Just when he thought he was out, the garbage in the ground pulled Seth Mallios right back in. Mallios, a professor of anthropology at San Diego State University, has been working on the Nathan Harrison project, among others, since joining the university in 2001. Harrison was born enslaved in Kentucky before becoming San Diego’s first Black homesteader, where he owned property on Palomar Mountain before he died in 1920.
Mallios’ work on the Harrison project has led to his authoring of “Born a Slave, Died a Pioneer: Nathan Harrison and the Historical Archaeology of Legend,” a companion exhibit to the San Diego History Center’s “Celebrate San Diego: Black History and Heritage,” titled “Nathan Harrison: Born Enslaved, Died a San Diego Legend,” and new answers to long-debated questions about Harrison’s life. Over the summer, his team found items at the site that confirm that Harrison had been married and that he’d owned a shotgun, an item that was illegal for Harrison to have in his possession because of his proximity to the Indigenous community.
Mallios, who also serves as SDSU’s history curator and director of the South Coastal Information Center, took some time to talk about the adversity Harrison navigated during his life, and the importance of teaching the fullness of history and its ties to the present. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: How and when did you first learn of Nathan Harrison?
A: It was back in 2000 and there was a job opening at San Diego State and they wanted the person for the job to focus on local, Southern California historical archaeology. During my time working on the Jamestown Rediscovery project (exploring the remains of the original English settlement from 1607 in Virginia), there was a point where I felt like I was studying people who had already received a lot of attention in history. When the opportunity came up at San Diego State to work locally, I wanted to go back to getting into the stories that I thought emphasized overcoming adversity, that really showed people who exhibited perseverance and survival strategies. I wanted to get at this multi-ethnic past that is often missed, overlooked or erased, especially in the Old West. I wanted to look at those early settlement patterns of multi-ethnic communities, and I came across some stories about Nathan Harrison.
What pulled me in was that there were such glaring contradictions just because of all of the mythmaking since different people have used Harrison, and stories about Harrison, to suit their own purposes. Some groups were celebrating him in terms of empowerment, and other groups were mocking him for being dependent on others. There were stories about him being from five different states, his age had this huge range, along with his name and whether it was Nathan or Nate, whether he was Harris or Harrison. There was so much information, yet none of it was definitive, and that just pulled me in even more. This intriguing individual, who seemed to be part of so many different communities, but at the same time seemed to be so elusive in these core facts about his life. That was where I started with this.
Q: What is it about him that has continued to interest you over the years?
A: I started out with this idea of being fixated on an individual who had overcome obstacles. This is where I feel very strongly that this isn’t the quintessential African American story; this is a quintessential American story, in terms of those ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Harrison embodies this. He lives to almost 90, when most African American males born into slavery, were dying at around 30 years old. He survived a trip across the country, the Gold Rush, the Old West, sundown towns in Southern California. He has this long life that is nothing short of exceptional, and he gains his freedom.
The reason I stayed with this project, evolved right in front of my eyes. It was this legacy of mythmaking. When I assembled all of the different stories of Harrison and looked at them over time, I saw that these stories evolved in very different and meaningful ways. This got me thinking, not about specific 19th-century California history, but about the stories we tell and why we tell them, and how myths evolve. I did not think I was going to be researching civil rights in California. I did not think I’d be going into this research that shows that San Diego was known as the “Mississippi of the West.” I didn’t know that Southern California was settled by southerners and Northern California was settled by northerners, and that Los Angeles was a hotbed for the Confederacy during the Civil War. This blew me away, that I was getting pulled into different topics and different time periods. It became so clear to me that all of these stories about Harrison were all written decades after he passed and were being pushed with a certain agenda. Some people were making up stories that Harrison made a lot of money and purchased his own freedom, which has no basis in fact, but it’s a very empowering story. Or, the flip side of it, where there are these stories that just perpetuate the racism of the time. So, that legacy in this mythmaking really pulled me in deep, and then the artifacts showed me stuff with a consistent pattern of being in the right time period and fitting this rural signature.
We also started seeing things that I didn’t expect to be there, like fired rifle cartridges from that time period, one of the most common artifacts. We started seeing writing utensils at the site, and this just made my jaw drop because every census record, up until the very last one when he’s in the hospital, said he was illiterate. There were all of these references that he couldn’t read or write, yet we’re finding pencils and sharpened lead, pen caps and ink bottles. Suddenly, the story is getting very, very interesting because we’re seeing things that weren’t supposed to be there.
We also started finding artifacts with Native American connections, like projectile points, little arrowheads buried in the corners of the cabin, one of those grinding stones that had been broken in half, which is often done when someone significant in the Native community dies. I went back through the records and tried to figure out if we could see this evidence of community, and that’s when we discovered, in old Spanish records that we had translated, that Harrison actually had this second identity. He had been baptized by the Rincon down at the bottom of the hill and his confirmation name was Inez Harrison. He had this entire separate identity of Inez Harrison that had always been missed by historians because it wasn’t the name Nathan Harrison. So, we saw this second life of his that included being literate, being armed, being an active member of the Native community, and none of this was in the popular stories about Harrison. The popular stories were that he lived on his own, he lived on handouts from people, he told entertaining stories, that he always put on this “aw, shucks” self-deprecating act; except, nobody called it an act. They all thought that was the real Harrison. We started going through some of the oral histories that had been written by members in the Native community, and we saw an entirely different person. We saw an individual who was an expert on the local terrain, a person who was part of the Native community who participated in their dances, who was close friends with the chief, and his wife was in the Rincon community. That’s where, when I started to look at this artifact collection, I realized we were seeing this double life and that the stories that White San Diego had been perpetuating about Nathan Harrison were the same minstrel stories that were being shown across the nation during this time.
Q: You presented a lecture through the San Diego Archaeological Center last week, discussing some of you and your team’s most recent findings at his homestead site on Palomar Mountain. Walk us through how you found the ring and the shotgun?
A: This was our ninth field season and I thought we had finished the exhibit. I thought there weren’t going to be any new surprises and I didn’t think anything would alter any of our interpretations. This past summer, the students were digging in this area that has butchered cow bone and a relish bottle from 1918. We’re finding these things that I’m fairly familiar with because I’ve seen it before, and then there’s something shiny in the ground. All of a sudden, one of my graduate students digs it up and it’s a man’s wedding band! It’s a wedding ring, and I’m telling you, I got goosebumps. I might have uttered some profanity. That question of whether or not Harrison had been married is one of the huge questions about him. There are stories that say he never married, and there are stories that said he married two different Indigenous women at different times. This is one big debate that ties into his double life because White San Diego was certain that he had never been married, yet the Indigenous population and the Mexican ranchers felt otherwise, and I never thought we’d be able to answer that. Then, this student digs up this brass ring from the late 19th century, which is perfect because brass was the poor man’s gold during that time period. It’s a big ring, a size 10 ½. Even though Harrison wasn’t very tall, he was a laborer, and jewelers emphasized that a real hardworking individual’s hands would be big. The reason I genuinely love the field of archaeology is that it answers one question and immediately raises about 10 more. How did it get there? Did it slip off of his finger as he was throwing out the garbage? Or, because he was Catholic and we found an iron cross at the site, and because rings are blessed in Catholic wedding ceremonies, and you’re supposed to burn or bury blessed good when they’re no longer in that blessed context. Did he bury it? Was this a ritual deposit? We don’t know the situation surrounding the demise of the marriage, so was this discarded in anger? That finding absolutely stunned me. It just goes to show that there are still surprises coming out of the ground.
The other thing is that we’ve been able to track down a firearm that was attributed to Harrison. This is wild because we never found the rifle or shotgun; we found hundreds of cartridges, but we never found the firearm itself. A local historian remembered the story of a family in Orange County having a rifle that belonged to Harrison, and gave me their name. The Douglass family. It made sense because Herb Douglass was a teenager when Harrison was at the end of his life, and Herb was a mountain lion hunter. He and Harrison used to hang out together, and the story was that, before Harrison passed, he gave Douglass his rifle and Douglass held on to it. So, I sent all these letters to every Douglass listed in Orange County. Lo and behold, last Thanksgiving I got a phone call that said, “You sent my parents a very strange letter, but I believe I have what you’re looking for.” She had a double-barreled shotgun made by the National Arms Company, which was only in business from 1864 to 1870, I believe. That timeline matches up perfectly. Then, as we’re digging this past summer, one of the students finds what’s known as a charger, which is a little metallic piece that would be used to pour powder when making your own cartridges or shotgun shells. So, we may have found the thing that links this shotgun to the site. We’re going to be digging again in the spring, and I keep saying that this is the last stage, but we keep finding out new stuff that I just find so fascinating.
Q: In an interview earlier this year, in which you discuss finding pieces that demonstrate his literacy and his conversion to Catholicism, you say that “In a time period that was especially dangerous for African Americans who appeared to have exhibited too much societal progress, I am stunned at both how strategic he was and how strategic he had to be.” That immediately reminded me of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” and how Black people in this country have routinely had to both work harder but not appear smarter or more talented than their White counterparts. What was stunning to you about this kind of strategy that Harrison seemed to find necessary to employ?
A: That really is the crux of the book, the deepest part of the exhibit, and this project. It’s getting at this very powerful notion that resonates today, as well. Do disempowered groups have to act deferential to survive or to succeed? That’s something that I think everybody needs to wrestle with right now, whether you’re looking at history or modern times. When we started looking deep into San Diego County during this time period — learning that Escondido was a sundown town, seeing what happened to so many different African Americans and different ethnic minorities in Southern California, and the persecution — it all starts to make sense why Harrison chose to live up on a mountain and why he actively engaged in this dual identity. When you put it all together, you realize he was quite successful at it. He had this nuanced and keen understanding of what he could present to different people. He kept his firearms out of sight, he’d change into his oldest and most raggedy clothing when people came to visit, and he’d immediately start speaking in this old-time, Southern dialect.
He told jokes, he was great with kids, and that’s where you see that, not only was he putting on this act, the only way he could survive was if nobody knew it was an act. It took me many years in this project to figure this all out. I was familiar with Dunbar’s “Mask,” but I didn’t realize the power of it.
This is where it folds nicely into the end of Harrison’s life. In 1919, he gets very sick and some friends convince him to go to the hospital. He wasn’t planning on leaving the mountain, the only reason he agreed to go is because they explained to him that everyone up there was going to be so worried about him. They were a really tight-knit community, so he goes to the hospital and he never returns. He’s hospitalized for a year. What’s so fascinating is that, because he’s no longer putting on the act as the mountain man, when he’s no longer regaling people with stories, folks forget about him. He ended up dying in the San Diego hospital without a penny to his name, all alone, and he’s put in an unmarked grave at Mount Hope. This was such a powerful dichotomy from when he was up on the mountain and celebrated. This is the question: What happens when we stop playing our expected role?
Q: In a story about Harrison on Archaeology.org, you talk about the differences in how White people received Harrison versus another Black homesteader in Malibu, John Ballard. Can you talk a bit about what you know of who Ballard was? And then the differences in his experience in Malibu, versus that of Harrison in Palomar?
A: When we study the past, we don’t often get this kind of scientific comparison where so many variables are controlled. Their stories are so eerily similar. They were both born into slavery in Kentucky, both were brought west during the Gold Rush, both migrated south after gaining their freedom, they both ended up homesteading land on top of a mountain in Southern California. They’ve got all of these amazing parallels, except for one: Ballard didn’t put on an act for anybody. He didn’t do the “Aw, shucks” routine, he didn’t engage in minstrelsy — and the locals burned him off of his property. I remember reading that story and seeing all of the different accounts of it, and coming to the conclusion that I would never, ever wonder again whether Harrison really had to put on that act. The answer was so clear. Yes, he had to do it, and he had to do it well because if anybody thought it was an act, that was incredibly dangerous. That could be lethal.
Q: Reading about that really struck me because it presented this really stark, and unfortunately painful, example of how limited choice is for marginalized people in that power dynamic. Ballard chose a kind of authenticity in his rebellion against positioning himself as a “safe Negro” who made White people comfortable, and he was punished for it. Whereas Harrison leaned into performing a very nonthreatening Black man for White visitors, and he was rewarded for it in some ways, but it would also seem exhausting to constantly have to shapeshift into this other, untrue version of oneself in order to avoid racist violence.
A: You’re absolutely right. The moment that he stopped performing, folks didn’t have time for him. I will fess up on this one: I was insistent that this exhibit go in at Balboa Park. I did not want this exhibit to be up on Palomar Mountain because I believe the city of San Diego owes Harrison an apology, and this is a reckoning for this story.
Q: What has your understanding of Harrison’s life and experience in San Diego taught you about the history of San Diego, and of California? And what do you hope it teaches the rest of us?
A: One is, it has reaffirmed my love of archaeology and my belief in archaeology, and my heightened suspicion of the written historical record. This particular story just pulled me in even more to be careful about what you read because you don’t know who wrote it, for what audience they wrote it, and how many times it was rewritten.
The second thing is that I’m pushing for Harrison’s story to be used when we’re teaching young people about the Gold Rush, the Civil War, the Old West, and that San Diego has very important history to tell. That we talk about how California was a free state in name only; thousands of African Americans remained enslaved because if you were African American and were brought to California before the Gold Rush, you stayed enslaved. Southern California was highly pro-Confederacy during the Civil War, with marching through the streets of Los Angeles. People are aghast that there were monuments to the Confederacy at places like Mount Hope [Cemetery] or that there were schools named after Robert E. Lee up until a couple of years ago, but there’s a reason for that and it’s because of this southern migration to Southern California.
The last thing is that, what I was taught as a kid was that California was this land of racial equality, but there’s just nothing true about that. It’s a very hostile history and that continues to this day. What I think this project has taught me most of all, is about the connections between past and present. Many people are dealing with the same issues today, that Harrison was dealing with back then.
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