-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: February 5, 2007 2:14:20 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Subject: How "the Law" Gets Our Respect
Imagine Naming a Law School After Himmler?
The Genocidal Namesake of the Hasting School of Law
By BRUCE ANDERSON
Counterpunch, February 5, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/anderson02052007.html
A stern visage, the picture of 19th century rectitude, looks down
on passersby from a banner at the corner of McAllister and Larkin,
fin de siècle San Francisco. The banner celebrates the adjacent law
school, which is named after Serranus Clinton Hastings, born in New
York, law degree in Indiana, on west to Iowa where he was Iowa's
first congressman and first chief justice, then out to California
during the Gold Rush where he became Chief Justice of the
California State Supreme Court.
Hastings, through his term as a congressman and founding legal
father of the state of Iowa, was already a nationally-connected
Democrat when he arrived in California in 1849, looking to add to
the small fortune he'd made in Iowa real estate. He knew the Gold
Rush also meant a land rush as thousands of Americans made their
way into the under-populated state to make their fortunes. But
Hastings preferred to look around for likely real estate and legal
sinecures rather than pan for gold; and as he prospected for free
land he also got himself a seat on California's early supreme court
as its chief justice. The Mendocino Indians soon had the judge
sitting on them in Eden Valley, near Covelo, which the judge had
appropriated for himself as a horse and cattle ranch, remarking
that he'd found the place "uninhabited except for some Uka Indians."
The foreman of Judge Hastings' Eden Valley ranch was a giant Texan
named Hall, "Texas Boy Hall" as he was known, and a giant at 6'9"
and 280 pounds, a doubly intimidating presence to the Indians who
were still trying to adjust to the lethal unpredictability of
ordinary-size white men when they first encountered Texas Boy, a
recreational Indian killer who showed up with the first wave of
white settlers in the Round Valley area in the middle 1850s, and
may have killed more Indians than any other single American,
including Kit Carson, the generally recognized champ.
While Hall ran Judge Hastings' ranch in Eden Valley, Hastings built
himself a big house in Solano County, a remove which would later
lend the judge what he seemed to think was plausible deniability
when his foreman became a little too notorious for his free lance
retaliatory rampages against the Indians on the judge's behalf, and
the judge reluctantly let him go; a psychotic baby killer, after
all, was an unseemly sort of employee for a state supreme court
judge. Texas Boy, though, soon got a paid job killing Indians with
Jarboe's Eel River Rangers.
The Indians had been casually murdered in every part of Mendocino
County since the Gold Rush. And every year saw new and larger
expeditions of both settlers and Army units sent out to kill them.
But Judge Hastings, Texas Boy Hall and Walter Jarboe, in
California's first public-private partnership, managed to convert
dead Indians to cold cash in expeditions against the Indians of the
Eel River drainage, from Covelo to Hayfork, public funding arranged
by Judge Hastings.
"A little more than a year ago, Hall of Eden Valley employed 13
Indians in place of pack mules to go and pack loads from Ukiah City
to Eden Valley, and promised to give each one a shirt in payment;
the distance, I think, is about 40 miles. The Indians commenced
complaining at not receiving the shirts, and he, Hall, whipped two
of them, to keep them quiet; he said he never gave them the shirts
after he whipped them." (Indians War Files)
In retaliation for not getting their shirts from the judge and
Texas Boy, the Indians, knowing exactly on whose behalf Texas Boy
was acting, killed Judge Hasting's $2,000 stallion.
At the time, no one in Mendocino County was in danger of drowning
in the milk of human kindness, but Judge Hastings and Texas Boy
Hall were extreme even by the frontier standards of 1856.
In retaliation for the death of Judge Hasting's stallion,
neighboring rancher William T. Scott would testify, Texas Boy got
up a gang of his friends and "commenced killing all the Indians
they could find in the mountains; when Hall met Indians he would
kill them. He did not want any man to go with him to hunt Indians
who would not kill all he could find, because a knit (sic) would
make a louse. Mr. Hall said he had run Indians out of their
rancherias and put strychnine in their baskets of soup, or what
they had to eat."
Scott related another incident when Hall, having killed all the
adult males among a group of Yuki Indians he'd encountered near
Covelo, took some women and children into his custody with the
apparent aim of taking them in to the reservation at Covelo. "I
think all the squaws were killed because they refused to go
further. We took one boy into the valley, and the infants were put
out of their misery, and a girl ten years of age was killed for
stubbornness."
But Judge Hastings was still unhappy about the Indians killing his
stallion, and he seemed to consider Texas Boy's random revenges
inadequate pay back for the loss of the horse. The judge wanted all
the Indians of inland Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties
permanently gone. On July 11, 1859, the judge called 16 Covelo-area
settlers together who all signed a declaration selecting "Walter S.
Jarboe as Captain of our Company of Volunteers against the Euka
Indians."
Of course Texas Boy Hall was first among Jarboe's Rangers. Texas
Boy would be paid to kill Indians, for him the best of all possible
worlds, and Hastings, the state's number one judge, had no trouble
persuading the state legislature to pay Jarboe and his Rangers to
empty inland Mendocino County of all the Indians Jarboe's Eel River
Rangers could find to kill.
The Indians didn't have horses and they didn't have guns. Jarboe
and Hall and their Rangers would typically ride down on Indian
rancherias at dawn, slaughtering men, women and children right down
to infants. The only casualties the white warriors suffered was an
occasional non-combat injury unrelated to their one-way war. Bows
and arrows were no match for dragoons, and certainly no match for
the Chief Justice of the California State Supreme Court.
The newspapers of Northern California regularly urged extermination
of the Indians, so when news of large scale murder drifted out of
the seemingly infinite recesses of an area larger than some states,
an area which is today bordered by I-5 to the east and 101 on the
west, Clearlake to the south, and the Trinity mountains to the
north, they were blithely reported like this:
"Massacre of Indians in Mendocino -- Captain Jarboe's Rangers
attacked an Indian ranch eight miles from Indian Valley, Mendocino
County, lately, killing quite a number. Hall, the 'Texan Boy,' 6
feet 9 inches high, and weighing 278 pounds, who is the dread of
all red skins, a week or two ago killed two Indians in a fair
fight..." (The Napa Reporter, August 22, 1859)
By the end of the Civil War, and certainly by 1870, the Indians
were finished. They'd fought back as best they could without the
horses and guns their enemies possessed, but they'd been hit so
hard and so fast all they could do was fight on the run, retreating
right on into extinction.
Judge Hastings, attorney, jurist, rancher, real estate developer,
and mass murderer is memorialized as the Hastings School of Law,
San Francisco. Pioneer Ukiah made Walter Jarboe the town's first
law enforcement officer. A man named James Jarboe is contemporary
America's domestic terrorism section chief for the FBI, which may
or may not be of histor-genetic significance, as may or may not be
a very large Covelo horseman named Hall, as in Texas Boy Hall, who
is presently confined to the state hospital at Napa. A New Age
impresario calling himself TimoThy is trying to buy Eden Valley to
convert it to an "Earth Village sustainable community" featuring "a
straw bale roundhouse" and cabins for TimoThy's followers that
would be called "earth arks." For $33,000 you can buy in.
Funny thing is, Eden Valley fully sustained people for 12,000 years
before Judge Hastings and Texas Boy moved their horses and cows in
on them and started killing them. Eden Valley was already an earth
ark.
Bruce Anderson is a contributor to (and former editor of) the
Anderson Valley Advertiser who lives in San Francisco.
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