‘Indian Joe’ and the Junipero Serra Controversy

“It is assumed that he is now dead,” historian Frank Stanger wrote about Indian Joe in “South from San Francisco,” which was published by the San Mateo County Historical Association in 1963. “It appears that, with his passing, the race that first inhabited the Peninsula, the people whose rising smokes attracted the attention of the first white explorers, became extinct.”

Joe, whose full name was Jose Evencio, was referred to as a “well known character” in an article in the Burlingame Advance on May 14, 1928. The newspaper reported that he was injured in a car accident in San Francisco and was found in “his shack on the point in an apparently helpless condition yesterday by a hiker.” Police officers said Joe sustained “an ugly scalp wound that was treated by a doctor.” The Advance’s account said Joe “has been keeper of the yacht harbor on the east shores of Coyote Point for several years.”

A story in the 1930 Burlingame High School Annual by student Jane Taylor recounted the harrowing tale of two brothers and their encounter with Joe who took a shot at them. Taylor described Joe as “a half wit” who guarded the point with his gun and dog and used methods “crude and simple.”

“If someone on horseback should happen to ride through the woods, Joe would merely dash out with his gun and dog and shoot at the ground under the horse’s hoofs,” Taylor reported, adding that “it was considered wisest to keep out of Injun Joe’s range.”

The bestowing of sainthood on Serra is scheduled for Sept. 23 when Pope Francis visits the nation’s capital. Among other things, critics blame Serra and his fellow missionaries for ending a culture centered on nature, a venue Joe favored. It is interesting to speculate what today’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, until recently Fish and Game, would think about Joe’s lifestyle.

Joe was the son of Pedro Evencio, who testified in an 1869 court case involving title to Rancho San Mateo. Except for visits to Mission Dolores in San Francisco, Evencio spent his entire life on the ranch.

In the 1890s, Mary Barnes, a professor from Stanford, interviewed Pedro Evencio in his small San Mateo home. Barnes described him as a reserved, dignified man who told her about the days when Mission Indians hauled lumber from the Peninsula to San Francisco. Evencio, the offspring of a tribelet of the Costanoans, was killed a few years later when he was struck by a train.

In his court testimony, Evencio said he could remember back to the days when “there were about 80 Indians at San Mateo, including boys.”

“I was raised there,” he said, referring to the ranch that was once part of a mission outpost. “There are only myself and an uncle of mine still alive of the San Mateo Indians.” He testified that he helped plant wheat, beans, and corn. In her report, Stanford professor Barnes said Pedro lived in a little white-washed house “neat within and without, the garden full of pinks and stocks and all sweet bright flowers…”

As for Serra, his legacy is everywhere on the Peninsula. There’s Serra High, Serra County Park, a mural in Sequoia High School that was the work of students in the 1920s and a statue on 280 that, in my humble opinion, the critics might want to take a look at.

Jim Clifford’s “The Rear View Mirror” appears every other Monday in the Daily Journal.