The Last of His People Has Wonders Yet to Tell

Tom Lucas carries the legacy of his people in his mind and shares it with strangers in words that trace a trail of outrage and harassment. He spins his people’s history in a singsong chant that holds no bitterness.

At 85, Tom Lucas is the last of the Kwaaymii, an Indian band that once lived high in the Laguna Mountains and wintered in the desert below.

The children from Spencer Valley School near Julian listen to Lucas and learn about the past and about the wonders of the mountain world around them. So do anthropologists and historians invited to his home off Sunrise Highway, a 320-acre spread on the crest of the hills, a piece of the land where the Kwaaymii lived for generations in peace, until the white settlers came and took away their lands.

When Lucas was born during a snowstorm in the winter of 1903, the tribe was no longer moving to its temporary winter quarters in the sheltering valley below. It stayed in its mountaintop village to prevent the ranchers from moving in and taking over its lands.

Perhaps because he was the last of his kind, a band that had been decimated by white men’s diseases--scarlet fever and influenza--and driven off the land by newcomers with political clout, Lucas has gathered the history of his ancestors in his mind.

“I guess I’m the only one today that remembers the past,” he says. “I was the only child and no kids to play with. At night, I was bound to listen. Listen to stories, listen to prayers.

“By keeping my ears open, as I most generally have, I picked up quite a few things. Some things I wasn’t supposed to know I heard anyway.”

Luanne Lynch, a Spencer Valley School instructor and longtime friend of Lucas, is in awe of the man’s vast memory, stretching generations back but running clear and straight into the present.

Lynch, with the aid of a school video camera, has recorded about a dozen hours of Lucas’ monologues, and she treasures every minute of them.

“I can’t wait to get home after a taping to see and hear what I have,” she said.

In those invaluable tapes, Lucas has

recounted his early life--he was raised by his grandmother on the mountain reservation--and has told with pride of his mother’s great ability as a horsewoman and as a self-taught cattle rancher.

He tells of his early years when “I didn’t understand much English, only when somebody called for dinner,” and how he went to public elementary school in Descanso, one of the few in his tribe to escape the beatings meted out in Indian school.

He proudly displays a picture taken in San Bernardino of 50 or more Indian representatives, pointing out himself and his mother. The picture was taken at about the time when the United States finally granted Indians U. S. citizenship and the right to a public education in 1924.

He laughs about going out into the white man’s world, riding in the rodeo, then giving it up and following his mother’s advice to “never mind the wild, woolly West.”

The white man also caused Lucas’ parents to separate, each returning to his or her land to protect it from the homesteaders who were “just sitting and waiting” to move in.

For 40 years Lucas worked in heavy construction. First he went to work as an interpreter and superintendent with the “3C”--the Civilian Conservation Corps run for Indians--and later with Hazard Construction Co., helping to build Camp Pendleton and doing other wartime chores.

In 1947, after an 18-year legal battle, Lucas was granted title to his mountain land as the last surviving member of his people. “It took all the money I had and a very slick lawyer,” he said.

Lucas bends down stiff-legged and clasps a handful of rich black soil. This, he says, “is where my ancestors sprang from.” Not from Asia via a land bridge to the North American continent. Not from rafts that braved the Pacific. “We come from this dirt.”

A walk with Lucas through his land is a journey into the past. He pauses to point out the hole where his mother once ground acorns and corn into meal. That was the last time a grinding stone was used here, he recalls. His mother died in 1924.

“They built up a strong fence of brush around here,” he tells his visitors, gesturing with his walking stick, “to protect what they did from the winds.”

Farther down the trail he stops at a deer track and tells his audience about herds of deer in the hundreds that once roamed the mountains and the equally plentiful bighorn sheep that were seen at watering holes in the desert below.

In the time of his grandmother, his people hunted, “but just for food, and they shared with all” the plenty of the land. A handful of sage reminds him that the Indians sometimes built a fire and made a smoke screen of the pungent shrub to mask the scent of the hunters from the hunted.

Up on the hill, there once was an Indian village, but the inhabitants all perished, Lucas said. He has found the pottery shards and grinding stones that show they once lived there. And, with the wisdom he has learned from the white man, he speculates on why they died. Food poisoning, probably ptomaine, wiped out the villagers after one of their shared meals.

In a meadow now dry and brown, Lucas laughs and does a little dance at the memory of a day last spring when the landscape was carpeted with buttercups. He shared that golden day with 9-year-old Desiree Kaufman and other youngsters from the Spencer Valley School, and he shares the memory again with his visitors.

He says he likes to live “surrounded by abundance” and once thought to build a cabin in a stand of pines “that grew up only recently, 60 years or so” ago, but then thought better of his idea because “those trees are there, and there is a reason for them being there, and I will not change it.”

Lucas built a log cabin on his land in 1929 and lives in it still, although it has been much expanded and modernized.

In the early days, the Kwaaymii lived in tepees and burned them down every year or so, Lucas said, but when his grandfather worked for the white man, he was paid “in axes and saws,” and the Indians turned to permanent abodes.

From an outlook near his land, Lucas points out the Kwaaymii Trail that leads to the valley where his ancestors once wintered. The campsite is gone now, even its traces erased by the great floods of 1916 and 1927.

The overgrown trail has been renamed the Mason Valley Trail by white men, but the rock that once was a religious place for his people still lies there at the trail side. His people stopped at the rock to ask the Great Spirit for safe passage to the wintering grounds and thank Him for their safe return.

“There’s a truckload of tiny pebbles there, left by my people,” each one dropping a single stone to mark his passage, Lucas said. “The rocks, the woods, the valleys, the rivers, the mountains all are the Great Spirit’s handwork. . . . That was the Indians’ church. . . . And, to this day, it is my church too.”

He ends his tour of the present and the past at a modest plot of rich, black soil beneath which 90 of his people lie. There are no monuments there because the “damn fool hunters” used them “and everything else” for target practice. His mother and his grandmother, who died in 1917 “somewhere between 110 and 120” years old, lie there.

Someday Tom Lucas will lie in the same burial grounds, but not before he has told and retold the story of his people to all who want to listen, to learn about them from the last surviving Kwaaymii.