The ancestors can weave together events, times, and places, then leave their memories behind like baskets full of their lives for their families to remember.
Wefts can be torn, reeds can be broken. Baskets can rot or burn to ash. But some fragments may remain, by which we can remember them.
The chaotic inferno of the California Gold Rush, California Indian massacres, slavery, and the Civil War swept up my great-great grandmother in ways she did not choose and could not fight. She left behind her son—my great-grandfather—and pieces of her name and DNA, little more. Ashes to sift through.
In the 1850s, an artist drew the portrait of an enslaved California Indian girl for sale for a pound of gunpowder and a bottle of whiskey, one of the more than 10,000 children sold in this era. Her hair was cropped short, likely in mourning. She wore earrings, a beaded necklace with a turtle pendant, and a Mexican-style blouse with string trim. I imagine Louisa to have been like that, wide-eyed, young and tender, grieving, plunged into the violence and chaos of the 1850s and 1860s in San Francisco. I see her eyes look back to me.
This photo could be her or look like her, as she resembles my Grandaunt Anna Sophie Fauteck, below, who was her granddaughter.
She was the younger sister of another Tomas Comtechal, who later became known as Tom Smith, the Miwok medicine man and dreamer. She may have stood awestruck beside him after their mother Tsupu woke them to see the Bodega mill burn in 1855. She may have listened to old stories around the fire as the winter rains beat down on the roof of the house Captain Stephen Smith built for them. She may have attended mass in the great hall of the Smith adobe when priests came to call.
She may have learned to sew, to cook, to keep house, to make baskets, to speak multiple languages foreign to her, and to survive.
She was also sister to Carmel, Sebastian, and Manuel Smith, half sister to William Smith—Stephen Smith’s son with Tsupu—and relative to many others.
Her family endured the Russian occupation at Fort Ross until 1841, Captain Stephen Smith’s ownership of Rancho Bodega under Mexican rule, then Californian rule, the brutal massacres of many Indians in the 1850s, and the breakup of Captain Smith’s properties after his death. Members of her close family survived because they were protected as Stephen Smith’s bound servants—he gave them his surname like a brand. Her mother Tsupu had become Smith’s mistress.
Her family would endure Maria Louisa’s disappearance as well. Sometime in the bloody decade between 1852 and 1862, she was gone, perhaps kidnapped or sold, perhaps assumed dead by her family.
Tom Smith remembered her much later to anthropologist Isabel Kelly, saying that he had a younger sister. He may have referred to her when he said that his “sister had a Catholic name; no others as far as he knows.”
Maria Louisa’s son, Henry Martin Fauteck, my great-grandfather, was born in San Francisco in August of 1863 or 1864. His father was another Henry, Heinrich Fauteck, a German immigrant serving in the U.S. Army as a private during the Civil War at the Presidio in San Francisco. He likely met Maria Louisa there. She may have been a bound servant—a slave—perhaps a laundress or housekeeper for the army.
Henry Martin lived in Newark, New Jersey as an adult. He may have returned there with his father. Heinrich may have continued to serve in the U.S. Army, may have fought in the Civil War. No one knows with certainty what happened to Maria Louisa.
She appeared on the records of Henry Martin’s life, on his marriage certificate and on his death certificate, as Louisa Schmidt, which is what Heinrich would have called her.
One of her descendants knew he was part Indian; he and others looked Indian. She was the only ancestor who could have been Indian; the rest were from Germany and Switzerland.
Her great-great-grandchildren ultimately proved her identity and relationships, pieced together the basket of her life by what she had left behind, the traces of her autosomal DNA passed to all of us.
Louisa has risen from her own ashes. We carry them on.
References
Collier, Mary E. T., and Sylvia B. Thalman, comps. and eds. 2003. Interviews with Tom Smith and Maria Copa. Occasional Papers. San Rafael, CA: Miwok Archaeological Preserve of Marin.
Unknown artist. Circa 1857. "Portrait of an Indian Girl." Jules Rupalley Album, Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection of Early California and Western American Pictorial Material. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA.
