"A Native American's
Account Of The B-25 Crash"
By Monte Hendricks
Rich is a retired high
school teacher and had taught at the school he attended as a boy. He
loves the
area. It’s evident as he goes back in time with boyhood stories of
growing up
on his family’s fruit ranch. He called me one evening and said, “I have
to tell
you about this!” He went on about how his family had bought their ranch
and, as
he said, “Folks were expected back then to take care of the things that
came
with property when you bought it.”
One of the things that came with their ranch
was an old Native American man called Wesley. “He lived in a small
cabin and he
was old. I always thought that he was ninety years old.” There was an
Indian
burial site down on the flats near where the B-25 would later crash.
The
neighborhood kids would pick up beads and arrowheads. “We all had shoe
boxes of
stuff we had picked up. But, we never touched any bones!” Rich said
that Wesley
told him stories about how, as a boy, his family group would travel
through the
area and the burial ground was where they would always bring their
dead.
<> As
Wesley’s stories were passed around the neighborhood children, they
started
thinking better about their collections. “We really started to worry
that we
would get bad luck,” Rich said. “We took our shoe boxes down there and
put the
stuff back.” Rich told me, “I believe it was 1939 when the University
of
California came up and did a big dig, sifted through everything and
carried it
all away. It’s probably long forgotten in some building in Berkeley!” Rich explained that the Native people were
very angry but felt powerless to do anything.
One day shortly after the B-25
crash, Rich’s mother asked him to carry some milk down to Wesley. Rich
was
still quite excited about the crash and asked Wesley if he had seen it,
and
what he thought about it. Wesley answered in a mix of English and his
native
language. Rich couldn’t understand all of it, so he carried the words
home to
his mother, who had grown up in the area and spoke the language. She
listened.
Then, she explained to Rich that Wesley was saying that the earth had
swallowed
up men who had dared to fly in the sky and had taken retribution from
the white
men for the desecration of their sacred burial site.