BY RUS STOLLING
One spring day in 1978, a hiker paused in the shade of a rock shelter-one of several natural formations of fallen rock along the trail to Mirror Lake in Yosemite National Park known as Indian Caves- to rest from her day's explorations. Idly poking and doodling with a tick in the soil of the floor of the cave, she uncovered a circular metallic object. Wiping away encrusted soil from the surface of the object, she found it to be a silver Spanish coin bearing a date of 1781.
Park archeologists learned of the find through "a series of curious circumstances", according to their account. They located the woman and, though she was reluctant to part with her find, obtained from her the coin and her account of its discovery. The coin, a silver Real of Spanish King Charles III-in numismatically "About Good" grade, now reposes in the park's archeological archives. Its obverse features the right-facing bust of the Spanish Monarch. The profile is strong, but has lost all detail through wear. The inscription CAROLUS III DEI GRATIA, and the date, 1781, are clearly legible. On the reverse, the pillars, ribbons, the crown and shield are still strongly represented, with detail remaining in the coat of arms on the shield. The inscription REX & RFF HISPANIA ET IND, is worn flat but is legible. The edge is chipped through from the obverse lll to the reverse H.
1781 Spanish Real Found in Indian Cave, Yosemite National Park, California
The coin's discovery excited a good deal of speculation as to how it came to be where it was found. The most exotic conclusion that could be reached is that the coin was lost by a Spaniard in some undocumented , late early nineteenth century excursion into what is known today as the Yosemite Valley. Also proposed was that the coin was a gift or had been traded from a Spaniard to an Indian in the Yosemite Valley. Either circumstance, if it could be proven, would necessitate a revision of the history of the discovery of the Yosemite Valley. Other less glamorous theories were also proposed.
While an exact retracing of the coin's travels from its point of origin to its resting place in shortly before and after the 'discovery' of the Yosemite will allow arrival at some likely conclusions.
THE SPANISH EXPLORATIONS: The closest documented approach to the Yosemite by a Spanish exploring party occurred in 1806, about the same time as Lewis & Clark were exploring the northwest portion of the Louisiana Purchase. With Lieutenant Don Alferez Gabriel Moraga as head of the column, a combined party of soldiers and priests left Mission San Juan Bautista in August of 1806 to explore the San Joaquin Valley.
Their purpose, as described in a diary of the expedition kept by Father Pedro Munoz, was to "collect indians" in order to make them Christians, to "save their souls and turn them from heathenism". The church was desirous of establishing an interior chain of missions similar to those along the coast. The army was there to protect the padres from the hostile actions of the very heathens they hoped to save from the white man's hell, in the event that they should resist salvation.
Following El Rio de Nuestra Senora de Merced (the River of our Lady of Mercy-the Merced River) the expedition had, by September, found its way as far as the foothills east of what is now Mariposa County. The diary of the expedition offers no evidence of their having gone any farther into the mountains. Moraga took another group through the area again in 1810, but no other Spanish explorations of this area are known.
The present day boundaries of Mariposa county are some thirty miles from the easternmost boundary of Yosemite. That anyone from either of Moraga's expeditions ventured into the Yosemite Valley is doubted.
After the Mexican Revolution in 1812 and the subsequent de-missionization and secularization, the Mariposa area was populated by a mixture of native and ex-mission Indians. Those who had formerly lived at the missions not only had a good command of the Spanish language, their very culture had been forever altered by their exposure to the white man's ways. They dressed in shirts and pants, they rode horses, and even when they spoke their native languages their conversation was inter-woven with Spanish words and phrases. It is very likely that among the possessions of some of these indians were Spanish coins.
INDIANS* The foothills of the Sierra Nevada were occupied and traversed by several tribes: the Paiute, the Chowchillas, the Miwok, Kaweah, Yokuts and others. Those in the Yosemite region were principally Southern Sierra Miwok. These people ranged widely and freely in pursuit of sustenance and adventure. Not only did they hunt and forage together, they intermingled, intermarried and conducted trade in a barter economy, and occasionally clashed in battle. Their trade routes extended as far as the California coast where they obtained shells for use as ornamentation and tools. And east over the crest of the Sierra Nevada to the Mono Lake region where they obtained obsidian from the volcanic glass mountains for the making of arrow points and cutting tools.
It is possible that these Indians, who had contact with tribes farther upstream along the Merced River-including the Indians of the Yosemite Valley-could have had opportunities to exchange through trade, or gain or lose as spoils of war, a variety of goods. Such goods might include coins obtained through contacts with the Spanish, with Mexicans settling in the area after the revolution, or from the "Gold Diggers" who came after 1849.
THE GOLD RUSH OF 1849 AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE YOSEMITE: American explorer Jedediah Strong Smith is known to have traveled across the Sierra Nevada in 1826 without seeing Yosemite Valley. In 1833 Captain Joseph Reddeford Walker's party was led through what is now Yosemite Valley National Park by a band of Indians who intentionally steered them north of the canyon of the Yosemite. Walker's report indicates he knew these Indians to be Miwok, and Walker realized he was being led away from an Indian stronghold he perceived from the surrounding topography to be a deep canyon, although he never peered into it. It was not until forty years after Moraga's excursions that white men found their way into the Yosemite Valley itself.
In the Spring of 1851, with snow still covering meadows, trails and passes, James Savage, proprietor of trading posts at the confluence of the north and south forks of the Merced , about fifteen miles downstream from the entrance to the Yosemite Valley, and another on the Fresno River, organized a quasi-military party of men to bring the Indians to justice following their raids on his post.
Savage was one of several men who had prospered from the discoveries of gold in the canyons of the Merced River and its tributary creeks. Rather than mine the gold himself, he established trading posts from which he provided the miners the necessities of their craft. They brought him gold nuggets and dust-he sold them flour, blankets, tools, clothing, knives. Gunpowder and bullets, and whiskey, all at exorbitant prices. (A pound of flour cost an ounce of gold, a shirt cost 5 ounces, a pair of boots cost a pound!)
The Indians likewise brought him lots of the yellow metal, worthless to them, in exchange for colorful wool shirts and blankets and metal knives. Savage learned Indian dialects and customs and allied himself with several local villages by making wives of their women. In receiving coins and gold dust from the miners in exchange for purchases, then trading with the Indians who frequented the posts, Savage and other traders provided limitless opportunities for Indians to obtain white-man artifacts, including coins.
The gold rush brought an estimated 6,000 whites into the Mariposa region and the Indians began to feel the pressure of the invading culture. Perceiving the continuing influx of the "gold Diggers" as a threat to their survival, several of the area tribes united, their announced purpose being to oppose the whites and drive them out. Savage's two trading posts were raided, as were the posts of other traders. Men were killed, livestock and goods stolen, and structures were burned.
Savage, commissioned by the Governor of California at the rank of Major, organized the Mariposa Battalion to subdue the Indians. The majority of the Indian communities, in the realization that the alternative was eradication, abandoned their villages and moved peaceably onto reservations with the promises of food, shelter and continuing peace. But one tribe, with a reputation among both Indians and whites as being particularly fierce and resistant, held out in its stronghold, a yet unexplored canyon upstream-the Yosemite Valley.
In March of 1851, Savage and the Mariposa Battalion, on horseback, moved up the canyon of the south fork of the Merced River into an area of Yosemite about a mile south of where the Wawona Hotel now stands, then proceeded into the Yosemite Valley by a route approximately paralleling the current road. He and his men entered the Yosemite Valley on March 21 near the base of Bridal Veil Fall, then moved on up the valley as far as Mirror Lake, burning villages in pursuit of the rest of the Yosemite Indians.
An account of the raid by a participant, Lafayette Bunnell, tells of their finding an old woman too old to travel, left behind by the rest of the fleeing Indians, crouched over a dwindling fire in a cave, possibly the one where the coin was found in 1978. Burnell documents the locations of the Indians' villages including a permanent site beneath the Royal Arches, near the caves. He describes the native's language as being a combination of dialects of the Paiute and Mono tribes, interlaced with words of Spanish derivation.
Evidence suggests that while the Yosemite Indians probably had no direct contact with the Spaniards or Mexicans in the San Joaquin Valley, they certainly had sufficient contact with Indians who had moved from the Missions into the canyon of the Merced downstream from Yosemite to incorporate foreign words into their conversation. They also had sufficient opportunity to acquire coins in trade or plunder.
The Ahwahneechee, as the Yosemite Indians called themselves-Ahwahnee was their name for the spectacular canyon that was their home-were relocated to a reservation on the Fresno River. Being a very small band and promising not to instigate any trouble, they were allowed to return to their valley in 1851.
The first permanent structure was erected by whites in the Yosemite in 1853, and the first tourist party arrived in 1855, opening the valley to white settlement and tourism. In the next few years homes, farms and a sawmill were built and hotels were established. Sheep and cattle grazed the valley meadows and orchards were planted. The white and Indian cultures mingled as many of the natives took jobs with white employers.
NUMISMATICALLY: Even though gold bullion was plentiful in pioneer California, circulating coinage was scarce. While private coiners Moffat & Company; Wass-Molitor; Kellog & Co, Norris, Greg, Norris and others-were punching gold slugs in San Francisco, silver coinage was in short supply, especially U S coinage. The circulating medium of the day was foreign silver-Spanish Reals and Pesos, French Francs, English Crowns, and other coins of European origin. Spanish coinage was more plentiful than any other. It is more likely that the pockets of the miners coming to the area were lined with coins minted in Mexico City than Philadelphia, as the San Francisco mint did not begin production until 1854 and foreign currency enjoyed legal status in the United States until it was demonetized in 1857.
The opportunities for a Yosemite Indian to obtain a Spanish coin from an American miner, trader, or settler were innumerable. For an Ahwahneechee to lose a silver trinkets in the dirt floor of his abode, or to leave one behind with his other possessions while being pursued, is not an unlikely event.
That coins found their way into Indian possession was probably not an unusual occurrence, although the coins probably served a decorative rather than commercial purpose. An excavation in 1921 of a burial site near Coulterville, north of Yosemite, uncovered a 1766 Irish half cent and an 1804 Spanish Real in a Miwok grave. The Irish coin had been drilled for suspension from a thong or string as if to serve as a pendant. Evidence of such usage of coins by Indians of other California tribes is extensive. The silver Real was heavily worn and badly corroded, showing barely enough detail for identification. Surprisingly, the obverse of the brass Irish half cent, 44 years older than the Real, still strongly portrayed the profile, but no detail, of a right facing bust and the inscription GEORGIUS III. Its reverse clearly depicted the harp and crown, HIBERNIA and the date.
While the origin of the coin found in Yosemite's Indian Cave cannot be verified, speculation as to its pedigree is exciting and entertaining. Regardless of its path to the caves, it likely passed through many hands-of Spanish explorers, Mexican colonists, American pioneers and Native Americans-long before being lost and obscured in the soil of a cave floor in what is now one of America's most popular national parks. That this coin lay buried for perhaps nearly a century and a half under a fraction of an inch of dirt just a few yards off a path regularly traveled by hundreds of hikers daily is a wonder unto itself. While this find will not be the cause of a rewriting of history, perhaps it is enough that it adds another footnote.
*The American Indian Council of Mariposa chooses to call themselves Indians rather than 'Native Americans'. The author has chosen to honor their tradition.
Editors Note: Rus Stolling, former Editor of Calcoin News, is a frequent contributor to this journal. He resides in Clovis, California.
From Calcoin News, Vol 52, No. 3, Summer 1998