The Mission Indians
Every report urges the necessity of reserves for the Mission Indians, to include especially the lands on which their villages are located. Naturally, every instinct of the voting white population opposed such a waste of the public domain. But finally, after twenty years, the first Indian reserve was set apart for the Mission Indians,—a large tract in the San Pasqual Valley, including the Indian village, or rancheria, of San Pasqual. The frantic demonstrations of the outraged settlers against this usurpation of their right to the whole country are more than hinted at in the agent's report:
"On the 2d of April, 1870, the reservation order was received, and the office of the agency was moved to San Pasqual Valley reservation, when I learned that the settlers had employed counsel to have the order set aside, had also enlisted the sympathy and co-operation of the majority of the people of the county in their favor, and that the editors of San Diego were publishing some most wonderful curiosities in the way of newspaper incendiary literature, in no manner calculated to throw oil on the troubled waters. I also found the Indians had been told 'they were to be made slaves of by the Government; smallpox was to be introduced in the clothing sent them; their cattle were to be taken from them;' and to such an extent had they been tampered with, that they positively refused to locate on the lands set apart and secured for their especial
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