and desire the spur." Not all the times were good or giddy, and in the tragedy of a teenage domestic who died in a botched abortion or a brutalized Indian woman we see the seamy underside of gender relations on the frontier. The other theme explored is the reaction of citizens who abhorred the loss of moral standards and sought to suppress excess. Their efforts included imposing all the stabilizing customs of whichever society dominated Californiaaduring the Hispanic period, arranged marriages and concern for family honor were the norm; among the Anglos, laws regulated prostitution, missionaries railed against vices, and "proper" women were brought in to help "civilize" the frontier.

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when vast numbers of whites 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. "Anyone interested in California Indians should read this book."-William Bright, Los Angeles Times Book Review "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."-Booklist "A wide-ranging and imaginative discussion of significant issues that are at the very center of scholarship on western settlement during the nineteenth century."-Roger Nichols, University of Arizona Winner of the 1989 Ray Allen Billington Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American frontier history.

This definitive biography offers a new critical assessment of the life, works, and ideas of Herbert E. Bolton (1870-1953), a leading historian of the American West, Mexico, and Latin America. Bolton, a famous pupil of Frederick Jackson Turner, formulated a concept - the borderlands - that is a foundation of historical studies today. His research took him not only to the archives and libraries of Mexico but out on the trails blazed by Spanish soldiers and missionaries during the colonial era. Bolton helped establish the reputation of the University of California and the Bancroft Library in the eyes of the world and was influential among historians during his lifetime, but interest in his ideas waned after his death. Now, more than a century after Bolton began to investigate the Mexican archives, Albert L. Hurtado explores his life against the backdrop of the cultural and political controversies of his day.

The Destruction of California Indians is so powerful that every American should read it. These accounts of the activities of agents, military officers, and newspapers reveal how thousands of California natives died from 1847 to 1865 from starvation, disease, drunkenness, enslavement, rape, murder, and warfare...The editor lets the documents tell the story and has provided organization and balance which make it possible to trace themes while letting the reader draw the conclusions. Library Journal

As American Indian communities face the new century, they look to the future armed with confidence in the indigenous perspectives that have kept them together thus far. Now five premier scholars in American Indian history, along with a tribal leader who has placed an indelible mark on the history of her people, show how understanding the past is the key to solving problems facing Indians today. Edited by Albert L. Hurtado and introduced by Wilma Mankiller, this book includes the insights of Colin G. Calloway, R. David Edmunds, Laurence M. Hauptman, Peter Iverson, and Brenda J. Child-scholars who have helped shape the way an entire generation thinks about American Indian history. Writing broadly about twentieth-century Native history, they focus on themes that drive this field of study: Indian identity, tribal acknowledgment, sovereignty, oral tradition, and cultural adaptation. Drawn from the Wilma Mankiller Symposium on American History, these thoughtful essays show how history continues to influence contemporary Native life. The authors carve a broad geographic swath-from the Oneidas' interpretation of the past, to the perseverance of the jingle dress tradition among the Ojibwes, to community persistence in the Southwest. Wilma Mankiller's essay on contemporary tribal government adds a personal perspective to understanding the situation of Indian people today.

As American Indian communities face the new century, they look to the future armed with confidence in the indigenous perspectives that have kept them together thus far. Now five premier scholars in American Indian history, along with a tribal leader who has placed an indelible mark on the history of her people, show how understanding the past is the key to solving problems facing Indians today.Edited by Albert L. Hurtado and introduced by Wilma Mankiller, this book includes the insights of Colin G. Calloway, R. David Edmunds, Laurence M. Hauptman, Peter Iverson, and Brenda J. Child - scholars who have helped shape the way an entire generation thinks about American Indian history. Writing broadly about twentieth-century Native history, they focus on themes that drive this field of study: Indian identity, tribal acknowledgment, sovereignty, oral tradition, and cultural adaptation. Drawn from the Wilma Mankiller Symposium on American History, these thoughtful essays show how history continues to influence contemporary Native life. The authors carve a broad geographic swath - from the Oneidas' interpretation of the past, to the perseverance of the jingle dress tradition among the Ojibwes, to community persistence in the Southwest. Wilma Mankiller's essay on contemporary tribal government adds a personal perspective to understanding the situation of Indian people today.

Founded in the late nineteenth century, the Women's National Indian Association was one of several reform associations that worked to implement the government's assimilation policy directed at Native peoples. The women of the WNIA combined political action with efforts to improve health and home life and spread Christianity on often remote reservations. During its more than seventy-year history, the WNIA established over sixty missionary sites in which they provided Native peoples with home-building loans, founded schools, built missionary cottages and chapels, and worked toward the realization of reservation hospitals. Gender, Race, and Power in the Indian Reform Movement reveals the complicated intersections of gender, race, and identity at the heart of Indian reform. This collection of essays offers a new interpretation of the WNIA's founding, argues that the WNIA provided opportunities for indigenous women, creates a new space in the public sphere for white women, and reveals the WNIA's role in broader national debates centered on Indian land rights and the political power of Christian reform.

In the history of the American frontier, John Sutter (1803-1880) looms large. A Swiss expatriate who attempted to create a personal empire in California's Sacramento Valley, he founded New Helvetia, a cosmopolitan settlement whose economy depended on Indian slaves and free laborers. New Helvetia drew overland immigrants to California in the 1840s and then--after gold was discovered by Sutter's employees--a flood of fortune seekers. Sutter was poised to become one of the richest men in the West, but rapacious settlers and his own poor business sense sent his dreams crashing.

Albert L. Hurtado has written the definitive biography of Sutter, mining a wealth of sources to create the first fully documented account of the man and his times. "John Sutter" explores Sutter's life in the broader context of America's rush for westward expansion while plumbing the inner dynamics of this erstwhile empire-builder.

Sutter was a quintessential outsider driven by anxiety over status--a man of talent, vision, and heroic ambitions who nevertheless became the victim of his own inadequacies as a businessman and his inability to adjust to a rapidly changing frontier. Sutter was full of contradictions. While building a reputation as a humanitarian friend of destitute immigrants, he callously exploited Indians. Nevertheless, this penniless dreamer became one of the most important men in California and a major player in the American conquest of the West.

In the history of the American frontier, John Sutter (1803-1880) looms large. A Swiss expatriate who attempted to create a personal empire in California's Sacramento Valley, he founded New Helvetia, a cosmopolitan settlement whose economy depended on Indian slaves and free laborers. New Helvetia drew overland immigrants to California in the 1840s and then--after gold was discovered by Sutter's employees--a flood of fortune seekers. Sutter was poised to become one of the richest men in the West, but rapacious settlers and his own poor business sense sent his dreams crashing.

Albert L. Hurtado has written the definitive biography of Sutter, mining a wealth of sources to create the first fully documented account of the man and his times. "John Sutter" explores Sutter's life in the broader context of America's rush for westward expansion while plumbing the inner dynamics of this erstwhile empire-builder.

Sutter was a quintessential outsider driven by anxiety over status--a man of talent, vision, and heroic ambitions who nevertheless became the victim of his own inadequacies as a businessman and his inability to adjust to a rapidly changing frontier. Sutter was full of contradictions. While building a reputation as a humanitarian friend of destitute immigrants, he callously exploited Indians. Nevertheless, this penniless dreamer became one of the most important men in California and a major player in the American conquest of the West.

"The rereading of these folklore selections in this attractively printed volume underscores again the uniqueness of California mythology...The tales that make up the mythology there are not the worn stand-bys of the world; these tales from the Pacific coast have a freshness of invention that one discovers all too seldom in collections of folklore. They are surprisingly indige-nous."--Ruth Benedict, American Anthropologist. "The volume is organized in such a way that it will be useful to students of literature as well as to students of anthropology, but the authors have not sacrificed accuracy and the critical use of their material in order to produce any kind of spurious picturesqueness. The volume is well gotten up and attractively illustrated."--Margaret Mead, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. "This is a most laudable attempt to make available to a general laity a representative collection of Californian Indian myths and tales."--Truman Michelson, American Historical Review. The compilers, Edward W. Gifford and Gwendoline Harris Block, were both associated with the University of California, Berkeley, Gifford as a professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Anthropology and Block as an editor in the Department of Anthropology. Albert L. Hurtado, who provided an introduction for the Bison Book edition, is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University and the author of Indian Survival on the California Borderland Frontier, 1819-6 (1988), winner of the Ray A. Billington Prize for American frontier history.