Blog: Indian Warrior Yozcolo Set Roots in Los Gatos

In 1836, after 60 years of operation, Mission Santa Clara was taken over by the Mexican government. The mission Indians were “freed,” and the mission land was divided up and parceled out mostly to government officials and whoever else could afford it.

For most of the mission Indians, this transition was not so simple. They could not go back to their former way of life. Not only was that way generations past, the food of the former way of life was largely gone. The large forest of oak trees that once covered the Santa Clara Valley was now gone, and with it the acorns that the Indians had subsisted on for many generations.

During the Spanish occupation and later under Mexican rule, with perhaps good intention, the Indians had been put under a kind of serfdom from which they were to “graduate” into full citizenship. This did not happen under Spanish rule and rarely, if ever, happened under Mexican rule. The idealism, however obviously impractical and previously proved unworkable (in what is now New Mexico), was convenient for political purposes at the time.

Under the terms of the “secularization” of the missions, half of the mission land was to be given to the Indians. Some of it actually was. Three Mexican land grants were given to mission Indians who, as all other grantees, were to work the land and pay taxes or abandon it. But most of the former mission Indians did not want to live this kind of life and it is doubtful that any had the skills to manage land.

At the time of the break-up of Mission Santa Clara, most of the Indians in the mission were Yokuts and Miwoks from the Central Valley. The Ohlone Indians, the natives of the area at the time the Spanish came, comprised only about a third of the mission population when the mission broke up. When the mission disbanded, the great majority of the former mission Indians fled to the Central Valley. Of the native peoples who remained in the area, most attached themselves to one of the new ranchos in order to survive.

After the secularization of Mission Santa Clara and Mission San Jose, there were some short-lived Indian villages established around the bay. One of them was established by a man named Yozcolo (or Yoscolo) who helped himself to a large number of what had been mission cattle and horses, and established a community in the Los Gatos foothills near Lexington.

When it became evident that they could not support themselves, these people began raiding the nearby ranchos. In one of those raids, near New Almaden, an Indian guarding a cornfield and a ranchero (a ranch owner) were killed. The Mexican Army, aided by Indians from the mission area, then attacked Yozcolo’s settlement in July of 1839. The battle is reported to have been fierce.

A number in the attacking party and all of Yozcolo’s followers were killed. Yozcolo’s head was placed on a lance, paraded through Pueblo San Jose, and left on a pole near the front of the mission church for months as a warning to would be thieves and rebels. The leader of the attack, Juan Prado Mesa, was rewarded with a land grant of over 4,000 acres in the Los Altos area which became known as Rancho San Antonio. Accounts of Yozcolo vary greatly, but on this much the accounts agree.

Contrary to what is portrayed in some Hollywood films and in some novels, not everything was wonderful in Mexican California before the Americans came.

Yoscolo’s story is not the most positive of stories, but it is our history; and history accurately recorded is worth presenting—even if it is uncomfortable.

This blog post is a Los Gatos story condensed from the new local history book, The Last of the Prune Pickers: A Pre-Silicon Valley Story, by Tim Stanley.