Albert L. Hurtado
Indian Survival on the California Frontier
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
Originally begun as a master's thesis, the book took on a life of
its own. It is a careful examination of how the Indians in
California co-existed with white society and managed to survive
in spite of being exploited as laborers, in spite of sporadic and
systematic ethnic genocide and in spite of low fertility rates.
The population did survive, though impoverished and dispossessed.
This is as much a story of human determination as it is one of
survival.
