Miwok Means People : The Life and Fate of the Native Inhabitants of the California Gold Rush Country

Imagine you live in a self-contained village where your parents and their parents and all your forebears from the beginning of time have lived.

Imagine that within a day’s walking distance from your village are the villages of other People—to the east and west and north and south.

They are PEOPLE because they speak words you mainly understand. There are in these foothills 9000 such PEOPLE.

Then imagine that in the space of a few months 90,000 ûyeayû—white men—come uninvited to all the PEOPLE’S villages to tear away the ground under the PEOPLE’S feet looking for rocks.

For each one of you there are 10 of them. Imagine!

Eugene L. Conrotto was born in Gilroy, California, at the southern end of Santa Clara Valley known today as Silicon Valley. He has lived his life two decades at a time. For the first twenty years he was a student, that experience culminating in a degree in anthropology from Stanford University. For the next twenty years he was a journalist in the California desert: editor of the award-winning Desert Magazine. His first book-Lost Desert Bonanzas-came from this experience. The third twenty years of his life saw him return to the classroom as a teacher. Hence: Classroom Strategies for the Subversive English Teacher. The fourth twenty years-and still counting-were spent in blessed retirement, the chief joy of which he found is "one no longer has to take orders from idiots." (He did not consider the spreading of good cheer to be among his responsibilities.) Conrotto is also the author of Miwok Means People, The Memoirs of Caesar Honore, Classroom Strategies for the Subversive English Teacher, An Annotated Chronology of the California Gold Rush, Notes on My Stay in a Convalescent Hospital, Avanti America, A Day with the Ant-People, and A Chronology of Unitarian-Universalist Celebrated Individuals.