Chickasaw

• Are from the hill country of Alabama and Mississippi. They collected acorns, chestnuts, wild strawberries, and blackberries from the forests and fields. And throughout the region a moist, warm climate and long summer season allowed most communities to plant two corn crops each year.
  
• spoke the Muskogean language
  
• By 1700 most of the Choctaw had joined forces with the French against the British and their allies, the Chickasaw and the Natchez, for colonial territories and trading rights. In 1702 a French official charged that in the previous decade Chickasaw warriors had taken 500 Choctaw prisoners at the urging of the English and killed three times as many more.
  
• In the early 1800's more than 300 years had passed since the first Europeans stepped into the Southeast. Formerly vast Indian territories had been reduced to tribal enclaves surrounded by white settlement-the cumulative result of armed conflicts, one sided peace treaties like Horseshoe Bend, and outright land grabs....In Missisippi, where few lands had been opened to white settlement, the Chickasaw still held the northern third of the state.
  
• The Chickasaw began their migration from northern Alabama and Mississippi in 1837, after buying land in Oklahoma from the Choctaw. Most went by boat, and because conditions on board were generally healthful, the Chickasaw were spared many of the physical hardships endured by other tribes. But as soon as they arrived, they were challenged by Plains Indians who claimed the newcomers had stolen land from local tribes. It would be years before they knew peace.
  
• In the 1840's, the Chickasaw nation drew up a constitution of their own, modeled on US political procedures.
  
• Chickasaw, traditional enemies of the Great Lakes tribes, helped Gen Anthony Wayne fight Little Turtle, a Miami leader in the 1790's.
  
• Between 1830 and 1842, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole had been forcibly removed from their homelands in the Southeastern United States and resettled in Indian Territory, part of what would become the state of Oklahoma. Overcoming that trauma-and the internal divisions it aroused-the exiles began to re-create their communities with remarkable speed and get on with their lives.
  
  Before the deportations, they had shown themselves willing, even eager, to embrace the trappings and values of white society. When whites referred to them as the Five Civilized Tribes, there was no hint of irony or sarcasm; it was a name that expressed respect. The theft of their lands in the Southeast did not rob the Five Tribes of their ambitions. They built substantial homes, re-established their own institutions and laws...and established themselves as successful farmers and ranchers.
  

Chinook

• When the Chinook people of the Columbia River Basin caught the first salmon of the year as it swam up its natal river to spawn, they treated it with ritual respect, as their forefathers had learned to do: They placed the honored fish on an altar facing upstream, and roasted it. Each person in the community tasted its flesh, and then its intact skeleton was carefully returned to the river, which it would swim to the marine world of the salmon people and report that it had been properly treated. Well into historic times, it appears that an ancestral claim in the annual salmon run was a perpetual legacy. Tribes that had moved away from the riverside continued to have absolute fishing rights when the salmon returned-as if their treating the salmon with respect had earned them the respect of other peoples as well.
  
• The Chinook had ongoing cultural and trade contacts with societies of the Plateau and northern California.
  
• For the Chinook, a person's status depended in large part on individual merit.
  

Chipewyan

• The Barren Lands, west of Hudson Bay, in the far northern reaches of the Canadian Rockies, were home to the Chipewyan, one of several Athabascan groups that tracked the region's great caribou herds. Each spring the caribou left the protective forest and moved to summer grazing grounds in the Barren Lands. In fall they returned, their coats sleek, their bodies meaty. In good years the herds numbered in the tens of thousands. Chipewyan hunters gathered along the migration routes in both spring and fall and harvested enormous quantities.
  
  Much like the buffalo...the caribou provided virtually all of life's necessities in the Subarctic. Caribou hides became tunics, moccasins, tent covers; eight or more hides were needed to tailor a complete set of winter clothing for an adult. Strips of caribou leather were worked into snares for small game and webbing for fishnets and snowshoes. Caribou bones and antlers became ax handles, fishhooks, and other implements. For the Chipewyan, caribou meat was the culinary staple; much of the vegetable matter in the Chipewyan diet was the half-digested mass of lichens in caribou stomachs, which were roasted whole over a fire.
  
• While their survival depended on the caribou, the Chipewyan believed they owed their very existence to another animal: the dog. Refer to my Creation Story page for details.
  
• In the mid-1700's, the Hudson's Bay Company opened Fort Prince of Wales at the mouth of the Churchill River....This was the edge of Chipewyan country and the gateway to the Northwestern interior. The Chipewyan showed little interest in trapping beaver, which had never been plentiful in their region. But they soon learned the short-term benefits of the fur business. Like the Cree, they found a profitable role as go-betweens, taking control of trade between the Company factors at Churchill and native groups to the west. So it was that an ambitious Chipewyan named Matonabbee rose to a position of prominence.
  
• Over six feet tall, powerfully built, with a quick intelligence and dauntless will, Matonabbee worked as a guide for the Company. He made a lasting impression on one of its agents, Samuel Hearne, age 24 and equally ambitious. Together the two men spent 19 months trekking the Subarctic in search of a navigable route to the Pacific Ocean.
  
  It was Hearne's third attempt. In 1769 he had turned back after just 200 miles when his native guide ran off with the expedition's ammunition and ice axes. A raid by tribal marauders cut short his second try. So in the dark of December 1770, Hearne set out from Churchill with Matonabbee as his guide and mentor. A band of Chipewyan hunters went with them, as well as a crew of women to haul supplies and set up camp. "Women were made for labor," Matonabbee explained. "One of them can carry...as much as two men." He himself had six wives and nine children.{In this early period, women-not dogs-usually hauled the birchwood toboggans.}
  
  Even with this support, the going was rough. Hiking as much as 20 miles a day across the muskeg, with game in short supply, the expedition ran low on food. During one two-day period they subsisted on nothing but tobacco and melted snow. Another lean stretch prompted Hearne to boil up an old pair of boots for dinner.
  
  By summer they had reached the banks of the Coppermine River, which flows north into the Arctic Ocean. They were now crossing a no-man's-land where Athabascan groups like the Chipewyan would occasionally come upon bands of Inuit, ancient enemies from the Far North. It happened now. Beside a small cataract, some Inuit families had set up a summer encampment. Spotting them in the distance, Hearne's Chipewyan companions underwent a sudden, terrifying transformation. Stripping to their loincloths, they tied back their hair and smeared their faces with red and black war paint.
  
  That night, as the Inuit lay sleeping, Matonabbee's band attacked. Men, women, children-all felt his fury. An Inuit elder took 20 spear thrusts until, said the horrified Hearne, "his body was like a sieve." A woman had her eyes poked out. A young girl wrapped herself around Hearne's legs, begging for mercy as two Chipewyans stabbed her to death. Not one Inuit survived. The stranger had just learned a lesson about the power of blood feuds in this part of the world.
  
  The expedition moved on, following the river, until it reached the ice-bound Arctic Ocean. Clearly, the route to the Pacific lay elsewhere. But Hearne's trip opened an unpredictable new era, and in his footsteps other white adventurers began thrusting their way into the hunting grounds of the Athabascans.
  

Chippewa

• See Ojibwa (coming soon).

Chiricahua

• The Chiricahua, the fiercest of all Apache tribes, raided along the Mexican border.
  
• A measure of tranquility took hold in the late 18th century as a succession of Spanish governors tried to improve relations [among the Plains]. The colonists forged a peace alliance with the Jicarilla Apache and Navajo and with the nomadic Ute and Comanche. But other Apaches remained at war. The Chiricahua of southern New Mexico and Arizona became particularly fierce combatants. One of their leaders was a lapsed Catholic convert named Juan Jose, who in 1835 learned that his father had been murdered by Mexicans. Taking justice into his own hands, Juan Jose began launching raids on Mexican settlements. He would then sell the loot to a white trader from the US, James Johnson. But the trader was no true friend of the Indian. In return for a handsome reward from the Mexican government, Johnson paid a visit to the Chiricahua camp, carrying a small howitzer concealed under a pile of gifts. After an exchange of pleasantries, he opened fire and shot Juan Jose dead.
  
• Similar acts of vengeance and betrayal continued to escalate the conflict. In one notorious incident of 1850, at the Mexican town of Ramos, local citizens plied some visiting Chiricahua traders with strong drink and sent them reeling back to camp-then followed that night to slaughter them in their sleep. And so the strife continued. So troublesome did raids into Mexico by Chiricahua and other bands become that one 19th-century governor of Sonora put a price on the scalp of every Apache man, woman, and child.
  
• After the surrender of Cochise and the death of Victorio, conditions on the San Carlos Reservation sparked a further series of Apache breakouts for old Mexico, where various bands joined forces and resumed freewheeling raids along the border. They even attacked the San Carlos Agency itself, killing four reservation policemen. Now a new leader emerged from among the Apache guerillas, a seasoned [Chiricahua] fighter who had fought alongside Cochise and Victorio. He was named Goyathlay, or "One Who Yawns," but he was better known as Geronimo.
  
• It was said that as a young man Geronimo had lost his mother, wife, and children to a surprise attack by Mexican soldiers, which gave rise to his pitiliess campaigns of revenge on settlements south of the border. Now, in September 1881, Geronimo led about 70 Chiricahua wariors along with their families across the Rio Grande again and began striking ranches throught the state of Chihuahua. But this time a regiment of Mexican troops managed to cut off most of the Apache women and children and slaughtered them all. General Crook ...was back in Arizona territory. War-weary and losing followers, Geromino managed to evade the paid Apache scouts Crook used to track him down until May 1993, when Crook located his base camp and took the women and children hostage. The last of Geromino's band finally gave themselves up in March 1884.
  
• In May 1885 Geronimo and other leaders were caught consuming home-brewed corn beer, a violation of army rules. While the authorities debated his punishment, Geronimo cut the telegraph wires, killed a ranching family, and slipped back into his old haunts in Mexico's Sierra Madre with 134 warriors. In March 1886, Crook finally managed a two-day parley with Geronimo in Mexico's Canon de los Embudos. Geronimo agreed to surrender and accept a two-year imprisonment at Ft Marion, 2,000 miles away in Florida. But along the way, while being led to Ft Bowie by Apache scouts, Geronimo and a handful of his followers broke free again.
  
  The army at this point replaced Crook with Gen. Nelson Miles, who committed 5,000 troops and 400 Apache scouts to the recapture of Geronimo. Even when confronted by a force of this magnitude...Geronimo's band of 38 men, women, and children still eluded their pursuers for six months. When Apache scouts finally talked Geronimo into laying down his gun in early September 1886, the surrender was bloodless and strangely anticlimactic.
  
  Recounted Geronimo's cousin Jason Betzinex:"Kayitah [an Apache scout] delivered General Miles' message. The general wanted them to give themselves up without any guarantees. The Indians seemed stunned. Finally Geronimo's half-brother, White Horse, spoke out. 'I am going to surrender. My wife and children have been captured. I love them, and want to be with them.' Then another brother said that if White Horse was going, he would go too. In a moment the third and youngest brother made a similar statement. Geronimo stood for a few moments without speaking. At length he said slowly, "I don't know what to do. I have been depending heavily on you three men. You have been great fighters in battle. If you are going to surrender, there is no use in my going without you. I will give up with you.'"
  
  Almost immediately Gen Miles had Geronimo's band taken into custody-along with the Apache scouts who had tracked him down-and put on a train for  Florida. Their destination was Ft Marion, the old Spanish fortress in St. Augustine where the army imprisoned its most dangerous Indians. There Geronimo would spend the next eight years. Released from confinement in 1894, the old guerilla accepted an offer from the Kiowa and Comanche to share their reservation in Indian Territory and spent his final years as a farmer outside Oklahoma's Ft Sill. He joined the Dutch Reformed church, where he taught Sunday school.  Later, with government approval, Geronimo spent a year with a Wild West show and appeared in Omaha, Buffalo, New York, and at the St. Louis World's Fair, where he made money selling his photographs and bows and arrows. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to Washington DC to ride in the inaugural parade. But to the day of his death in 1909, Arizona never considered Geronimo safe enough to let him set foot in his homeland again.
  

Choctaw

• Would travel to the Arkansas' hot springs to gather together with other tribes to hunt, trade, and take the healing waters. Even when their peoples were at war, individuals of opposing tribes could come together here in safety and peace.
  
• spoke the Muskogean language.
  
• would collect acorns, chestnuts, wild strawberries, and blackberries from the forest and fields in and around the hills of Alabama and Mississippi. And throughout the region a moist, warm climate and long summer season allowed most communities to plant two corn crops each year. Their main lands were south of the Chickasaw and north of the Natchez.
  
• Choctaw's hunter prayer-"Deer, I am sorry to hurt you, but the people are hungry." In the old days, the storytellers said, all the animals and plants had lived together in peace with the people. But as time went on, men invented knives and bows, blowguns, spears, and hooks and began to slaughter the animals for their flesh and skins. So the animals held councils to discuss these grave threats. The deer decided they would send rheumatism to any hunter who killed one of them without at least asking their pardon. To enforce this policy, they agreed that Little Deer-who was swift as the wind and could not be seen-would race to the spot the moment a deer was shot and ask the animal's spirit if it had heard the hunter's prayer for forgiveness. If so, all was well. But if not, Little Deer would follow the hunter back to his village and cripple him with rheumatism. So it was that young men were taught prayers asking the Creator that the spirit of a slain deer return in the body of a fawn. Likewise, many new hunters were forbidden to eat the first bear, deer, or turkey they killed: this was a momentous occasion, meant to renew the sacred bond between human and animal for another generation-not merely to indulge the appetite of a single day.
  
• Dreams were powerful agents in maintaining physical and spiritual health. During a dream the spirit temporarily left the body and experienced things that no conscious person could know. Because dreams gave access to the spirit world, they could also serve as warnings of impending peril. To the Choctaw, for instance, a dream in which a bear was encountered meant that either the indiviudal or the community would soon meet trouble.
  
• In October 1540, De Soto and the Spaniards reached the territory of the great Choctaw chief Tuscaloosa. The chief, seated on cushions in a raised pavilion in the town plaza, received the strangers with regal pomp. About his shoulders hung a floor-length feather cape; behind him stood an attendant holding a fan-shaped parasol. De Soto demanded 400 bearers, which Tuscaloosa graciously provided, and also 100 women. These, the Choctaw said, would be waiting at the next town, Mabila. So the Spanish set off. At Mabila they entered a massive stockade with 15-foot-high mud-plastered walls and tall defensive watchtowers. Suddenly Choctaw warriors poured into the central plaza and fell upon the intruders. De Soto had been ambushed. After hours of ferocious combat, thousands of Tuscaloosa's men had fallen to the Spaniards' guns and swords; tribal legend tells that the survivors hanged themselves rather than surrender.
  
  The conflict was also devastating to the Spaniards. The Choctaw cut down many of their horses, destroyed most of their supplies, killed perhaps 40 Spanish soldiers, and wounded almost all the others. It was a hungry and haggard force, then, that De Soto led west to Chicaza on the Mississippi-Alabama border. There, subjected to numerous hit-and-run attacks by the local people-the Chickasaw-he sought to rest his troops and restock his supplies.
  
• The Choctaw speak of a great mound, Nanih Wiya, from which the Great Spirit created the first of their people, who then crawled through a cave into the light of day.
  
• By 1700 most of the Choctaw had joined forces with the French against the British and their allies, the Chickasaw and the Natchez, for colonial territories and trading rights.
  
• In response to the Fort Mims Massacre in 1813, the government called in Jackson to smash the Red Stick coalition. Moving quicky, he assembled 3,500 Tennessee mitiliamen and a force of Cherokee, Choctaw, and White Stick Creek allies.
  
• Coerced by illegal treaties and bullied by federal troops, the last of the Southeastern Indians were finally forced off what was left of their land. The Choctaw were first to leave, moving from Mississippi to eastern Oklahoma in large groups between 1830 and 1846. Some went by boat up the Arkansas River; others trekked over land. For all, it was a long and sorrowful trip. The boats were crowded and unsanitary; the land convoys poorly supplied and ill equipped for cold weather. During the bitter winter of 1831-32, one party of Choctaws walked for 24 hours barefoot through the snow and ice. An army officer supervising the operation sadly noted, "Our poor emigrants, many of them quite naked, and without much shelter, must suffer, it is impossible to do otherwise."
  
  Cholera and other diseases swept through the boats and the caravans. By the end of 1832, approximately 20 percent of the 3,000 Choctaws who had left Mississippi were dead. Better planning and more provisions made the process less hazardous to life and limb in later years, but nothing could heal the suffering those leaving the soil of their ancestors. It was a journey, wrote one mournful Choctaw, "calculated to embitter the human heart."
  
• In the 1840's after arriving in Indian Territory, the Choctaw drew up constitutions of their own, modeled on US political procedures. They also set aside their own concerns long enough to raise $710 in 1847 for victims of the potato famine in Ireland.
  
• They aided Gen Anthony Wayne in the goverment's attack on Little Turtle, a Miama leader in the 1790's.
  
• In the late 1800's, the Choctaw had Bibles available in their native language.
  
• Between 1830 and 1842, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole had been forcibly removed from their homelands in the Southeastern United States and resettle in Indian Territory, part of what would become the state of Oklahoma. Overcoming that trauma-and the internal divisions it aroused-the exiles began to re-create their communities with remarkable speed and get on with their lives.
  
  Before the deportations, they had shown themselves willing, even eager, to embrace the trappings and values of white society. When whites referred to them as the Five Civilized Tribes, there was no hint of irony or sarcasm; it was a name that expressed respect. The theft of their lands in the Southeast did not rob the Five Tribes of their ambitions. They built substantial homes, re-established their own institutions and laws...and established themselves as successful farmers and ranchers.
  

Chumash

• The Chumash believed a comet was a sign of disharmony in the upper world.
  
• The quality of Chumash basketry has long been considered among the best ever produced in North America. The Chumash, trading as far east as the Colorado River, had magnificent baskets to offer. Because they were not obliged to devote all their energy to the raw demands of survival, native Californians had time to achieve a level of craftsmanship that produced ceremonial objects like flawlessly wrought obsidian blades and decorative clothing.
  
• In late fall 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed his ships past the inlet to San Francisco Bay. Along the way they encountered people from villages on both the mainland and the Channel Islands. Among them were the Chumash who...welcomed the Spaniards warmly, offering them food and other provisions. Cabrillo died as the result of an accident on San Miguel Island, one of the Channel Islands, in January 1543, and the Chumash soon watched the Spanish vessels depart their shores. This first European foray into California had left the inhabitants undisturbed. For two more centuries it would remain so.
  
• The Chumash occupied a stretch of southern California from below present-day Ventura on the south to Morro Bay on the north, including the settlements on the Channel Islands that Cabrillo visited. Inland, Chumash territory extended beyond the Sierra Madre to the edge of the San Joaquin Valley.
  
• Like other California peoples, the Chumash were hunters and gatherers of food rather than tillers of the soil. Roots, seeds, berries, and nuts made up a large part of their diet and were systematically collected by the women. The fall acorn crop for a single community, stored in granaries for use throughout the year, might run to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Chumash men hunted and fished, depending on the availability of game animals and proximity to water. Those living along the coast and on the Channel Islands were master seamen and boat builders. Designers of the only oceangoing plank canoes in North America, they harvested rich supplies of fish, mollusks, and sea mammals.
  
  Blessed with such abundance, the land of the Chumash was truly an enviable inheritance. Indeed, so naturally beneficent was the entire California region, extending from the Colorado River northward to the realm of the giant redwoods, that it could support a population of more than 350,000, making it the most densely settled region north of Mexico before the Europeans arrived.
  
• The coastal Chumash of California were a fishing and trading people, and for these purposes they had a remarkable craft, the tomol, or plank canoe. The tomol was made of driftwood (preferably redwood) split into planks, which were lashed together with cord made from milkweed fiber. The completed hull was caulked with toy, a mixture of tar and ground pine pitch, then painted with another sealant, red ocher paint, to make it more watertight. Light and maneuverable, propelled with double-bladed paddles, this "house of the sea" generally carried a crew of two and a boy for bailing, although it could hold 15 or 20 people if necessary. Membership in the Brotherhood of the Canoe, composed of tomol crewmen, was eagerly sought, and those who belonged were among the richest, most powerful men in Chumash society.
  
• The Chumash revered earth, air, and water as sacred entities. Fire, wind, and rain were also sacred-but dangerous-spirits. Like most native peoples, the Chumash paid close attention to the stars. Learned men linked the motions of the stars, sun, and moon to the changing tides and turning seasons. Each community had an open-air ceremonial enclosure with painted posts. Here the Chumash danced and worshipped the powers that the posts symbolized. Long after Spanish priests established missions in California, these rituals would continue to be practiced.
  
  "The Chumash have a story....It begins with a worm who is eaten by a bird. The bird is eaten by a cat whose self-satisfaction is disrupted by a mean-looking dog. After devouring the cat, the dog is killed by a grizzly bear...About that time comes a man who kills the bear and climbs a mountain to proclaim his superiority. He ran so hard up the mountain that he died at the top. Before long the worm crawled out of his body." Kote Katah, Chumash
  
• When the first Spaniards arrived in the region, they found nicely planned Chumash communities with as many as 2,000 people. A Spanish observer later described one of the Chumash towns: "They arrange their houses in groups. The houses are well constructed, round, like an oven, spacious and fairly comfortable; light enters from a hole in the roof. The beds are made on frames and they cover themselves with skins and shawls. The beds have divisions between them, like the cabins of a ship, so that if many people sleep in one house, they do not see one another. In the middle of the floor they make a fire for cooking seeds, fish, and other foods, for they eat everything boiled or roasted." This carefully balanced world, however, was about to be turned upside down.
  
• In 1769 the Spanish government, alarmed by Russian land claims along the Pacific coast, decided to extend its American empire north from Mexico into what is now California. It was not the Spanish army, however, but the Catholic Church that had primary responsibility for accomplishing the task....Depending on the amount of resistance expected from native populations, large or small detachments of Spanish soldiers would accompany the missionary group to its destination and there build a fort, or presidio, to defend it. The plan for the missionary compounds was preestablished, as was the practice of laying claim to large tracts of land commandeering a native work force.
  
  Over the next half century, Franciscans founded 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma, north of San Francisco. The Spanish Crown decreed that Indians should be converted to the Catholic faith. The missionaries brought an unquestioning fervor to their work, believing that the conversions reflected the will of God and were in the Indians' own best interests. Many natives did convert-perhaps because they were impressed by the priests' message of salvation and by the elaborate church ritual. Some may simply have wanted the food that the missionaries offered. Still others may have been attracted to Spanish tools and agricultural techniques.
  
  The labor at first was provided entirely by neophytes, as new converts were called. But as was true in so many other places, European diseases took a terrible toll. With no resistance to smallpox, measles, influenza, and other ills, converts and their families died by the thousands. The high mortality rate among the neophytes, however, did create a labor shortage that had to be remedied, and the misionaries eventually resorted to conscripting workers by force from the general population.
  
  The lives of mission Indians were regimented to an extraordinary degree. Once baptized, neophytes were not permitted to leave the mission compound. The friars required them to learn the Spanish language, to dress according to Spanish custom, and to learn new trades such as farming, herding, and construction. Families could live together only if the parents remarried in the church. Unmarried adolescents were housed in sexually segregated barracks, an arrangement designed to protect the chastity of maidens...Sexual assaults on Indian women by the Spaniards, wrote Father Serra, were a "plague of immorality" that would cause the Indians to "turn on us like tigers." His predictions were borne out time and again. But barracks life was itself a hazard because concentrations of people in relatively small spaces increased the risk of disease.
  
  Priests, soldiers, and Indian alcaldes (minor officials appointed by the priests) all imposed stern discipline on neophytes. Those who broke mission rules were subjected to harsh penalties, including whipping, imprisonment at hard labor, and the stocks.
  
• When native healers proved incapable of curing the new diseases, some Indians saw it as evidence that the old ways had lost their power....The missionaries did their best to speed the process, equating the shamans's rituals with satanism and witchcraft. Nevertheless, many Indians held tenaciously to old beliefs. Long after embracing Christianity, the Chumash continued to celebrate the Hutash, a corn harvest festival, at Mission San Buenaventura. The friars evidently never suspectd what was occurring.
  
• Inevitably, the mission system pushed the Indians to violence. In 1775 an alliance of Christian Indians and unconverted Kumeyaays tried to destroy the San Diego mission. They were motivated in part by revenge for sexual assaults on native women.
  
• In February 1824, Chumash neophytes rose up at Mission Santa Ines and burned mission buildings. The revolt spread to the missions at La Purisima and Santa Barbara. At La Purisima 400 angry Indians drove off the priests and soldiers and seized control of the mission compound. Mexican forces attacked La Purisima with artillery and forced the rebels to surrender. At Mission Santa Barbara a convert named Andres assumed leadership and took a rebel force to the San Joaquin Valley. Mexican forces made two forays into the valley before some the rebellious neophytes-including Andres-agreed to return to the mission after Mexican authorities promised not to punish them further.  Others, however, remained in the San Joaquin Valley.