Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/184



The following notes by Mr. Case, whose "Reminiscences ' ' appeared in the Oregon Historical Quarterly for September, are intended to give, in his own language, a somewhat more circumstantial account of the troubles in California in 1849, between the Columbia River men and the original California ranchers and traders; and in the settlement of which the Indians were the chief sufferers. It must be borne in mind that the real conflict was between a system of peon and contract labor and free labor. The Oregonians, the representatives of free labor, employed the method that was available which in the circumstances was mere brute force. But the result was to make California a free state and to make anything but citizen labor unavailable and impossible. H. S. LYMAN.

I left home on the sixteenth day of February, 1849, and arrived at San Francisco on the fourteenth of March of the same year. Made my way as best I could to Sacramento. I went from there to Coloma, on the South Fork of the American River, and started there at carpenter work. The trouble with the Indians was just this way. When the Oregonians arrived late in 1848, they found in Cali-