At the Santa Barbara Mission, before the sun rises and before the noisy traffic begins the daily commute down the mountain to work in the town below, a visitor can almost hear the whispered groans of the thousands of Chumash who lie buried in unmarked graves in the mission graveyard. The mission exudes an eerie quiet in the early-morning stillness. The night fog recedes back toward the ocean after providing the meager moisture for the imported trees and plants that suck droplets of mist from the damp night air. The lingering fog obscures the rising sun, making it hard to tell exactly when day begins, but gradually light descends and the rays mop up the air to reveal a spectacular view of the town and ocean below.

The Mission of Santa Barbara sits a few miles inland and upward from the ocean, in the mouth of a canyon lined with stately coastal live oaks and sturdy sycamores with bark so pale that at night they look almost like birches. The classical white but somewhat squat façade of the mission reflects an Italian influence that gives it the most European and least rustic appearance of all the California missions. The nearly pink trim gives the building a sugary appearance, like a gingerbread house trimmed in pink icing. This polished and classically worked face earned the building the sobriquet of “Queen of the Missions.”

The mission overlooks the red tile roofs and earth-toned walls of one of the most beautiful towns in the world, a place where even the Mormon, Unitarian, and Christian Scientist churches show the graceful architecture of colonial Spanish chapels. Tall, elegant palms and spindly eucalyptus line the roads, where the luxuriant vegetation gives a natural elegance to even the most modest home. The higher up the hills one climbs around the mission, the more expensive the homes become as they acquire a better view of the ocean, more extensive landscaping, larger swimming pools, longer driveways, higher gates, and better-illuminated tennis courts.

Inside the simple mission, a flickering candle burns before the altar. According to tradition, a candle has been burning at that altar without interruption for over two centuries. An expansive wrought-iron chandelier dominates the dank, cavernous interior. The gift shop in the mission plays religious music, Gregorian chants or the thin tunes of the “folk mass” in English.

The Chumash who once lived here have virtually disappeared, but their memory permeates the hillside. Four thousand Indian graves, mostly of Chumash, now surround the mission as a reminder of the great price paid for this place and this building by the natives who lived here for thousands of years. But the mission does not house the memory of these people. That memory and a few physical artifacts of the Chumash now find refuge in the nearby Santa Barbara Natural History Museum.

The missions of California symbolize the Spanish colonial era, but the missions originated as Spanish settlements built in Indian communities as places where the Indians could learn about Christianity and in the process learn about the European way of life. During most of the time when Spain controlled this area, Spanish colonists evidenced little interest in living in California, because Mexico offered much better lands and easier fortunes. Several halfhearted attempts to colonize California failed because the area proved simply too far from Mexico and the center of commerce, power, and social life. For a Mexican colonist, living in California was living in distant exile.

The Spanish authorities took serious notice of California only after the Russians colonized Alaska in the eighteenth century and threatened to move down the Pacific Coast to California. Suddenly faced with the possibility of losing the whole northern Pacific Coast to the Russians much the way they had already lost the northern Atlantic Coast to the British, the Spanish powers in Mexico City finally decided to settle and defend the California coast.

Before the Russians could extend their power south to California, the Spaniards sought to erect a series of forts, but they needed a regular supply of food, cloth, leather, and skilled workers. California lay too far from Mexico to depend on regular shipments of such materials. To supply its forts without having to send in reluctant Mexican colonists, the government devised a plan centered on the Franciscan monks. The friars would convert the Indians, who would then serve the needs of the forts. In this way the financially constrained monarchy of Spain defended what remained of its land claim on the Pacific, and the church forced the Indians to bear the economic burden of this military force.

The Franciscan missionary Miguel José Serra, better known as Junípero Serra, who was already working in Baja California, gladly accepted the challenge to build missions near the forts in Alta California. Between 1769 and his death in 1784, he established nine California missions starting at San Diego and Monterey, and then filling in with more missions, each about one hard day’s walk from another. Eventually, twenty-one missions stretched from San Diego in the south to Sonoma, north of San Francisco. The forts and the supporting missions gave the government of New Spain its first visible presence in California.

Before the Spaniards could build a mission at Santa Barbara, they built the Presidio, a military fort, which Father Serra dedicated and blessed on April 21, 1782. The Presidio was erected to subdue the Indians who interfered with mail transmissions along El Camino Real, the “royal road” connecting northern and southern California. Another four and a half years passed before the military controlled the area firmly enough to allow work to begin on the mission in December 1786.

The friars and the soldiers worked together to capture the coastal Chumash and settle them into a life of mission servitude. Once the Indians consented to baptism, they were irrevocably tied to the mission and to the authority of the friars. The missionaries forced the Indians to clear the land, to farm it, to build mission buildings, to dress in cloth, and to worship the Christian God, the Virgin, and the saints.

The mission offered no school, but its friars taught the Chumash to work. Women wove blankets all day in workshops set up beside the mission. They also ground corn in rows of stone metates, and they cooked the mission’s food. The assembly-line nature of their work shows clearly in the laundry pit still standing in front of the mission but now made much more attractive with flowers floating in the pond and turtles swimming amid the pigeons that use it as a large birdbath. Chumash women once lined the sides of the long trough in their ceaseless pounding and scrubbing of piles of laundry.

Men who did not work in the fields built an elaborate system of stone-lined aqueducts, canals, dams, and drainage ditches, some of which still function today to bring water to the modern residents of Santa Barbara. Other men made tiles, tanned leather, dipped candles, and performed the other tasks that transformed their environment from an Indian world to a miniaturized model of a Spanish colonial community. The mission has none of the stateliness or mechanical wizardry of the contemporary settlement Old Williamsburg in Virginia. By comparison, the austere and rustic qualities of the mission settlement show that it was built for work and worship, but not for the daily enjoyments of domestic or urban life.

Junípero Serra and his Franciscan successors concentrated their missions along the coast, which gave them easier access by sea back to Mexico. In this way the Spanish authorities occupied the most fertile strip of California. Prior to the Spanish arrival, the combination of wild foods growing near the shore, the seafood available from the ocean, and the animals living in this thin fertile strip had provided a luxurious living for the Indians for thousands of years.

At the Santa Barbara Mission, which operated as one of the most lenient and enlightened of all the missions, the Indians had time off to gather traditional wild foods in the fall and to visit relatives throughout the year. Nevertheless, the friars whipped the Chumash for violations of the strict and seemingly arbitrary rules of monastic life. They also imprisoned the Indians in stocks, shackles, and chains.

At night the friars locked unmarried Chumash women in a large room (Forbes 1964). This sleeping arrangement kept the Chumash men apart from the Chumash women, but did not keep the Spanish soldiers away from the women. According to a denunciation of the harsh conditions written by Santa Barbara friars Esteban Tapis and Juan Cortés in 1800, the soldiers used the women as prostitutes and paid the malnourished women with simple food (Forbes 1964). Such treatment of women seems to have been common throughout southern California and to have caused a high rate of venereal infection among Indian women as well as creating a new generation of mixed Spanish-Indian offspring (John R. Johnson, 1989).

In return for their labor, the Indians received no pay other than the food and clothing necessary to keep them fit for more work; the profits accrued to the missions. The Indians lived in a series of barracks lined up in military fashion next to the mission. The individual family units measured twelve by eighteen feet. Visitors to the modern mission can no longer see the shoddy Indian residences, which disintegrated long ago, but surviving blueprints seem to presage a modern military or work camp lined with identical barracks.

The Chumash inmates wore uniform blue clothing made at the mission. Those men appointed by the friars as leaders separated themselves from the people under them by wearing some items of leather and clothing of Spanish design. While the friars ate baked bread and meat, the daily ration for the Indians consisted of atole, a corn mush, for breakfast and supper, supplemented by some vegetables and meat flavoring at noon. The friars imposed a strict regimen with rules to control every aspect of the Indians’ family life, work, sexual relations, celebrations, and clothing.

The only escape for the Indians who wished to avoid mission slavery came through a dangerous flight into the interior of California, into the waste areas, the dry hills and canyons, or into the desert, where the shortage of food and water and the oppressive heat made life difficult. Many Indians fled there, and many of them died, but today virtually the only Indian groups left in California are descended from those who lived in the interior. All the tribes who lived where Father Serra built his missions have effectively disappeared.

At the time the missions began in California, approximately seventy thousand Indians inhabited the coast from San Francisco to San Diego. By the time the Mexican government secularized the missions in 1833-35, the friars had reduced the native population to a mere fifteen thousand (Forbes 1964).

The leatherbound book of baptisms at Santa Barbara carefully records in neat handwriting the names of all the Indians brought under Spanish authority. The book contains 373 leaves, each listing some of the Christian names of the 4,771 Indian adults and infants baptized between 1786 and 1858.

An equally large burial registry lists the deaths. Only a few months after the first baptism, a Chumash man named Ysaga (but changed to Agustin) of the community of Saspili (changed to Goleta) died and became the first name in the burial registry. By 1841 the friars had filled the Indian burial registry with 3,997 entries, and they had to begin recording deaths in the back pages of the burial book for whites. Fertility among Chumash women declined, child mortality increased steadily, and most of these entries represented children and infants killed by European diseases (John R. Johnson, 1989). By 1872, when registration ceased, the Indian death list had reached 4,645 entries. At each of the Franciscan monasteries established in California, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births as the Spaniards captured and brought in Indians who failed to thrive or even to reproduce.

Of those who died at the Santa Barbara Mission, about four thousand found burial in large pits next to the church. Whenever one of the troughlike pits filled up, the friars had the Indians dig out the layers of bones and deposit them in a charnel house to make room in the pits for new bodies. In a macabre twist of someone’s sense of decoration, two of the skulls from the graveyard were mounted on the wall of the church with crossed thighbones beneath them to create a skull-and-crossbones motif above the doorway.

Today a simple wooden sign with white lettering on a black background commemorates the Chumash who lie buried in the courtyard. The large stone vaults and headstones of the cemetery, however, do not belong to the Chumash. They mark the resting places of families with illustrious Spanish surnames, as well as the graves of Irish settlers and New England Yankees who immigrated into the area after it fell to American control.

As the Indians cleared the land and brought it into cultivation for crops or cattle, Mexican colonists moved north to take over the land. Indians continued to die from European diseases aggravated by the hard work and the disruption of their tribal culture. Those who survived did so by surrendering their native language to Spanish, giving up their religion for Catholicism, and casting off nearly every vestige of Indian culture to become hispanicized even to the point of disclaiming Indian descent in favor of Spanish.

An exhibit in the Santa Barbara Mission dryly and naïvely explains the disappearance of the Chumash. “Conflicts arose between the missionaries and soldiers, and between soldiers and Indians. Health-related problems and opposing ethnic practices proved a detriment to the Chumash…. The remaining Chumash have been integrated into the American way of life.” Some unknown hand corrected the sign by penciling in the prefix “dis”-before the word “integrated.”

Of all the Indians who disappeared into the mission system, mystery still surrounds the cryptic Spanish entry number 1183 in the Santa Barbara Mission death registry dated October 19, 1853. “I gave ecclesiastical burial in this cemetery to the mortal remains of Juana Maria, an Indian brought from San Nicolas Island, and since there was no one who understood her language she was baptized conditionally by Father Sanchez.” Those few lines serve as a memorial to a whole people whose entire language and even their very name disappeared with only this small entry in a book of deaths.

The subject of the entry was not Chumash; she was a Channel Island woman who had been abandoned on her native island by an 1835 expedition to capture Indians and settle them around the missions. She may well have been a survivor or daughter of the women who massacred the Russian men a generation earlier. For nearly two decades the woman had lived alone on San Nicolas, the traditional home of the Gabrielino, who spoke a Uto-Aztecan language unrelated to Chumash. She supported herself by hunting small animals, gathering food along the shore, and making baskets, clothes, knives, fishhooks, needles, ropes, and fur capes. In 1853 some American adventurers led by Captain George Nidever found her and brought her to the mission.

She had managed to survive alone, in the worst of circumstances, on a deserted island, but in the intervening years since the mission raiders had taken away the other people of San Nicolas Island, none of the Indians brought to the mission had lived. Within seven weeks after her transfer to the mission, she too lay dead without having found anyone with whom she could talk, to whom she could tell her story of how she lived. No one ever found out her name—so they called her Juana Maria.

According to the oral tradition at the mission, the friars gathered all of Juana Maria’s interesting tools and creations and sent them to the Vatican in Rome, but no written record remains of what happened to these unique cultural items. They have disappeared along with all other physical remains of the mysterious woman.

The friars buried Juana Maria, like all the other Indians, in one of their Indian pits, so that today we have no idea where in the cemetery her bones might be. In 1928 the Santa Barbara Daughters of the American Revolution installed a small bronze plaque on the mission wall to commemorate the Indian woman of unknown name.

The true name of Juana Maria has been lost, as have the names of many of the settlements along the southern California coast. A few Chumash place names, such as Malibu Beach, Point Magu, Port Hueneme, and Saticoy, survive in southern California, but most have yielded to Spanish or English names.

The labor of Indians opened up California to Mexican colonists, who further improved it and then yielded it to Anglo colonists, who may in their turn have to surrender it to yet others. These Indians were not legally slaves, but for moral and practical purposes, there is little distinction between a slave and someone forced to work for an occupying invader.

The importance of Indian slaves in the opening of the land was not a phenomenon unique to California; it was only better organized there. The same process of Indian slavery underlay the development of the English colonies along the Atlantic, and the French colonies along the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers.

Indian slavery prepared most parts of North America for colonization. Christopher Columbus started this practice by kidnapping twenty-five Indians whom he took back to Spain with him as slaves. A few years later, when he was pressed to make a profit from his voyages, and had found little gold or spices with which to do so, he began shipping Caribbean Indians back to Spain to be sold in the Portuguese Azores, the Spanish Canaries, and the markets of Seville and other mainland cities.

Miguel de Cuneo, a member of Columbus’s second expedition, described one of their slave raids in 1495, writing that of 1,600 Indian slaves, only 550 fit into the ships. The men staying on the island divided up most of those who remained. Of the 550 slaves shipped out on February 17, 1495, 200 died at sea and were thrown into the ocean (Forbes 1988). De Cuneo also mentions that Columbus gave him an attractive Carib woman whom he managed to rape only after a long fight and a thorough beating.

Columbus pursued a deliberate policy of using Indian slavery and Indian labor to finance the conquest of the new lands (Forbes 1988). Within the first decade of Columbus’s arrival, the Spaniards had shipped out at least three thousand Indian slaves, and possibly as many as six thousand, to Seville (Forbes 1988). In addition to the thousands sold in Europe, Columbus enslaved many times that number for use in the early mines and plantations of the Caribbean.

Columbus set a precedent that virtually every other explorer followed in the succeeding years: he financed his explorations by trading in the flesh of captured Indian slaves. When John Cabot made his official discovery of North America for the English crown in 1497, he too seized a few Indians to take back with him to Europe. Cabot arrived on the North American coast 123 years before the first successful English colony, and throughout this time explorers, traders, and fishermen raided the American shoreline for slaves, whom they picked up seemingly as a way to earn a little pocket money in between their major activities. A few Indian slaves could be sold in the Caribbean for food or supplies for one’s ship, or a few slaves taken back to Europe could help defray some of the costs of the expedition. Slaves collected on one expedition and sold in Europe helped to finance the next expedition.

Columbus and the other Spanish slave traders incurred quick opposition from the monarchy, particularly Queen Isabella, who insisted that the Indians of the New World belonged to the monarchy and thus could not be sold in Spain. This only encouraged the traders to sell the slaves in other places, notably the islands including the Canaries, Azores, and Cape Verdes. Increasingly the new planters in the Caribbean wanted to keep the slaves in America for use on their plantations, and the exporting of slaves declined quickly.

By 1519 the Spaniards had nearly exhausted the supply of Indian slaves in the Caribbean. A letter from that year can still be seen today in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The paper still looks fresh, and the ink has faded to the brown hue of rich Moroccan leather. In a curly and elegant handwriting that must have been that of a scribe, Diego Columbus, the son of Christopher, beseeched King Charles V of Spain for permission to import African slaves to replace the depleted supply of Indians. This letter reveals the earliest known official request to import Africans to the Americas, and with the elegant strokes on that page began three centuries of the cruel commerce across the mid-Atlantic.

The Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French followed quickly behind the Spaniards in the effort to enslave native Americans. In 1500, Gaspar CÔrte-Real, a Portuguese explorer from Terceira, in the Azores, sailed up the northern Atlantic Coast to what is now Labrador, where he encountered the Nasquapee or Naskapi people, sixty of whom he immediately captured and took back to Lisbon for sale as slaves. According to some accounts, King Manoel called this land Terra del Laboratore, “the land of the workers,” or, more freely translated, “the slave coast,” and from this inauspicious remark arose the modern name of Labrador. Equally plausible stories offer other etymologies of the name (Grenfell 1909). Regardless of the true etymology, the story illustrates how common the practice of enslavement became in America.

CÔrte-Real made his third trip to America in 1502, but disappeared while at sea. His brother set out in search of him, and he too disappeared without a trace. Perhaps they died trying to enslave another group of natives in Labrador or somewhere else on the American coast. Perhaps the explorers of a rival European monarch killed them. Or perhaps nature herself destroyed them, but until now no trace of either of them, or their boats and crews, has been found.

In 1524, Juan (or Giovanni) Verrazano explored the North American mainland for the French crown, and captured slaves on his voyages; Jacques Cartier continued the explorations and the Indian enslavement in 1535. In the seventeenth century the French, who made an alliance with the Hurons but failed to do so with the Iroquois, captured Iroquois and sold them to work as galley slaves for the king (Forbes 1988).

One of the first of the North American Indian slaves to have his name passed on to posterity was Squanto, the Wampanoag who helped the Pilgrim settlers of Massachusetts. In 1614 or 1615, before the Pilgrims arrived in New England, the English slave trader Thomas Hunt raided the Wampanoag village of Patuxet and seized Squanto. Hunt carried Squanto and twenty-seven other Indians across the Atlantic and sold him in the Spanish port of Màlaga on the Mediterranean, about sixty miles northeast of Gibraltar.

Squanto subsequently escaped from slavery and gradually worked his way back to Massachusetts via England and Newfoundland, only to find his village of Patuxet deserted from the combined devastation of slave raids and the epidemic that Hunt’s sailors left behind among the survivors of the raid (Forbes 1988).

Despite the great services rendered them by Squanto and a few of the other surviving Indians from the coast, the Pilgrims not only continued but expanded the Indian slave trade in the area. War, slave raids, and disease already had eradicated most of the natives along the Massachusetts coast, and the Pilgrims made war on those who survived. In the winter of 1636 they attacked the Pequots of what is now Connecticut, and by the spring of 1637 they had thoroughly defeated them. The colonists of Massachusetts and Connecticut divided the Indian prisoners. The Massachusetts victors sold their slaves for cash, while the Connecticut colonists kept theirs for domestic service.

The Pilgrim settlers enslaved the remnants of the tribe and shipped them out for sale. The Pilgrims could not, however, send them to England. As early as 1596 and again in 1601, Queen Elizabeth had exiled all dark-skinned people from her realm. This expulsion order included “negars and blackamoores” as well as Indians. Most of the slaves in Britain at that time had to be removed to the British possessions in the Americas (Forbes 1988). Since the Pilgrims could not sell their Pequot slaves in England, they sent them to market in Bermuda.

The New England colonists sold some of the Indian slaves across the Atlantic in Europe and even in Africa. In 1683 a shipment of Indians was abandoned in the Algiers slave market after the Muslims refused to buy them (Lauber). Other reports list Indian slaves sold in Morocco, along the west coast of Africa, and in the Canaries, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands.

As the colonists grew stronger, they engaged in larger wars and attacked larger Indian tribes. In the winter of 1675, the New England Confederation of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut made war on the Wampanoag, who were then led by Metacom, a leader whom the English named King Philip. After a series of brutal victories by the English at Narragansett in December 1675, at Deerfield in May 1676, and near Bridgewater Swamp in August 1676, the colonists assassinated Metacom. With the defeat of the Indian armies and the killing of their leader, the English began their slave raids on the survivors.

The colonists cleaned out large new areas of land for themselves by enslaving the Indians and selling them in Spain and the Caribbean. They executed older males, selling only the younger Indians of both sexes into slavery. By colonial law the English allowed themselves not only to enslave soldiers caught in battle, but to enslave the wives and children of any hostile Indians as well. After a brief biblical debate as to whether a son should be called to account for his father’s acts, the colonial officials even seized the widow and son of Metacom and sold them for thirty shillings apiece in the West Indies (Waldman).

Massachusetts law allowed owners to brand Indian slaves to prevent their escape. The owners often pricked a letter or symbol onto the cheek or forehead of a slave and then filled the figure with gunpowder and Indian ink to leave a combination of a brand and a tattoo (Lauber).

By selling the survivors and the land of the Indians, the Pilgrims financed another phase in their colonization of New England. The Indians could literally finance their own destruction as the colonists sold the Indian victims and land of one campaign to finance the next campaign, which always penetrated a little deeper into America.

Just as Boston became the major slave market for the northern Indians, Charleston, South Carolina, became the major market in the south. Even before the founding of the Charleston colony, slave raiders such as William Hilton seized slaves for the Caribbean plantations from along the Carolina coast in 1663. With the founding of Charleston in 1670, the port became the primary exit point for Southern slaves, particularly the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw.

The Charleston merchants soon had long trade lines that stretched across the Southern states to the Mississippi River. Initially they relied heavily on warfare and kidnapping as the means to capture Indian slaves. In time they encouraged their Indian allies to do the difficult work and then to sell the captives to the whites in exchange for cheap trade goods. As Gary Nash described the situation in the 1760s, “Slave coffles were marching through the Carolina backcountry to the coast as much as they were filing through the African interior to the trading posts on the African coast” (Nash).

The Carolina settlers continued the well-established economic pattern initiated by Columbus by using Indian slavery to finance new wars of conquest. They used Indians to fight Indians, then enslaved the losers to finance the next campaign. This strategy found frank expression in a letter of April 9, 1754, from Indian trader Matthew Toole to South Carolina’s governor, James Glen. In asking for permission to use one group of Indians to fight another, Toole writes that “[w]e want no Pay, only what we can take and plunder, what Slaves we take to be our own of Indians” (Washburn).

In New England, where agriculture played a less important role in the economy, and where the economy suffered chronic labor shortages of many types, the settlers used the Indians in manual trades. Eighteenth-century newspapers in New England carried advertisements announcing the availability for hire or sale of Indian as well as African craftsmen including carpenters, coopers, wheelwrights, and butchers (Lauber).

Indian women sold or reared in slavery learned domestic tasks that usually kept them working in a single household for years. The type of work they performed appears readily in an advertisement in the Boston News Letter of January 5, 1719. It offered for sale an Indian woman “fit for all manner of household work either in town or country, can sew, wash, brew, bake, spin and milk cows.” An advertisement from the American Weekly Mercury of April 10, 1729, offered a woman and her child for sale. The advertisement boasted that the woman “washes, irons, and starches very well, and is a good cook.”

Indian slaves also found themselves impressed into work as sailors and soldiers by virtually every European nation with whom they came into contact. Law required slaveholders to furnish their slaves for combat in times of emergency. Owners who lost slaves in battle received compensation from public coffers or received newly captured slaves to replace the dead ones.

As late as 1778, during the American Revolution, Washington requested slaves for his battalions. The Rhode Island assembly responded by mustering all Indian, mulatto, and Negro slaves with the promise of eventual freedom for them, if the Americans won the war against the British (Lauber).

Along the Canadian coast, the French followed a practice different from that of the English. Even though the first African slave went up for sale in Quebec in 1629, Canadian slavery centered primarily on the Pawnee people. In contrast to British settlers, who preferred African slaves, French settlers in Canada preferred Native American ones. As late as 1760, the Treaty of Montreal recognized African and Pawnee slavery in Canada, and thus the Pawnee became known as the “Negroes of America” (Davis). Most of the African slaves brought into Canada came after 1783 with British loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. Even though the English outlawed the slave trade in England in 1772, they did not extend the ban on slavery to Canada until August 1, 1834.

At first, Indian slavery provided a lucrative, albeit episodic, source of income to colonists, who harvested and sold villages of people much the way they did stands of pine or colonies of beaver. The Indians formed part of the natural resources of the rich North American continent. As the colonists became more settled, and as their small colonial villages grew into seaports and they found agricultural crops that they could sell, they began to value the Indians less as a source of income from a one-time sale, and to see them as a source of labor that would produce an income for years and even decades.

In the early years of Indian slavery, the colonists frequently wanted to dispose of their newly captured slaves as quickly as possible by shipping them far away. This reduced the danger of the Indians escaping back to their home villages or being rescued by their kinsmen. As the colonists grew stronger and the Indian nations weaker, the colonists often simply exchanged slaves with another colony. The distance often sufficed to keep the Indian slaves from escaping, and many slaves feared escape because of the presence of Indians hostile to the tribes from which they had been seized.

Americans imported Africans almost from the founding of the earliest settlements, but African slaves had to be transported over thousands of miles of ocean to the Caribbean, and then up the Atlantic Coast. In the early eighteenth century an African cost twice the price of a Native American, and the cost of a healthy African male stayed perpetually high compared to that of a Native American (Forbes 1964). North American settlers lacked the rich resources of the Caribbean sugar planters, whose demand for African labor was as inexhaustible as their income from their lucrative sugar trade.

Unable to buy the large numbers of African slaves that they wanted, the early colonists started their plantations with a heavy reliance on the much cheaper and easier-to-obtain Indian slaves. Africans remained the slaves of choice primarily because they had immunity or resistance to many of the diseases that killed Indians—particularly malaria, which the Europeans brought with them very early to the swamps of the American south. Unlike the Indians, who still lived on their home continent, the Africans could virtually never return home to their native people.

As late as 1709, Indians made up one-quarter of all slaves in South Carolina (Lauber). In 1708, Captain Thomas Nairne, explaining the importance of Indian slavery in the Carolinas, wrote that the colonists enslaved the Indians because they feared that the French to the west might arm the Indians if the English colonists did not enslave them (Forbes 1964). By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Southern colonies focused on a few lucrative plantation crops such as tobacco, indigo, rice, and eventually cotton; from these the planters acquired the financial resources to compete with the sugar planters of the Caribbean and to buy increasingly large numbers of Africans.

By the time of the American Revolution, African slavery had largely replaced Indian slavery in the thirteen colonies. Many Indians had been absorbed into the slave population, and relatively few free natives still lived in the colonies. Planters found it easier and cheaper to buy freshly imported Africans at American docks than to finance lengthy and dangerous expeditions into the continental interior to capture Indians.

Indian slavery continued to flourish, however, in the western part of North America, still under Spanish domination. The slave trade in Mexico started with the conquest of the Aztec empire by Cortez, and quickly spread north. As early as the 1560s, Spanish slave-raiding expeditions reached Texas. In 1581, Gaspar de Luxan led a slave raid into La Junta, along the Texas border, and in the following year Espejo-Beltran took an expedition into New Mexico (Forbes 1964). Most of these Indian slaves ended as laborers in the silver mines and ranches of Mexico or in the plantations of the Yucatàn, where the slaves grew henequen, the thick-leafed tropical plants used to make a coarse, reddish fiber for ropes and twine.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Pueblo Indians of the upper Rio Grande valley fell victim to repeated slave raids and to enslavement meted out to them as punishment by secular authorities. The Spaniards usually marched the captive Pueblos downstream to El Paso for sale to rancher colonists, or for work deeper in the Mexican interior.

Slavery as practiced legally in the early United States was technically illegal in Spanish-controlled lands, but Spanish administrators devised cunning ways of overcoming this legal restriction. After the reconquest of the Acoma Pueblo in January 1599, the Spaniards sentenced males and females above the age of twelve to twenty years of personal servitude. Males above the age of twenty-five endured the additional punishment of having one foot amputated by a Spanish sword before beginning their servitude (Forbes 1960). The church distributed children under the age of twelve to work as servants for families of Mexican Christians in the area.

The captured Indians became servants without liberty for life. The legal distinctions between such servants for life and slaves did little, however, to change the living conditions of the Indians. An Indian working as a servant without liberty in a Mexican silver mine or on a Mexican ranch differed little in the quality of life from one working on a cotton plantation in Georgia or a sugar mill in Jamaica.

As control tightened over the Pueblo Indians, the Spaniards extended slave raiding to the capture of nomadic Athapaskan peoples, the ancestors of the modern Navajo and Apache. They also preyed on the farming peoples, including the Yuma, Pima, and Papago. The slave trade pushed ever farther north into what became the states of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado through the eighteenth century, and in the more remote areas until the dawn of the twentieth century.

Mission control over the Indians of California was legally terminated between 1833 and 1835, when the Mexican Republic declared all Indians free and independent. Much of the impetus for this emancipation came from the Mexican colonists moving into the area and finding that the clergy at the missions monopolized Indian labor. The new ranchers wanted the Indian labor for their own endeavors. The legal emancipation of the Indians changed their masters from the Spanish friars to the Mexican ranchers, who treated them no better than the clerics had done. In 1836, one California Mexican rancher, Francisco M. Alvarado, justified the continuation of the harsh treatment of Indians by explaining that the “Indians cannot be controlled except by flogging” (Forbes 1964).

Indian slavery, both de jure and de facto, continued even after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in the Confederate states. The United States Congress outlawed the enslavement of Navajos by Americans and Mexicans through a joint resolution of July 27, 1868, and slavery of Alaskan natives did not legally end until even later.

When control of California passed from Mexico to the United States, the position of the surviving Indians improved only gradually. From 1850 until 1869, Los Angeles maintained an Indian slave market on Monday mornings. The Mayor’s Court sold the labor of Indians convicted of offenses, the most common of which was drunkenness. By paying an Indian’s fine, an Anglo or Mexican rancher could require that the Indian work for him for twice the length of time to which the Indian had been sentenced to prison (Forbes 1964).

When the Indian completed his sentence, he often found that he now owed the rancher for his food or other services, and thus still could not be freed. The ranchers periodically supplied liberal amounts of alcohol for their indentured workers, and if a worker ever attained his freedom, the ranchers found it easy to have him rearrested for drunkenness. This started the cycle again.

Ranchers in California and other parts of the West maintained virtual enslavement of Indians through various legal charades, such as “debt peonage,” in which the peon owed the rancher for food and other services provided at high prices that the peon could never afford to pay. The courts offered little recourse for Indians, since the Supreme Court ruled in Elk v. Wilkins in 1884 that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution freed the African slaves but did not grant citizenship or constitutional rights to American Indians, even to those who had surrendered their tribal status and joined the larger society.

Even after emancipation of all slaves in the United States and its territories, agents of the federal government frequently conspired in the virtual enslavement of legally free Indians. Through legal devices that allowed them to confine Indians to reservations and to compel them to perform various types of unpaid labor, the Indian agents harnessed Indian labor and allowed it to be used for the profit of farmers, ranchers, and business, both on and off the reservation. Many reservation Indians had a status little higher than that of an indentured servant or a prison trustee. Some such practices continued until the United States finally conferred citizenship and full constitutional rights on all Indians in 1924.

When the morning fog lifts off Santa Barbara, and the imported cars of commuters snake down the mountain in long, slow lines, young Chicano men gather along Mission Street, which runs below the mission for which it is named. These young men, often mere boys dressed in blue jeans, pullover shirts, and old tennis shoes, line the streets waiting for an opportunity for day labor. They pace restlessly along the edge of the street, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups, and talking intermittently with one another, but they constantly watch the traffic for a signal from one of the drivers for them to jump into the back of a truck or crawl into a van. The one who first spots a potential employer and who moves fastest is the one most likely to earn a day’s pay.

The young men will haul lumber, pick broccoli, cut grass, pour cement, transplant tomatoes, clean floors, carry bricks, chop weeds, wash trucks, stack wood, move garbage, water lawns, sort avocados, scrub grills, trim bushes, pack kiwis, or do almost any other legal labor for a day’s pay. Of the many young men who line the street on any particular day, only a few will find work; the rest will have to move faster tomorrow.

Most of them have straight black hair, dark eyes, copper-colored skin, and beardless faces. They come from Mexico, speaking Spanish and bearing Christian names, but they are the survivors of the ancient Indians. With little if any European blood flowing through them, they continue today the long tradition of hard labor begun by their ancestors when Columbus first sailed to America. These young men now search for work in the same place where their native ancestors built the Presidio and the mission, cleared the land for farming and ranching, and laid the foundations for the prosperity so tastefully apparent in modern Santa Barbara. They are the people who built the city, and their strong backs, legs, arms, and minds still keep it clean and running today in the shadow of the old mission where the bones of the Chumash lie buried in their unmarked graves.