The Legend of Squaw Leap

A Yokut Myth
by
H L Gordon
Chapter Five in The Settlers Series
Historical Fiction


“We are the Borg.
Lower your sheilds and surrender your ships.
We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
Your culture will adapt to serve us.
Resistance is futile.”
Borg Queen,
Central Locus, Borg Collective
Unimatrix One, Delta Quadrant
Star Trek, “The Next Generation”


MESOZOIC ERA - Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods
(208 to 65 million years ago)

The first primates appeared.

Floating on an ocean of molten rock the two plates collided. The oceanic (western) plate was pushed beneath the continental (eastern) plate. The pressure of the two plates colliding caused what would become the Sierra Nevada mountain range to be uplifted out of the seas. Volcanoes spewed ash and lava throughout its entire length of the newly formed Sierra Mountain Range. Batholiths formed beneath these volcanoes to fuel their violent activity. West of the Sierra, a deep-ocean trench formed at the bottom of the sea. What would become the San Joaquin Valley and Coast Range Mountains lay under thousands of feet of the Pacific Ocean waters. Tens of thousands of feet of sediments carried from the Sierra Nevada began to accumulate in the deep trench covered by ocean waters. This sediment settled into the trench and formed the flat, fine silted sub base of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys.

Eocene Epoch
(53 to 39 million years ago)

Sea levels changed, both local and worldwide. The sea level of the San Joaquin Valley was only hundreds of feet deep now rather than thousands of feet deep. A sub-tropical climate formed and caused intense weathering and erosion. The Diablo Range uplifted. Then Sea level dropped and deltas formed westward from the Sierra Nevada as the tons of sediment settled on the ocean floor. Parts of the San Joaquin Valley, particularly north of Coalinga, were above sea level for the first time.

Oligocene Epoch
(39 to 23 million years ago)

The Pacific Plate, forced beneath the North American plate, continued in the Oligocene Epoch, re-igniting volcanic activity in California. Marine conditions continued to exist in the valley. Renewed uplift and erosion of the Sierra Nevada occurred to the east and the San Emigdio Mountains to the south, and the Stockton area to the north.

Miocene Epoch
(23 to 5 million years ago)

By the Middle Miocene, marine deposition was restricted to the central and southern San Joaquin Valley. On the west side, the entire Diablo Range and the Temblor Range north of McKittrick underwent significant uplift. Sierra sediments flowed into the valley and formed deltas and alluvial fans, on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley. During the Middle Miocene, excellent conditions existed to support abundant plant growth and wildlife in the marine embayment, as evidenced by vertebrate fossils from the Sharktooth Hill area near Bakersfield. Renewed uplift and volcanism began again in the Sierra Nevada 10-12 million years ago.

Ocean waters deepened in most of the central and southern San Joaquin Valley in the Late Miocene. Marine deposition extended as far north as Chowchilla. In the Late Miocene and Pliocene, the valley oceanic embayment began once again to fill with tremendous amounts of sediment forming another layer that sedimentologists would explore. This period provided the most rapid sedimentation that the southern valley had yet seen. Tens of thousands of feet of sediment accumulated in the valley in just a few million years. Like rings in a tree, the layers upon layers of sediments on the valley floor left a history of the building of the San Joaquin Valley.

Quaternary Period- Pleistocene Epoch
(2 million years ago to 10,000 years ago)

Rapid filling of the San Joaquin Valley with sediment continued. The Sierra Nevada Mountains arched skyward with renewed uplift, and glaciation began to occur. These glaciers have given us some of the spectacular geomorphic features we see today, such as Yosemite Valley. As glaciation ebbed and glacial melt waters flowed, the valley floor filled with freshwater lakes. The last widespread lakes to fill the valley did so 700,000 years ago.

50,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens appeared.

Holocene Epoch
(10,000 years ago to present)

The San Joaquin Valley completely filled with sediment, and most of the valley is now a few hundred feet above sea level. Freshwater. Tule Lake, Buena Vista Lake, and Kern Lake formed from melting glacial runoff.

The rest of the story begins.

12 Thousand Years Ago

Ani walked along the tree line above the gulch that hung out over the huge boulders that had been carried down the river when the ice melted. He saw a bush with berry’s that the birds had not eaten yet. He walked toward the bush and as he walked, his foot struck something that stuck out of the ground. He spun to see what had tripped him. Out of the soil stuck a round object. He walked back to investigate. Ani grabbed hold of the strange looking object and pulled. It was stuck fast into the soil. He put his foot on it and pushed. It moved. He did it again, and again. Soon he had it moving back and forth with his foot, loosing it up. He reached down and pulled hard and finally, the object pulled out of the ground and was free. He held the object, turning it around in his hand for a closer look. It was a long stick of some sort, with a stone attached to one end. He wiped it clean with his hands. It was as long as his forearm and on the handle, it had some sort of skin he had never seen before. On the other end was a stone that was flat on one end and came to a sharp point on the other end.
He had never seen anything like this. The geology pick’s sides were perfectly smooth and even. He held it and gripped the handle. He liked it. It fit his hand well and had a good weight to it. He swung it through the air. It moved well. “It would make a good weapon,” he thought. He turned and swung it again, this time striking the tree next to him with the sharp end. It buried itself into the wood of the tree. It was good. He pulled it from the tree and looked closely at it and sniffed it. It smelled like the earth that he had pulled it from. He looked at the head of the weapon as he turned it over in his hands. On the edge of the head were two markings of some type. Ani was baffled as he traced his finger along the lines of the G.H. marked on the head of the hammer. He didn’t ponder the markings long and was delighted at his find. He carried the new weapon in his hand, occasionally swinging the hammer through the air as though he were striking some unseen foe. In the other hand he carried the obsidian tipped spear as he continued on in his journey.

The Aelurodon had come upon the rotting remains of the sloth. The sloth had hung from the branches until he died. Finally, as the sun beat down on the carcass, his limbs tore loose from his dead weight and he fell to the ground below.

The Aelurodon or dog-wolf, was a disgruntled fellow, usually he had four things that were of concern to him. Number one, he liked to eat. The large wolf-sized predator wasn’t to particular about what he ate as long as he ate and there was plenty of it. With his large jaws and flat molars, he could crush the bones of most animals and swallow large chunks of flesh, fur and bone. Secondly he liked to lay in the cool shade and doze after he ate. It was important to him. Thirdly, he felt it was his duty to propagate his species and he spent a great deal of time in pursuit of that objective. Lastly, he loved to fight. He didn’t care who he fought. He considered the world as his personal domain and if another animal of any size entered into his field of vision, they were trespassers and it was his duty to expel them.

As Ani rounded the bend the Aelurodon, who was feeding on the rotting carcess of a sloth was startled and assumed the position to defend his food. Ani raised his spear toward the animal and started to circle around to get a good shot at the beast, should he attack. The dog-wolf charged and Ani dropped to his knee and placed the butt of the spear to the ground with the sharp obsidian tip pointing in the direction of the charging beast. The Aelurodon leaped and Ani moved the spear so that the animal would land on the tip with all his weight. The spear tip pierced the animals’ hide and plunged into his chest and through his heart. But before he died his claws slashed out at Ani and split the skin of his upper thigh nearly to the bone. Ani quickly dispatched the beast with his newly found weapon and a crushing blow to the beasts skull.

Ani sat on the flat stone looking out over the Gorge into the roaring river and valley below. It had been long since he had seen any of the others. He lifted the drying moss from his wound. The puss oozed from the gash. The dog-wolf had been clawing into the decaying flesh of the sloth. When the beast’s claws slashed Ani, the flesh rotting bacteria had entered his wound. From there, the bacteria grew until the infection was complete. The toxins grew and ran through his blood. Ani knew that he did not be much longer. He gazed out over the gorge. “It was beautiful,” he thought to himself. He didn’t know where he would go, but he knew he would not see his home again.

He found the small cave hidden behind a manzanita bush. It would protect him from the sun. The cave went back into the outcrop of rocks about 15 feet. He felt the coolness of the cave as he peered in. He crawled into the darkened hole and made himself comfortable. He pulled a strip of dried Caribou out of his pouch and nibbled on it. He took his knife, the stones he had collected, a wooden carving that he had made and three polished bones from the pouch and lay them on the moist soil before him. He looked at them as his vision blurred. He felt tired. Ani lay back on the soil and rolled to his side. He felt the coolness creep up into him and it felt good. The bacteria raced through his bloodstream, causing his body's organs to go into systemic shock. Ani slept and in his sleep the toxins from the bacteria reached his brain, his breathing stopped and soon after his heart ceased. Ani never woke up.

That night the storm blew in from the north and snow fell. The earth trembled and several large boulders dislodged and rolled down the mountain slope. The bush that had hidden the opening of the cave was crushed and the mouth was closed up forever, as though it were a bottle and the cork had been inserted.

The Modern Age Arrives

Somewhere, high up on the granite bluff where the glacier had gouged out the gorge and the San Joaquin River flows, a small cave and its inhabitant still lie hidden. The air turned dry and soon Ani’s flesh desiccated. His trinkets still lay where he had lain them. The geologists hammer lay near his hand where he had dropped it. Eventually someone would find him and the mystery would begin, but for now the missing link would lay hidden and it would be thousands of years that Ani would sleep in peace.

And so it went with over 60 distinct Tribes of the California Indigenous People that formed as early man drifted into the area from the north, south, east and west to inhabit the San Joaquin Valley over 13,000 years ago. Time came and went. Very few survived. Many could not assimilate into the new “advanced” culture so they were destroyed. Others were rounded up and herded into camps, prisons and reservations and drug away to be assimilated by the new “white man’s” culture. In the end all that was left was their history, a few artifacts, some grain milling holes in stones along the riverbanks and a remnant of People that escaped to carry on the seed of a culture that lived in harmony with nature.

From the early 1800’s until the present day, war has been waged against the Native Americans. First the Mexican Army reeked of genocide and then the Gold Diggers, then the Ranchers and Farmers, and then the US Army.

1851, Millerton/Table Mountain, Central California Foothills

In 1851, California’s Governor McDougall addressed his first legislature. He promised, "The war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct." Despite guarantees of one treaty after another, the rights of the Native Americans were stripped away. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Indians were denied state citizenship, voting rights and the right to redress the Courts. These Treaty’s effectively removed all legal avenues of escape for native peoples and left them to the mercy of anyone who chose to rob, commit sexual assault, kidnap and even murder them. Settlers, Ranchers, Gold Diggers, the US Army and the US Government hopelessly had the Indians surrounded. Despite California’s entering the union as a free state in 1850, the California legislature rapidly enacted a series of laws legalizing Indian slavery. And to make an impossible situation even worse, the Iron Horse was coming to town. For many of the settlers, they themselves were escaping the unbearable conditions that forced them to face the hardships of the new frontier. For the Corporations and Government, it was pure greed that ruled the day. With the Native Americans out of the way, the wealth of land, timber, minerals and wildlife were there for the taking. There was no escape for the People. They fought long and hard, but they had no chance against the brutality of an enemy with vast mechanized weaponry and resources.

The life of the Native American People lives on in the memories of those who opposed the extermination. The remnant held to the old ideas and carried the seed of the People and their culture with them. A time came when the extermination was over, but the assimilation went on and on, yet the People survive. They survive because they never forgot where they came from or who they are.

The ghost of the People lives on in the stories they told to their children. After a time, their children told the stories to their own children. The tales spread near and wide. The seed was scattered and the Winds carried the songs of the People on its wings.

During the time of exterminations, the Army was instructed to round up the Native Americans and bring them into the reservations, and it was done. Laws were re-written to make it legal to en-slave the Indian people.

A small village of Dumna People had taken refuge in the foothills near Fresno Crossing on the banks of the San Joaquin River, just above what is now called Table Mountain and San Joaquin Gorge. Many of the mountains in that area are extinct volcanoes whose craters had hardened when they were full of lava. This made the tops flat and against the skyline the mountains look like tabletops. Water and game were abundant for the people who wanted to live in peace and gather their food in the canyons of the foothills. But the People were soon found out. The miners, who poured their mercury into the streams to amalgamate the gold from the sands and stone, carried the report back to the army at Fort Miller and Camp Barbour, which was just a little further downstream on the San Joaquin River.

By sunset, 65 heavily armed soldiers and miner volunteers took off up the river, in silence. Their plan was to surround the People before sunrise and march them back to Fort Miller and later take them to the reservation near Woodlake, just east of Visalia.

The horses stumbled in the darkness in the treacherous terrain. Many of the soldiers were not accustomed to these kinds of trails. A great noise went up ahead of the soldiers and warned the Indians that they were coming. The young Indian warriors had mostly been killed or marched off to camps by this time, so all that was left to defend the People were the old men, women and children. They quietly readied themselves to fight the soldiers. Many of the people had only stones, sticks and crudely made spears for weapons. But the old men had the wisdom of the years before their time and made a plan. Half of the villagers would climb up on the bluffs, overlooking the stream and when the soldiers came by they would drop heavy stones down on them from above. The other villagers crossed the stream and did likewise on the other side. The idea was that when the soldiers saw their predicament, they would cross the stream for protection from the villagers, only to find themselves under another assault. The elders knew that some soldiers would be lost in the darkness and fall from their horses and be injured or trampled. Others would run and hide and the rocks falling on them would kill other soldiers. All in all the old men thought it was a good plan. And it was, for the most part.

The soldiers rode straight into the trap. The old men waited until the soldiers were even with them, and directly below where they hid, before giving the signal to the women and children to drop the rocks. Part of the women pried rocks from the face of the canyon escarpment, while others threw or rolled them off the ledge onto the soldiers below. The panic was widespread and complete. The horses reared and bolted throwing many of the riders to the treacherous rock laden ground. Soldiers fell or ran in the darkness as horses trampled over them. All totaled, 12 soldiers and 7 miners were killed mostly by the horses. 33 soldiers were seriously injured. All had some sort of wounds. The Army retreated.

The cry went out throughout the region about a savage ambush of the soldiers. Rumors flourished that a vast Indian Army had massed in the foothills and raids on settlers and farms was coming next. Mostly, the liquor did the talking. The settlers crowded into Fort Miller for protection. Runners were sent out to Fresno Crossing, French Camp, Stockton and Monterey for re-enforcements. The Governor, outraged by the so called ambush, put pressure on Army Commanders to dispatch 2000 heavily armed troops to Fort Miller to quell the savage uprising. Troops marched in from Fort Tejon, Monterey and Stockton. Along the way, Commanders whipped the troops into a frenzy. Fort Miller and Camp Barbour swelled beyond capacity. Ranchers capitalized on the situation and gouged the Army for the price of wheat and horses. The price of horses went from $125 a head to $195.00 and flour brought in $.10 a pound.

The troops massed at Fort Miller and departed with the break of day. This time they would go in full daylight. Their orders were to capture as many of the renegades as possible, chain them together to keep them from running off and march them back to Fort Miller.

It took five days to round up most of the villagers. The old men were battered and torn. They were quickly separated from the rest and taken away. Many suffered much abuse and were beaten and tortured at the hands of the angry soldiers. Children were torn from the mothers and herded away. The women suffered the most. They were chained in groups of fifteen to twenty women. Soldiers ripped their clothes from them. Many were drug away from the group and raped. Some were raped and forced to perform sex acts on soldiers while the other women watched.

A group of seventeen women were chained together. The soldiers had already raped many of them multiple times. The women huddled together for protection that never came. Finally, they managed to free the chain from the tree they had been bound to. The entire group ran through the forest trying to escape. They ran wildly and found themselves high on a bluff of granite that towered out over the gorge below. This bluff had been used many times in the past by Indian sentries that stood on lookout over the valley below. They huddled together as the soldiers approached them. The women were trapped. The gorge below prevented escape in that direction and the soldiers had blocked their escape back down to the forest and off of the bluff. The women talked briefly to each other; some cried while others screamed out and others comforted the weaker ones as they huddled, awaiting their capture.

Chula Humma (Red Fox) was seventeen. She was a strong one. She had suffered much at the hands of the soldiers because of her youthful beauty. She had seen all the men in her family killed or drug away in chains. Now she stood facing the soldiers, a stone in her hand, her hair knotted and pulled out in spots. Her sister, Hooshi Humma (Red Bird) lay sobbing on the ground at her feet where Chula had tried to console her.

Chula spoke to the other women in a commanding voice. They all looked at her and saw that in her was the only strength that they had left. She commanded them to listen to her words. “Stop crying and cowering from these dogs that nipped at our heels. We are the People whose time has come and now it is leaving us. Let it not leave us in disgrace at the hands of these cowards that cannot make a woman love them. Can you not see that it is they who are afraid of us because we are strong and free? Our men have fought hard and have given all to kill these dogs and tie their hides to the trees where the wind can blow away their stench. We must honor our men and our people and fight these creatures that have no honor. We must sprout up on the wings of our forefathers who are carried by the eagles into the other world. We must go now where these dogs cannot follow.”

The other women silenced themselves. One by one they rose to face the soldiers. The dirty uniformed men knew that something was afoot and stood frozen, staring at the band of squaws.

Coming up from the rear were the young brothers, Otto and Buford Miller who had lived down near Visalia. They were part of the newly forming law in the land, along with their father, Henry Miller. Their bloodline is long and strong and runs throughout time.

The chant went up softly from the women. One by one their voices joined together until they were one again. They linked hands and prayed to their ancestors to meet them on the other side and carry them home to be with their families once again. The women walked toward the edge of the bluff and stood. Their voices were carried off by the winds of change. In the distance an eagle screeched as he soared the winds of the gorge. Across the gorge a buck snorted and stood frozen, and somewhere a bear roared out his ownership of this territory. The chains fell from their wrist and ankles as though some magical hand had freed them. One by one the women stepped off of the edge of the bluff into the wind and plummeted to the rocks below.

Chula Humma was the last one. She looked up at them and smiled, remembering the time as a child when she had seen the old wise man curse the bear that took his son. She raised her hand, pointing at the soldiers and made a fist. With her fist pointing upward, her middle finger raised from her fist and she held it up to them as she had seen him do. Then she stepped from the bluff and plummeted into immortality.

With that, the soldiers stood staring in disbelief. Buford tapped his brother on the arm and motioned for him to follow. The two brothers walked down the hill in silence to where their horses were tethered. Neither man spoke as they rode away from the soldiers. Later in their lives, they would be interviewed and talk about this time. It would be one of the few times in either mans life that they would be ashamed. These brothers, who were together their entire lives and dedicated themselves to being Lawmen, never cared much for the Army or the Government from that day forward. They respected the laws, or at least most of them. During the course of their lives and through their many adventures they would befriend the Indians many times, much of it to their benefit.

From that day forward, the story spread of how the women chose death over the humiliation and impossible odds. The People, White and Indian, changed the name of the bluff that looked out over the gorge to Squaw Leap. In that name the story of the People lives on, even with the white man who are now as many as the grains of sand on the lakeside. Many times the white man’s leaders tried to change the name of the bluff on his maps so that the bravery of the People would be hidden in the tule fogs of time. If the memory of the people could be hidden, the rich men would finally be rid of the people who lived as one with the Earth and stood between him and his gold. Then their plans would be complete to take the land and torture it until it too would be dead.

There are times in the course of mans’ destiny that the prize is not won at the battle. When my father was a young man, he saw my mother and loved her. Another stronger man saw my mother and wanted her as well. My father stood up and fought for my mother and was badly beaten for it. Through his courage and bravery to resist a greater force, he was victorious even in his defeat. Many years later, my mother still sleeps at his hearth and the other suitor is long forgotten.

“Whatever it is you might think you have
You have nothing to lose.
Through every dead and living thing,
Time runs like a fuse.
And the fuse is burning
And the Earth is turning.”

Jackson Brown
The Pretender Album,
“The Fuse”
Electra Records

REFERENCES:

1) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Finger (gesture)
Origin
The origin of this gesture is highly speculative, but is quite possibly up to 2500 years old. It is identified as the digitus impudicus ('impudent finger') in Ancient Roman writings [1] and reference is made to using the finger in the Ancient Greek comedy The Clouds by Aristophanes. It was defined there as a gesture intended to insult another. It has been noted that the gesture resembles an erect penis. Ancient Romans also considered an image of an erect phallus as a talisman against evil spells. As a consequence, displaying this gesture to another may not have been a pseudo-sexual insult but rather an insulting statement along the lines of "I'm going to protect myself against your witchcraft, before you even start," but an even earlier reference is made to ancient farmers using this finger to test hens for coming eggs.
2) CBS – Paramount Televison : Star Trek, Gene Rodenberry
3) Gary Weissmann , Associate Professor - Factors controlling sequence development on Quaternary fluvial fans, San Joaquin Basin, California, USA, G.S. WEISSMANN*, G.L. BENNETT & A.L. LANSDALE
4) Marvin L. Kientz, Indians of the Sierra Foothills
5) The Society for California Archaeology
6) DUMNA TRIBAL GOVERNMENT NEWS
www.dumnaindians.org www.dumna.org
7) Patricia Ann Murphy Brattland
Native American Advisory Council (NAAC).
For pointing me in the right direction for historical facts
8) Squaw Leap Article Fresno Bee, June 2003
9) AOL for providing the portal to the worlds library
10) Goggle for interpreting the Scientific lingo
11) Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for interpreting and explaining stuff about sedimentation, subdigation, plate drift, tetonic movement, batholiths, uplifts, parasols, Indiginous Peoples, making acorn flour, Tule Lake, Kings River, San Joaquin Valley, Yokuts and just about anything else I needed to know about volcanoes, and erosion.