In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Trial of "Indian Joe": Race and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century West
  • James A. Sandos
The Trial of "Indian Joe": Race and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century West. By Clare V. McKanna (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2003) 155 pp. $35.00

A local incident can illuminate larger regional-historical forces, but a scholar needs to combine the insights of several disciplines to explicate [End Page 662] it. McKanna has already written two important books dealing with race, homicide, and justice in the American West and in California.1 During the course of research in California, McKanna found a 360-page trial transcript of the proceedings against an Indian named José Gabriel for the alleged murder of a farmer and his wife on the Otay Mesa in southern San Diego County in 1872. That case study is the basis of this book.

McKanna deftly describes the setting near the Mexican border and devotes chapters to the prosecution, the defense, the judge, and the jury. He points out the bias that each of these actors brought to the judicial process. McKanna recreates the crime scene and provides a plausible alternative theory about how two men other than Gabriel might have committed the murders. The image of the defendant in the local newspapers, however, was that of "Indian Joe," reminiscent, McKanna claims, of "Injun Joe" in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). McKanna argues that "Twain, blinded by his own deeply rooted racial prejudice, paints Injun Joe as a sinister figure with no redeeming qualities" (108). San Diegans came to regard Gabriel in the same way. McKanna concludes, not surprisingly, that the Indian defendant did not get a fair trial; he was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed by hanging at San Quentin less than six months after the murders.

Regrettably, the considerable effort that McKanna invested in this work does not bear out its subtitle "Race and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century West." McKanna does not compare this case systematically to the larger body of work that he has already written. Nor does he take advantage of the opportunity to explore the literature on Indian hating that would have helped explain Twain and the attitudes of other non-Indians toward native people, which Drinnon views as having shaped the Western experience.2 This lapse is all the more surprising since McKanna's bibliography cites the pioneering work of several in that field including Melville, Pearce, and Sandos and Burgess.3

Although McKanna has done much to recover Gabriel's voice, this story comes more as a footnote than an illuminating example of the history of race and justice in the nineteenth-century West.

James A. Sandos
University of Redlands

Footnotes

1. McKanna, Jr., Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West, 1880-1920 (Tucson, 1997); Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California (Reno, 2002).

2. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Norman, 1997; orig. pub. 1980).

3. Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (New York, 1954; orig. pub. 1857); Roy Harvey Pearce, "The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating," Ethnohistory, IV (1957), 27-40; Sandos and Larry E. Burgess, The Hunt for Willie Boy: Indian-Hating and Popular Culture (Norman, 1994).

...

pdf

Share