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My Shipwreck
This story is about you, not me.
I was
a sailor on that inland sea,
living on islands joyful and free.
Attacked by pirates, I walked the plank,
gave my
life, my ship sank.
But the islands remain, alive and well.
My family thrives to cast their spell
in wintry snowflake
and summer rain,
my shipwreck their shelter,
near my bones are lain.
Willian Marshall, 1851
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ROLLING REVIEW FORUM, March 2003
An appealing debut looks
at the history of California in the turbulent 1840's.(Kirkus Reviews)
Garth Murphy's earthy, sensual debut deftly tracks
the footfalls of the county's first residents - the story is epic and the passions of these characters burn hot as campfire
cinders. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
A slow building but ultimately richly panoramic story. (American Library Association)
The
scenes of native life are fully realized and poignant.(Library Journal)
Subtle and intense; the women have depth.(Nava
Young)
Meticulously researched...(San Diego Union-Tribune)
An engaging account...with a good feel for the place and
time.(Kirkus Reviews)
The book has wide appeal. The complex relationships between the natives and settlers are fascinating.
The author's extensive knowledge of regional history is evident on every page. (TheBookHaven.net)
A vivid picture of early
pioneer life on the western edge of the continent.(Publishers Weekly)
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AN AFTERWARD, best enjoyed afterward!
To begin with,
this was a true story. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent, for whom among them was innocent? As to
the guilty, their unretouched portraits deserve positions of prominance in my thieves gallery of scoundrels.
This novel
is also a work of imagination, building living tissue to join and articulate the bare bones of historic record, giving flesh
and blood and intelligence to lives scarcely known and long forgotten – and doing so primarily from the point of view of those
who left the least record of their passing – the women and natives who constitute the vast silent majority of early 19th century
California history.
There is general agreement among modern historians that Spanish and Mexican prosperity in California
was erected on the backs and in the not-always-willing wombs of the native American population, under a feudal system of enforced
servitude and bondage barely a whiplash short of slavery. The 49ers who followed, a hard-nosed international bigot brigade,
but mostly Americans from the south and east, terrorized the Indians, demanding not their labor as slaves, but that they quit
their land and die. By 1854, ninety percent of the California Indians – once the most populous tribes on the northern continent
–– were dead, or herded to obscurity in wasteland corners of the Golden State.
This is not the history you are used to
hearing, written by the same men who conquered, raped, enslaved, cheated, stole and killed to amass their fortunes – then
glossed over and forgot and shifted blame and covered up to cleanse their own histories.
Nor is this a victim's lament
of suffering, sadness and defeat. The Indian Lover is a hymn to joy and laughter, love and defiance, intelligence and philosophy
- antidotes to pain and fear - wide wings to span the lonely chasms of death and despair.
Do not be surprised to find your
ancestors named as villains in these pages. I have taken liberties, but less than they did and not without clue. If some
of them may have been innocent, they were never more so than William Marshall, the young man whose happy life among the 'savages'
was more damnation than they could bear.
If you believe in karma, you will enjoy adding these footnotes to your balance
sheet:
1. Leandro Osuna was poisoned by his native servants and shot himself in the head, rather than face the painful
death they offered him.
2. Jesus Machado, Lugarda’s second husband, was slain by the Indians of Buena Vista for betraying
their trust and selling their ancestral land.
3. Sheriff Agoston Haraszthy fled California in the wake of corruption charges
– only to be eaten alive by alligators in a Nicaraguan river.
4. In 1852, justice of the peace Joshua Bean was bushwhacked,
shot dead riding to a tightrope walking exhibition near his home.
5. Pio Pico died in Los Angeles, homeless and penniless,
sustained by his friend John Warner, who never returned to live in Valle de San Jose.
6. The transcontinental railway went
north to Sacramento, relegating San Diego County to obscurity until World War II.
7. President Abraham Lincoln returned
San Luis Rey Mission to the Franciscans by executive order, just before his murder by John Wilkes Booth.
8. Antonio Garra
was turned over to Judge Bean by the Cahuilla. He confessed, absolving Bill of any involvment in his revolt, on December 13,
1851. He was executed in San Diego the 27th January, 1852.
A note on native ethnography: The social organization of the
Kuupiaxchem - a loose alliance of exogamous familial clans, each with its own chief; the clans divided into two groups or
moities, the Coyotes and Wildcats, also exogamous - had been worn down by the 1840's. For seventy-five years the Spanish
had insisted on treating the Indians as one people, under the jurisdiction of a mission priest who appointed head chiefs or
alcaldes for each geographical area, disregarding clans and moieties, and locked all baptised unmarried women in the mission,
allowing them to marry any baptised man outside the immediate family, disregarding clan, moiety, tribe or race. I have only
referred to the clans and other social distinctions when they directly illuminate a character's motives or action. I consider
every character to be a human being first. Gender, ethnicity, family and social position are the seasoning for this main course.
Finally,
sex was the main form of entertainment in the firelit 19th century and no history (or herstory) is complete without a good
dose of it.
Garth Murphy, Encinitas, California, 2002
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