Hang Trees

Searching for California Hang Trees

by

Ken Gonzales-Day

The series Searching for California’s Hang Trees began in 2002 and grew out of my research into the history of lynching in California. I began the research by compiling the most complete record of lynching in California to be published at that time. The data was also included in my book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke, 2006), which documented over 350 cases of lynching in the state.

I was particularly interested in documenting how nineteenth-century conceptions of difference had obscured the fact that along with African Americans in the South, Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese, and Latinos of Mexican descent, were lynched in California across the Southwest. I also documented cases involving the lynching of whites or "Yankees," immigrants, and persons of European descent (from Australia). The work was difficult and to this day, many individuals and institutions continue to downplay the brutal killing of brown people across the nation.

I am primarily a visual artist and so I had to do a lot more than simply research the history. The resulting series of photographs I created to help me to cope with the history of racial hatred that had taken place across the California landscape and I faced the added challenge of trying to create a project that could also speak to the invisibility of that history,  a history that continues to be downplayed, even as ICE agents continue to target and incarcerate and deport brown skinned individuals across the nation. Symbolically, the series also functions as physical testimony and as a record of my efforts to raise awareness of the historical mistreatment of Latinos and other communities of color in light of the most recent anti-immigration efforts, which have literally led to the incarceration of thousands of Latinos in our own time.

"It might sound strange to say that the work did not begin as a project about lynching. It was a project about place and the people who inhabited it. It was also a response to real-life vigilantes who began to appear along the U.S./Mexico border as a result of the anti-immigration rhetoric that was being promoted by then-President, George W. Bush in the early 2000s. Their armed presence reminded me of those who had unjustly targeted Mexicans, Californios, Latin Americans, and Latinx communities across much of the Southwest throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. [1]

In doing the research, I scrolled through countless rolls of microfilm (before digitization), read dozens of historical accounts of the “frontier”, and perused old newspapers like the Los Angeles Star and the Daily Alta California.  It was during this period that I began to identify individual cases of lynching in California. I documented over 350 of these cases and discovered that 64 percent of lynching victims were BIPOC with 37 percent identified as Latinx (Chilean, Mexican, or Mexican  ), 11.5 % Native American, over 8% Chinese, and just over 2% black.[2]  Thirty-three percent of the cases involved the lynching of whites from Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Six percent were unidentified.

While I was still conducting the research and assembling the case list, I found myself increasingly traumatized by the research. Scholars doubted the accuracy of my claims. Fellow artists questioned my practice. One day, I was sitting in a viewing station reading microfilm in a regional history archive when I broke down while reading about a particularly brutal killing and found myself unable to.

I realized that the case had taken place a short distance from where I was and decided to get in my car and go look for the site.  I was quite certain that I did not have enough information to find the exact spot but I wanted to go see, to witness for myself, the land on which these acts had occurred.

The first thing I did once I returned home was to log on to eBay and look for a camera. I did not want just any camera. I wanted the kind of large format camera that was used by artists like Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others who crystalized the notion of the American West as empty and untouched. I found an old wooden Deardorff 8x10 view camera and learned how to use it. Part of the idea was to imagine a new kind of landscape photography that would somehow capture the idea, that the land was a site filled with the histories of people, of Indigenous peoples, of Californios, of early immigrants, and migrations of all kinds, even once the physical traces were  The photographs were shot on Fuji color film and then drum scanned. The choice of color film was intended to signal a break from the past and to locate the images within the time in which they were made.[3]

Nearly all of the historic hang trees in California were cut down or destroyed in the aftermath of the lynchings themselves. If they were not razed to the ground, many of California’s oaks have been impacted by both real estate development and by Sudden Oak Death, a disease caused by a fungus-like plant pathogen that has contributed to widespread dieback across the state. Driving up and down the state to look for these locations I later came to see my project as a call -- to witness. I wanted to visit every site no matter the race of the victim. Once I was at a location I would consider the details of the case and try to imagine the impact of any alleged crime on the families and communities that were impacted.    I saw the trees as witnesses and imagined the lynch mobs passing under their limbs. When I got home my pockets were sometimes filled with acorns I brought from the sites and I stuck them in the ground around my house. They were smooth to the touch and helped me keep the memory of the places I had visited.

I never conceptualized the project as a documentary photography project but rather as an embodied act. A performative gesture that included my body, the land, the camera, and the final image -- even when the land was covered with asphalt and pavement. It was a new kind of landscape photography because it had to imagine a new kind of audience.

The resulting series stands in for an overlooked and forgotten history. For me, photography was a performative act --a witnessing through image-making. The images were taken in the city and county where the events occurred. Some of the locations have local or state historical markers, such as the hanging tree in Holcomb Valley (N 34 15.898 x W 116 55.276) [4] or Second   (California Landmark No. 460).

In About a Hundred Yards from the Road, I went looking for Panoche Pass in San Benito County where a group of Rangers, led by Captain Love, were said to have chased and killed Joaquim Murrieta and Three-Fingered Jack. The pass was described in various early accounts and is a short drive from the place where the Arroyo de Catuna state historical marker No. 344 is placed. For me, the old road seemed to provide a glimpse back in time and was informed by accounts that described an elaborate chase through grassy hills, horse trials, and secret hideouts.

In Nightfall   (Figure 1), I photographed a single tree in Griffith Park to stand in for many cases across Los Angeles County because the trees and makeshift gallows have long since disappeared. The image was taken around midnight in keeping with the history of so many lynching cases. The flash was meant to foreground the impact of flash photography in shaping the spectacle of death depicted in lynching postcards and newspaper coverage in the first decades of the twentieth century. This particular image was commissioned by LAXART in 2007 and was presented as a billboard in Los Angeles. Commuters stuck in rush hour traffic could see it out of the corner of their eye as they crawled along Interstate 10, one of the nation’s busiest highways. The tree was intended to stand in for California’s missing history of lynching and its impact on BIPOC, Latinx, and other immigrant communities.

It is my hope that the absence inferred in this work may one day be seen as contributing to social justice movements, adding to the history of our nation, and marking a new chapter in how we see images of the land, not just as symbolic or metaphorical representations of existing power relations, but as a critical response to the social construction of the Western landscape as justification for Manifest Destiny and settler colonialism." [5]

[1] In researching the project, I became aware of a number of important publications on vigilantism and lynching. The first was Popular Tribunals, vol. 1 & II (1887) by Hubert Howe Bancroft which looked at California’s early days, and the second was Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) by James Allen, Hilton Als, Leon F. Litwack, and John Lewis, which introduced me to the idea that the lynching photograph was a part of a legacy of terror that served to reenforce racial subordination and segregation against blacks nationwide.

[2] Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006), p. 206.

[3] Processing color sheet film has since become increasingly difficult and I have mostly shot digitally since 2014.

[4] source: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC13RP8_hangmans-tree?guid=94ceadf7-ddbb-4c84-acc8-aaa6d5d91e0e  (02/28/2021)

[5] Excerpt  from Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe, Edited by Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge

To watch the PBS segment from Lost LA click here.