KENNY ROGERS of Westport fame is scheduled to be back in Mendocino County Superior Court on Friday, May 11th. Rogers, chairman of the County's Republic Party at the time of a confused shooting alleged to have been carried out by a friend of Rogers on a Westport enemy of Rogers, was tried as attempted murder, and Rogers was found guilty.
THIS PASSAGE appeared in Sunday's Ukiah Daily Journal: (Written by Grace Sweeney and read by Jennie S. MacMillan at Potter Valley at the Pioneer's Reunion, held June 17, 1926): During the early settlement of the valley there were a large number of Indians here living at their various rancherias but these were generally peaceable and quiet and no very serious trouble ever occurred between them and the white people. Later these Indians were removed to the reservation at Round valley with the exception of a few who remained to live on the ranches and work in exchange for food and clothes.”
NOT EXACTLY. Mendocino County's Native Americans, beset by Spanish and Mexican slave traders as early as 1830, were also kidnapped by missionaries and forced to labor without reward. With the Gold Rush, a thousand or so single men, among them many criminals, found Mendocino County a hospitable venue for whatever these outlaws felt like doing which, along with our noble pioneer families, often consisted of the wholesale murder of Indians simply to remove them from land desired by the newcomers. Indians were also hunted for sport.
MENDOCINO COUNTY'S Indians, as Indians throughout the Golden State, were officially enslaved in newly formed California from statehood in 1850 to 1867 via a state law that permitted pioneer ranchers to simply impound Indian labor by declaring Indians vagrants. Mendocino County's true history appears in hard to find publications and scholarly papers, but is best described in Genocide and Vendetta, a book that was litigated into silence as soon as it appeared by a descendant of one of the first Indian killers successfully claimed that the authors had used great grandpap's diary without permission.
IT'S WORSE THAN annoying that the rosy views of the Potter Valley ladies of old mentioned above are still fairly prevalent; the wholesale murders of local Indians is today euphemized by the County's museums as “relocations” or mysterious mass “disappearances.” Of course here in Amnesia County, home of the Rural Smiley Face, the unhappier truths, then as now, are simply ignored.
MOST locals don’t really comprendo
What life was like for Indians when settlers descendo
With laws and guns
Settler fathers and sons
Removed the Indians and then called it Mendo.
The unhappier truths are pretty much ignored nationwide. We “exceptionals” prefer to live in a dream world in which we are the most beneficent folks ever, along with our “enlightened” ancestors. Even our brutal wars, generally over resources owned by others, are carried out with the “best of intentions”.