By Donald H. Harrison
SPRING VALLEY, California—Speculation was popular from the 17th through 19th centuries that Native Americans might have been descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. In this community off State Route 94, there once lived a famous historian who was among those who investigated the Lost Tribe theory and then dismissed it as being fanciful.
He was Hubert Howe Bancroft, who is perhaps best known as the namesake for the Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley. For a good portion of his life, Bancroft was a book seller in San Francisco and a collector of historical and ethnographic materials. He became a publisher and eventually compiled histories of most of the western states, which today are collector’s items.
Approximately in 1885, shortly after writing The Native Races , the first of his 39 history works, Bancroft purchased an adobe home from Rufus K. Porter near the spring that gave Spring Valley its name. Today the Bancroft Ranch House is both a state and national historic landmark.
A lover of the Bible since he was three years old, Bancroft purchased enough additional properties to assemble more than 500 acres of farm land, on which he planted date palms, olive trees as well as non-biblical crops. While California historians would believe that he wrote some of his histories while staying in Spring Valley, this is not for certain. Other historians say it is possible that this was the place Bancroft came to vacation from his writing, or at least to consign it to his subconscious.
In his book on Native Americans, Bancroft examined the Lost Tribe of Israel thesis, one toward which it might have been more difficult for him than other historians to maintain an attitude of strict neutrality. His father, a minister, had been one of the persons who had helped to popularize the theory in Ohio, where he said he had discovered a tombstone with ancient writing that appeared to be the Hebrew of the 1st or 2nd century CE.
In the 1989 book Menasseh Ben Israel and His World published by E.J. Brill, A chapter by Richard H. Popkin on the “Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory,” explained why Christian theologians, in particular, were so intrigued with the idea of Native Americans being descended from the Lost Tribes.
If the ancestors of Native Americans indeed were the Lost Tribes of Israel then 1) it was evidence of the biblical concept that all mankind was related to Adam and Eve, or at least to Noah and the other seven human survivors of the Flood. On the other hand, if they were not members of the Lost Tribes, it might be evidence of a theory that directly contradicted the Bible—that humans sprung up independently all over the globe.
Additionally Christians theorized that if Native Americans were indeed descended from Jews, their conversion to Christianity might represent a fulfillment of prophecy, particularly if these converts could be persuaded to move to Jerusalem and thereby pave the way for what Christians believed would be the second coming of the Messiah.
Not everyone was pleased by such ideas, according to Popkin’s article. Those who wanted to take the lands of Native Americans away preferred the theories of Samuel Morton of Philadelphia, who measured skulls of members of different races and “fudged his data” to prove there were differences in the brain capacities of Asians, African-Americans, Native Americans and Caucasians. His conclusion that there was thus no common ancestry among the races provided “evidence” to support the contention that the other races were inferior to Caucasians, and they were not therefore entitled to any familial consideration.
Among those who embraced Morton’s theories was the scientist Louis Agassiz, who visited Spring Valley during the time that the adobe was owned by Rufus K.Porter.
It was not unnatural that Agassiz would come visiting: Porter’s father, Rufus Porter (whose name was without the middle initial K), was the founder of the magazine Scientific American. While Agassiz was in San Diego County, he found European brown snails (Helix Aspersa) living in the nearby hills. Later Porter named one of the peaks which dominates modern day La Mesa as “Mount Helix” after Agassiz’s discovery.
In his interesting chapter, Popkin writes: “The important American historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in his history of the native races of America, presented a chapter on the origins of the Indians, setting out the prevailing theories. The Jewish Indian theory was taken up and disowned by Bancroft but it was described as having strong evidence in its favor. The evidence consisted of the phylacteries (found in 1820 in an Indian burial ground) and the tomb… Bancroft’s father deposited in the local historical society from whence it seems to have disappeared.”
Beautifully bound leather volumes of Bancroft’s historical works are kept at the adobe, which is both the home of the Spring Valley Historical Society and for 30 years the pride of Jim Van Meter, an architectural designer and draftsman, who has served as the property’s caretaker and guide in exchange for the right to live in a nearby dwelling on the property.
I toured through the original two rooms of the adobe, as well as some rooms that were later added on, saw the historical society’s crowded library, and then visited the adjacent palm-studded lot where one can find the nests of numerous trap-door spiders and the small water seep indicating an underground spring. This is one of the greener places in San Diego’s arid climate.
Van Meter said that before Porter had owned the property, it was owned by Augustus Ensworth, an attorney who actually had built the adobe back in the 1850s. As the author of Louis Rose: San Diego’s First Jewish Settler and Entrepreneur, I recognized that Ensworth had handled some minor legal matters for Rose (attempting to collect debts for him) and also had complained in a letter during the 1860s to a general store business partner about how difficult it was for Gentile merchants to sell anything to the townspeople. This was because so many of the townspeople owed money to the Jewish merchants in San Diego, debts which they said they couldn’t pay. If the same customers were spotted going into the cash-only stores owned by Gentiles, the Jewish merchants might sue the customers for payment of back debts.
Prior to Ensworth, the land had been granted to the family of Santiago Arguello during San Diego’s Mexican period. Arguello had served in 1830 as alcalde or mayor of San Diego, and he and his wife, Pilar, had 22 children.
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. This article appeared previously on examiner.com