The Petaluma Dime Museum’s Lost Treasure

THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF NATIVE AMERICAN ARTIFACTS

In January 1849, a young merchant named Johnny B. Lewis set off for the California gold mines, only to discover he had failed to book advance reservations.

Having boarded a ship in New York City with a “stock company” of other aspiring miners funded by investors, Lewis sailed with his company to the Isthmus of Panama. After making their way overland to the Pacific Coast, the group found a line of 4,000 other treasure hunters waiting for a ship to San Francisco.^[1] 

Stuck in port for four months, Lewis obtained a large tent and earned money by renting it out as a restaurant and lodging house. When he finally secured passage to California, it was aboard the Humboldt, a refitted coal ship packed with 400 other passengers, for $200 per ticket ($7,500 in today’s currency).^[2]

When Lewis finally disembarked in San Francisco after 102 grueling days at sea, he found himself cured of gold fever. Purchasing a horse and cart, he became a teamster, making a small fortune hauling freight around town for $25 a day ($1,000 in today’s currency) to help pay back the stock company that funded him. Expenses in the Gold Rush city ran equally high. In his spare time he channeled his lust for buried treasure into digging for “Indian curios.”^[3]

Over the next half century, Lewis assembled one of the largest collections of Native American artifacts in California, all proudly displayed at his Dime Museum in Petaluma.^[4]

While looting archaeological sites had been popular since antiquity, it became something of an American pastime in the 19^th century, after the British Empire began ransacking countries for trophies of its colonial triumph. Private museums of exotic artifacts proliferated as wealthy men turned collecting a competitive sport and middle class hobbyists began assembling collections to enhance their social status.^[5]

In California, relic hunters found Native American villages and burial grounds easy pickings, as the state’s indigenous population had been reduced an estimated 150,000, or half of what it had been at first European contact 80 years earlier. Driven first by the Spanish and Mexicans into mission servitude, and then labor camps like Fort Ross and the Petaluma Adobe, many Natives were worked to death, infected by European-transmitted diseases like syphilis, measles, and smallpox, or else killed outright by soldiers.^[6]

After the U.S. claimed California as a spoil of the Mexican-American War in 1848, Americans began streaming into the state under the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” believing they were divinely ordained to settle the West and remake it in their own image. For some, that meant first eradicating what remained of the indigenous population.^[7]

“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected,” California’s first governor Peter Burnett explained to state legislators in 1851.^[8]

To expedite his belief, he signed an act facilitating the removal and displacement of Natives from their traditional lands and indenturing Native adults and children to White settlers. He also set aside state money to arm local militias for undertake killing expeditions as needed. As a result, by 1870 California’s Native population had been reduced to an estimated 30,000.^[9]

Against this backdrop, in 1856 Lewis purchased a 300-acre cattle and dairy ranch in Lakeville, seven miles downriver from Petaluma.^[10] As luck would have it, the ranch was near Lakeville’s namesake—Tolay Lake. (Full disclosure: In 1863, my great-grandfather John Casey and his brother Jeremiah purchased a ranch bordering the north end of Tolay Lake; John Casey later leased farm land in Lakeville from Lewis).

No more than 20 feet in depth, the lake was actually a sag pond encompassing 300 acres. The Alaguali, a Coast Miwok tribe whose main village bordered San Pablo Bay, made use of it for drinking, bathing, and cooking. They also cultivated roots of the lake’s sedge beds for basketmaking and hunted migrating fowl drawn to its waters. But the lake’s most significant use for Natives was as a sacred spiritual center and medical depository for charmstones.^[11]

Mostly two to three inches long, the stones varied in shape from oblong to round and squat. Natives believed they carried mystical power, allowing doctors to extract illness from the sick and injured, after which the stones were drowned in the lake to fully eradicate the illness. Some of the charmstones found in the lake were later determined to be more than 4,000 years old, originating from as far away as Mexico and Washington state^.[12]

Such archaeological knowledge was largely lost on relic hunters like Lewis, who mistook the stones for “sinkers” used in weighing down fishing nets.^[13] That wasn’t unusual. Most hobbyists operated within an informational vacuum, their fixation on collecting overriding both curiosity and concern for the sites they excavated.^[14]

In 1859, Tolay Lake was purchased by a wealthy German immigrant named William Bihler. In 1870, he dynamited the natural dam at the lake’s southern end, allowing the water to drain out into San Pablo Bay. He then planted potatoes in the lakebed. Each year’s plowing of the field brought new charmstones to the surface.^[15]

By the turn of the century, Lewis claimed to have secured half of the thousands of charmstones gathered at Tolay. He also noticed the Natives stopped coming around after Bihler drained the lake.

“When I came here in the early fifties,” he wrote, “there used (to be) large numbers of Indians go by my ranch in the fall, down the Petaluma creek to catch sturgeon and dry them, and they always went back by the way of the lagoon and stayed a day or two and had some kind of pow-wow.”^[16]

Anthropologist Peter Nelson notes that they were most likely concerned with the dangers of being exposed to charmstones exposed in the dry lakebed.^[17]

Along with charmstones, Lewis also gathered from the area stone axes, hatchets, chisels, spear- and arrowheads, string beads made from shells and teeth, and human skulls found near the Petaluma Adobe.^[18] But the bulk of his collection consisted of mortars and pestles used by Natives for milling acorns, an essential food source, into flour.^[19]

In his digs, Lewis discovered different types of mortars confined to certain areas. Those with straight sides and flat bottoms he found near Sonoma Mountain, where boulders of basalt were common. But in the sandy hills in the west side of Petaluma, the mortars were  pointed or urn-shaped.

To display his artifacts, Lewis built a museum on his ranch. It became a regular attraction, drawing people out to Lakeville on weekend carriage rides, as well as serving during the 1890s bicycling craze as the finish line for races from Petaluma.^[20]

In 1900, “Uncle Johnny,” as he was fondly known, leased out the ranch and moved into Petaluma to live with his son, Charles, who operated a bicycle and general repair shop on East Washington Street (across from today’s River Plaza Shopping Center). In the storefront beside Charles’ shop, Lewis opened the Dime Museum for his collection. A 19^th century phenomenon, dime museums showcased collections of artifacts and oddities for the entrance fee of a dime.^[21]

In 1907, an ailing Lewis decided to close the museum and sell off his collection. A private collector in Missouri purchased his charmstones, while Charles H. Culp, a friend and fellow relic hunter in Pacific Grove, acquired his 227 mortars and pestles. Added to the 250 mortars Culp had already amassed from Central California, it reportedly made for the largest collection of Native mortars in the country.^[22]

Lewis died in January 1909 at the age of 84. A few months later, Culp shipped his expanded collection to Seattle for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, where he opened a “California Indian Museum” along the exposition’s “Pay Streak Amusements” midway. Similar to a world’s fair, the exposition featured romanticized exhibits of Native Americans, Alaska and Yukon Natives, and Pacific Islanders. Running from June through October, it drew more than 4 million visitors, including collectors and museum directors. ^[23]

Among them was George G. Heye, a New York banker in the process of assembling the world’s largest private collection of Native American artifacts. In 1917, Heye opened the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City to showcase his collection.^[24]

It’s unclear whether Heye purchased any of Culp’s collection at the Seattle exposition. The Smithsonian, which assumed ownership of Heye’s museum in 1990, has record of only a dozen mortars attributed to Culp, all of them originating from Central California.^[25]

The last reported sighting of Culp’s mortars collection after the exposition was in 1911, when it was on loan to the Pacific Grove Museum. The museum has no record of the collection after that date. It most likely ended up in the hands of private collectors.^[26]

Archaeologists often refer to pillaged archaeological sites as “pages torn from our history book.”^[27] In an attempt to return some of those missing pages, in 1990 Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It required that Native American cultural items found on federal or tribal lands or in museums receiving federal funding be returned to federally recognized tribes upon request. California enacted a similar law a decade later.^[28]  

Some public collections, notably those of the University of California, have subjected repatriation requests to a slow-moving and wildly obtuse process. Private collectors are another matter. Many of them have adopted a position of free enterprise, claiming such artifacts belonged not to the people they came from, but to the relic hunters who moved them.^[29]

As long as such lingering attitudes of Manifest Destiny remain, characterizing Native people and culture as though they are in the past tense, the artifacts collected by relic hunters like Johnny B. Lewis remain pages torn from history.^[30]

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909.

[2] “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909. “Uncle Johnny Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, June 17, 1901; “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908; Lewis A. McArthur “The Pacific Coast Survey of 1849 and 1850,” The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1915), pp. 246-274.

[3] “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909; Robert M. Robinson, “San Francisco Teamsters at the Turn of the Century,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 35.1, March 1956: Letters from J.B. Lewis to his wife Elizabeth, October 30, 1850, and November 30, 1850, Petlauma Historical Library & Museum.

[4] “Uncle Johnny Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, June 17, 1901; “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908;

[5] Michael W. Hancock, “Boffin’s Books and Darwin’s Finches: Victorian Cultures of Collecting,” master’s dissertation, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, 2006. DigitalCommons@IMSA, digitalcommons.imsa.edu/engpr/5/; Robert J. Mallouf, “An Unraveling Rope: The Looting of America’s Past,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2, (Spring, 1996), pp. 197-208. https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/mallouf.pdf

[6] George E. Tinke, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 5; Benjamin Madley, American Genocide (Yale University press, 2017), p. 3.

[7] “Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal,” Smithsonian Institute, https://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Manifest-Destiny-and-Indian-Removal.pdf.

[8] Peter H. Burnett, “Governor’s Annual Message to the Legislature, January 7, 1851, Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the State of California, at the Second Session of the Legislature, 1851-1852, p.15. ; Journals of the Legislature of the State of California 1851.

[9] Madley, p. 3; Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, “Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians,” California State Library, September 2002. https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/IB.pdf

[10] “84 Years Sunday,” Petaluma Courier, March 16, 1908; “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909.

[11] Peter Nelson, “Indigenous Archaeology at Tolay Lake,” graduate dissertation, UC Berkeley, p. 6; Warren K. Moorehead, The Stone Age of North America, Vol. II (The Riverside press, Cambridge, MA, 1910), p. 106-112.

[12] Greg Sarris, “The Charms of Tolay Lake Regional Park,” Bay Nature Magazine, July-September, 2017; Interview with Steve Estes and Claudia Luke, February 23, 2016, Osborn Oral History Project, Center for Environmental Inquiry, Sonoma State University; “Tolay Lake Regional Park: Cultural and Natural History,” www.sonoma-county. Org/park/pk_history.html, County of Sonoma Regional Parks Department; Nelson, p.1.

[13] Moorehead; John Sharp, “Charmstones: A Summary of the Ethnographic Record,” Sonoma State University, 1994, Society for California Archaeology, https://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.13Sharp.pdf

[14] Mallouf, p. 199.

[15] “Bihler’s Lake Farm,” Petaluma Argus, June 13, 1873; Nelson, p. 1.

[16] Moorehead; Nelson, p. 6.

[17] Nelson, p. 8.

[18] “J.B. Lewis’ Museum,” Petaluma Courier, February 24, 1902; “Dime Museum,” Petaluma Argus, September 5, 1902; Petaluma Courier, July 12, 1902; “J.B. Lewis,” Petaluma Argus, October 5, 1903.

[19] Michael A. Glassow, “The Significance to California Prehistory of the Earliest Mortars and Pestles,” Pacific Coast Archaeology Society Quarterly, No. 32(4), Fall 1996. https://pcas.org/Vol32N4/324Gla.pdf

[20] “The Road Race,” Petaluma Courier, April 20, 1896; “Watermelon Run,” Petaluma Courier, August 22, 1899.

[21] “Uncle Johnnie Coming to Town,” Petaluma Argus, July 6, 1900; 1907 Sanborn map of Petaluma; “J.B. Lewis is Dead,” Petaluma Courier, January 7, 1909; “Dime Museum,” Showhistory.com, https://showhistory.com/show-type/dime-museum.

[22] “Purchased Indian Mortars,” Petaluma Courier, April 29, 1907; “Sold His Curios,” Petaluma Courier, January 8, 1908; “For Sale,” Petaluma Courier, December 21, 1908.

[23] “J.B. Lewis is Called Home,” Petaluma Argus, January 7, 1909; “Collection of Mortars,” Monterey Daily Express, April 30, 1907; “Indian Collection for Seattle,” Monterey Daily Express, January 10, 1909; Kate C. Duncan, 1001 Curious Things (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 78; “The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition,” University of Washington Special Collections, https://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/collections/exhibits/ayp

[24] Rita Cipalla, “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop (Seattle),” History Link.org, August 26, 2022. https://www.historylink.org/File/22526

[25] History of the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation, Smithsonian Institution,

https://sova.si.edu/record/NMAI.AC.001; “Charles Culp: Mortars and Pestles, 1917, Box 212, Folder 15,” Archives of the Museum of the American Indian.

[26] “Museum Contains World of Knowledge for Visitors,” Monterey Daily Cypress, February 19, 1915; Email from Nate King, Collections and Research Manager, Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, February 2, 2023.

[27] Mallouf, p. 200.

[28] CalNAGPRA, https://nahc.ca.gov/calnagpra/

[29] “UC Inexcusably Drags Its Feet Returning Native American Remains and Artifacts,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 26, 2022; Audit Report of Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,https://www.auditor.ca.gov/reports/2019-047/summary.html; Tarisai Ngangura, “The Colonized World Wants Its Artifacts Back,” Vice. com.

[30] “To Share Native American Culture and History the Right Way, Artifacts Should Always be Returned to Tribes,” San Diego Union Tribune, November 27, 2022.