Mystics of the Tuolumne

The end

"Me voy para siempre, puta" He screamed his slur. He sneered menacingly with his fist raised. He rarely worked and it was even rarer that he brought home any corn, beans, meat, or money with which to buy them.  Miguel Vaca was no more impacted than the handful of other Dons who were disenfranchised.  But, Miguel felt that he was entitled to patrician status.  

"Yo, no soy puta, cabron.  Se va, a me no importa." She finally drew a line in the sandy loam.  She was used to his drunkenness, gambling,  beatings, and aversion to work.  He would not be welcome again when he was broke, hungry, or needed a place to sleep.  It was easier for him to sleep outside now that the 100-degree heat of summer had settled in for the next five months. She shoved him out the door and then barred it.

"Come here, my little princess, hija mia.  You never need to be afraid.  Momma can take care of you and little Joel.  I make plenty to live on from our people.  You and Joel can help with the animals and the garden.  We have done it by ourselves anyway."  Ericia was a curandera partura, a shamanic tribal midwife.  People gave her chickens, corn, beans, beef, and milk to thank her for her help in childbirth.  Sometimes she was even given gold or silver coins.  Dahlia knew all this before her mother told her.   Dahlia was uncannily observant, she had that way.  Dahlia, after all, was the great-granddaughter of Chief Estanislao the greatest hero and leader of the Chunkchansi-Miwok through her mother's line.

 Her father was from a family of estancieros who had lost their lands to the Yankee invasion of 1850.  When tens of thousand of gold seekers poured in from overland and by sea.  Thousand of grifters who would be a parasitic provider of goods and services to those with gold fever.  He and his family were Spanish criollos.  They were called gauchepines (tenderfeet) by the Californios.  His grandfather,  Juan Vaca,  had been granted Rancho los Putos in 1843.  It amounted to forty-five thousand acres that they had been working since 1792.   An anglo town sprung up on the ranch without permission, named Vacaville.  The loss of property and means of a living were devastating to the Vaca family.   It had been thirty years since they had been turned out by an Anglo court.  Miguel Vaca was still hoping for magic but, he didn't have any.

Their identity as people of means was riven from their collective grasps.  Just as they had plundered the Miwok who truly owned and worked the land.  The most glaring difference being that the Anglos did not enslave the estancieros as the estancieros had the Miwok.  One one glorious occasion, Dahlia's Grand Father, Cheif Estanislao, led Miwok warriors to victory over the forces of General Vallejo.  Estanislao was a man of great knowledge, courage,  and character.  He had 'the gift of vision' and passed this gift through generations to Dahlia.

Dahlia could tell her mother when people started riding down the lane to their house.  Anyone could do that.  Dahlia could tell you who they were before she could see them.  She could 'talk' to the animals on their small farm hold.   The animals would convey to her thoughts what had passed during the day or night.  The animals kept the family safe from nighttime strangers and dangers.  Dahlia had been told that Estanislao could move objects with his mind.  He could start fires.  He could direct the flight of an arrow.  He could tell if the hated gauchupines were near.

Dahlia loved attending school, even though,  most of the boys would bully her.  Only one boy would talk to her a little, Albert McKinley.  He was very shy and his family owned the bank, 60,000 acres of wheat, the agricultural processing plants, and a riverboat transport company.  Despite his familial trappings, Albert was bullied too.  He respected Dahlia because she would stand up to the bullies and fight.   Albert cringed when he was bullied.  She stood tall when she was bullied.  He loved her humorous outlook on life.  She was his only intellectual equal in the whole Tuolomne river basin. Dahlia loved her friend, Albert.  She could hear his thoughts.  She could see through his eyes the beautiful paintings that were there waiting for him to paint them.  He and his brother were driven to and from school each day in a beautiful gray shay drawn by a dapple gray horse.  Albert would lean out and watch her from the shay until it disappeared from sight.  Dahlia could see herself standing there through Albert's eyes.  She wouldn't move until she could no longer see herself.

School was dismissed for the summer so the children could lend their labor to the family farms.  Dahlia did not work the fields but she and Joel helped her mother on their small holding.  Joel was a jolly, sweet, and happy little boy.  Everyone loved him.  The McHenrys were among the wealthiest families in the Great Valley.  They traveled during the summer.  Sometimes to expose the children to the wonders of the world but mainly to escape the insufferable heat of the valley.  It would get as high as 120F and the humidity was appalling. Dahlia would walk among the grapes arbors.  She loved the feel of the fine dusty loam.  It made tiny squeaking sounds beneath her heels and toes as she walked along in her bare feet.  She was picking the largest green grapes one by one and placing them in the basket her grandmother had made for her from the tule reeds which grew beside the river.  Her mother, Ericia, would make verjus by squeezing them.    She used it as part of her medicines.  
There was a smell the valley had in the summer.  It was like toasted bread from the wheat.  The grasses, and reeds along the river and its many creeks had their own sweet grassy smell.  The sky was light blue in the middle but, white where its edges touched the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, 

Water was brought to the holding through a series of irrigation ditches, called acequia.  Dahlia job in the summer was to make sure there would be no flooding or overflow.  Dahlia prescience helped her immensely with this task and it gave her more time to dawdle and see the scenes that Albert sent her.  After knowing Albert for several years, she had seen, San Francisco, Athens, London, Paris, and the Great Pyramids in Egypt.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I hope that I was able to set the scene in California's San Joaquin valley just before the turn of the century.

The TV series "Big Valley" was centered in the San Joaquin valley.  

Have I built enough background story for the protagonists and antagonists?