Education in the Far West

Sources

Spanish California . After Upper California was settled in 1769, Franciscan friars established missions at San Diego and then San Carlos Borromeo near Monterey, where they taught Indians to cultivate the soil, build houses and churches, make clothing and tools, and practice Christianity. Indians stayed near the missions to obtain a steady supply of food, and the friars focused on their children, training them to live within the restraints of mission life. Some of the promising boys were taught to speak, read, and write in the Spanish language and to sing and play musical instruments; girls, who were protected under lock and key at night, learned to spin, weave, embroider, and engage in domestic tasks. In 1793 King Carlos IV ordered that the use of native languages be discouraged and that government schools be established to teach the Indians to speak, read, and write Spanish. Around the same time artisans were sent from Mexico—tailors, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, potters, and leather workers—to instruct the neophyte youths in skilled trades. As the missions increased in number to eighteen, Gov. Diego de Borica levied a school tax on settlers in the surrounding towns and presidios, requiring that children of civilians and soldiers attend schools he established at San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Jose. To meet the demand of parents that children have time for work, classes were held in early morning and late afternoon on alternate days. Although these schools lacked supplies and qualified teachers, by 1820 the four pre sidios and two towns in California each had primary schools.

Mexican Period. After the Mexican Revolution in 1822 the liberal government hoped to extend education in its states and territories. Governor of the California territory, Jose Maria Echeandia, emancipated Indians and offered them Mexican citizenship at the missions of San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco, and urged compulsory education for all children, Indian and Mestizo as well as Hispanic. Yet disruption and conflict prevailed, and only a few schools existed in the 1820s. After the missions were secularized by the Mexican Congress in 1833, Indians became an agricultural labor force for the Hispanic ranching families, who taught their children at home or hired private tutors. Traders from Europe and the United States filtered into the area; some of them converted to Catholicism and married California women. In 1834 an English Catholic, William E. P. Hartnell, opened a boarding school for Indian and white boys, El Collegio de San Jose near Monterey, which offered instruction in the Spanish, French, English, and German languages as well as Latin grammar, mathematics, bookkeeping, philosophy, and religion. Although Hartnell continued to be active in California education, his school closed within two years. In 1842 Gov. Manuel Micheltorena arrived in California to instill order and deflect the influence of U.S. citizens entering the territory in ever larger numbers. Placing the missions once again under the care of the friars, he granted public funds to support a school in Los Angeles and established seven additional schools throughout the territory for children between the ages of six and eleven.

Segregation in California Schools

When white citizens of the United States flocked to California during the Gold Rush, they brought with them the racial attitudes of Jacksonian America as well as the conviction that they had won land and resources through conquest in the Mexican War. Such attitudes prevailed in the 1850 Foreign Miners’ Tax; aimed at Europeans, Indians, Mexicans, and Chinese, the act provided that only native or naturalized citizens of the United States could mine without a license, the cost of which was a prohibitive twenty dollars a month. Black Americans, slave and free, also had come or been brought to California, sometimes earning enough in the mines to purchase freedom or begin a business. The census of 1850 counted 962 African Americans in the state, 206 of whom lived near the northern mines in Sacramento City. After the Sacramento City Council levied a school tax in 1853, leaders of the black community, including the teacher Elizabeth Thorn Scott and the abolitionist Jeremiah B. Sanderson (newly arrived from Massachusetts in 1855), raised the issue of whether public funds would be available for the instruction of black children. Sanderson, who formed a Colored School Committee as soon as he arrived, must have been aware of the tumult in 1849 and 1850 concerning segregation in the Boston public schools, where black parents had sued the Boston School Committee in Roberts v. City of Boston and the future U.S. senator Charles Sumner had argued before the state supreme court that racially segregated schools did not recognize equality before the law. Boston public schools were not integrated until 1855, when the legislature mandated integration in the state. That same year, acting on its own, Sacramento’s city council voted to allow tax funds to support separate education for black children, overcoming the argument that such provision would open schoolhouse doors to Indians, Hawaiians, and Chinese. Although Sanderson left the city a year later, the Colored School Committee continued his school, which received some security in 1860 when the Republican legislature authorized that public funds be allocated to segregated schools. During Reconstruction in 1866 legislators voted that school trustees could enroll non-Caucasians in white schools, a provision repealed in 1870.

Source: Susan Bragg, “Knowledge is Power: Sacramento Blacks and the Public Schools, 1854-1860,” and Clarence Caesar, “The Historical Demographics of Sacramento’s Black Community, 1848-1900,” California History, 75 (Fall 1996): 198-221.

California under the United States . As immigrants from the United States increased in numbers by 1846, they improvised schooling for the education of their children. A widow, Olive Mann Isbell, opened a school in outbuildings of the Santa Clara mission. Initially she lacked supplies and was forced to teach the alphabet by drawing letters on children’s hands. During the war between Mexico and the United States, Isbell moved her school to Monterey, where she taught fifty boys and girls, first in the Customs House and then in a schoolroom. In 1847 San Francisco citizens called a public meeting to elect school trustees, who hired Thomas Douglas, a Yale graduate, to provide a school. By 1849 the city supported a free public school in the Baptist chapel, where J. C. Pelton instructed more than one hundred students. After the war, when California became a territory of the United States, delegates to the 1849 Constitutional Convention adopted provisions of the 1837 Michigan school law. In addition the federal land grant of five hundred thousand acres for internal improvements, which had been enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1841, was added to the proceeds of the sale of land in two townships to constitute a school fund. Delegates also established the elective office of superintendent of public instruction and instructed the legislature to set up a system of common schools and allocate land for a univer sity. Although these provisions would not be enacted fully until the 1860s, the California legislature provided for school districts in 1851 and a year later authorized a state property tax to support public schools.

Sources

Laurence Murrell Childers, “Education in California under Spain and Mexico and under American Rule,” dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1930;

Charles Toto Jr., “A History of Education in California, 1800-1850,” dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1952.