There is an article in the San Diego Reader about the Cupeno Removal of 1903.
Here is a link and an excerpt:
This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903 The blackest of crimes committed against Warner Ranch Indians.
By Jeff Smith, March 30, 2016
Visitors to the Indian village at Kupa were often struck by the silence. No loud voices, no sudden shouts. Even children played quietly. A stillness spread from the bowl-shaped Valle de San Jose below, past Warner’s Ranch, and up to where Cupeños busied themselves with the tasks of the moment — tasks their people had performed since time for them began.
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On May 13, 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the California Supreme Court’s decision: J. Harvey Downey and his stockholders legally owned Agua Caliente — aka Kupa. It did not matter that the Cupeños lived there centuries before the Spanish came. In the original case, Barker vs. Harvey, attorneys for John Downey, J. Harvey’s uncle, argued that no natives were on the site in 1844, when John J. Warner obtained the land grant. And they never filed a claim to the Board of Land Commissioners in 1851.
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Courts from San Diego to Washington DC read “vacant and abandoned” to mean no Indians were on the property. But in 1893, Warner said that wasn’t true. Eighty-five years old and gravely ill, Warner gave a deposition at his home in Los Angeles. The southern half of the valley was abandoned, he said, not the northern, which included Agua Caliente/Kupa. He “never heard of them being displaced.” The original grant even stipulated that he could not interfere with roads and other usages,” meaning the native village.
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Read the full article at the link below.
This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903 The blackest of crimes committed against Warner Ranch Indians.
