The government was the most to blame, because it did not
in the first place enact laws for the protection of the Indians in their
rights.
About the towns, many of the natives gathered for work. In some places
the authorities had the right to arrest them as vagabonds and hire them
out as bondmen to the highest bidder, for a period often of as many as
two or three months at a time, with no regard to family ties. Little
seems to have been done to assist them to a better kind of life. In Los
Angeles, when working in the vineyards as grape pickers, they were paid
their wages each Saturday night, and immediately they were tempted on
all sides by sellers of bad whisky and were really hurried into
drunkenness. Their shrieks and howls would, for a time, make the night
hideous, when they were driven by the officers of the law into corrals,
like so many pigs or cattle, and left there till Monday morning, when
they were handed over to whoever chose to pay the officers for the right
to own them for the next week.
Near the Oregon line lived some of the most warlike and troublesome
Indians of California.
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