Hastings Law balks at name change despite founder’s role in genocide

The Wikipedia entry for Serranus Clinton Hastings, the law school’s namesake, tells a story of uncommon personal and professional success:

A young lawyer is elected to Congress, becomes chief justice to the Supreme Court of first Iowa and then California, and then parlays a small fortune into a post-Gold Rush real estate empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

What you won’t read is the story of how the mutton chop-bearded judge promoted and financed the killing of hundreds of Native Americans in Mendocino and surrounding counties and stole their land. Those who were not slain were imprisoned in labor camps ostensibly for their own “protection.” There they were starved, sexually assaulted and brutalized.

In 1878, Hastings founded the law school, the oldest in the state, with a gift worth the equivalent of $190 million in current dollars. How much of that sum was derived from the extermination of native tribes and theft of their land will never be known.

Today some people — including alumni and faculty — are calling for Hastings to separate itself from the ugly legacy of its founder by renaming the school. On Sept. 11, Hastings Chancellor and Dean David Faigman released to the school’s Board of Directors the findings of a three-year project examining Judge Hastings’ murderous past. While acknowledging Hastings’ crimes, Faigman recommended that the school name not be changed.

The case against Serranus Hastings

Serranus Hastings came to California during the Gold Rush, but he was not interested in panning for nuggets; he intended to strike it rich in real estate. And the easiest way to do that was just to seize the land for himself.

Hastings laid claim to most of Mendocino County’s Eden Valley, where he could graze his cattle and horses. It was, he observed, “uninhabited except for some Uka [Yuki] Indians.”

To run his ranch, Hastings hired H.L. Hall, or “Texas Boy Hall,” as he was known. A giant at 6-foot-9, 280 pounds, the foreman must have seemed terrifying to the 50 or so Yuki ranch employees he supervised and routinely mistreated.

One account claims that Indigenous people hired to haul loads 40 miles on their backs killed Hastings’s prize white stallion after Texas Boy refused to pay their wages of one shirt for each man. Hastings, however, said in an 1860 deposition that the Yuki slaughtered the animal, worth $2,000, for meat.

In any case, the judge was livid about losing his favorite mount and more determined than ever to rid Mendocino County of every last native person. So Hall recruited a group of pals and “commenced killing all the Indians they could find in the mountains,” a local rancher recalled. As a parting gift, they poisoned the food they discovered in the natives’ rancherias with strychnine.

‘Killed for stubbornness’

Hall was queried in 1860 about the treatment of women and children captured during a Native American hunt that resulted in the deaths of all the adult males. While he didn’t admit to doing the shooting, he confirmed that the most of the captives were executed:

“I saw one of the squaws after she was dead; I think she died from a bullet; I think all the squaws were killed because they refused to go further. We took one boy into the valley [reservation], and the infants were put out of their misery, and a girl 10 years of age was killed for stubbornness.” (Indian War Files of the California Archives.)

In 1859, Hastings persuaded his friend, Gov. John B. Weller, to sign off on the formation of a militia to mount expeditions against the Yuki and other tribes. Public funding for the effort was secured by Hastings.

Covelo-area settlers organized by Hastings signed a declaration in July 1859 that selected Walter S. Jarboe to lead what essentially was a death squad against tribes in present day Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties.

The Eel River Raiders

Jarboe was the leader of the Eel River Raiders and one of the most vicious “Indian killers” in California history. He was soon joined by Hall, the one man in the state who could boast of a higher body count.

Together, they and the other 20 Raiders went on a six-month spree that left an estimated 1,000 Mendocino natives dead.

The Yuki, Wailacki and other tribes had no guns or horses. Their bows and arrows were useless against Jarboe’s mounted mercenaries, who typically would gallop into their settlements at dawn and beginning shooting any Indigenous person they could find — man, woman or child.

The Eel River Raiders suffered no casualties in the campaign other than those accidentally self-inflicted.

By 1860, there were so few natives left in Mendocino County that local farmer Benjamin Arthur told officials the whites could not find enough to kill.

In a report defending his recommendation against a name change, Chancellor Faigman argues that “erasing a school’s name does not alter the past but might undermine our ability to learn from it.”

According to Faigman, the descendants of the Yuki and other tribes have not asked for a name change and many expressly oppose it. The chancellor proposes that instead of that symbolic gesture, the school take “concrete” action by implementing a 12-step program to provide legal assistance, dedicate a public memorial, establish an “Indian Program” for studying Native American law and highlight past injustices.

Although Serranus Hastings was well-known in his day, Faigman maintains that California’s first chief justice of the state Supreme Court is now “but a footnote in history,” overshadowed by the law school’s lofty reputation.

In a footnote of his own in the paper, the chancellor acknowledges that changing the school’s name could be “an expensive proposition.” The state law establishing the school specifies that if the name is changed, the original Hastings bequest must be returned to the heirs, with interest — potentially a sum in the millions of dollars.

Let the alumni be heard

In a dissenting opinion, Hastings alumnus Paul Laurin writes that the 3-year study failed to deliberate the public policy implications of a name change and lacked critical community input from alumni and the broader community.

“Hastings was expert in utilizing ‘externalities’ to shift to the State the substantial expenses of clearing his claimed lands and perpetuating a slave system predicated on terror, killings, rapes, and forced family separation which funneled into the slave camp known as the Nome Cult Farm, where one could eat only if one could work,” Laurin says.

“That he was significantly responsible for genocidal atrocities against the native peoples of Round Valley is not in dispute. “

Laurin says the alumni should be heard on this issue.

“For my own part, and those I informally poll, it is hard to justify retaining a name for the school of a confirmed human rights’ criminal. If any fight would be worth fighting, it would seem that would be it,” he writes.

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