Chimney Rock, January Eighteen Sixty-Seven

The marker near Chimney Rock describes a January eighteen sixty-seven confrontation as the last Indian fight in Southern California. A band of Native people had left their camp east of the rock and raided several cabins and a sawmill in the San Bernardino Mountains, taking food and supplies. A posse retaliated by attacking the camp, killing and wounding an unrecorded number of people.

The language of the original marker reflects the era in which it was placed, describing the violence from the settler perspective without naming the Indigenous people involved or their circumstances. Historians generally identify the people as Serrano or Chemehuevi, communities who had been displaced from their traditional territories by ranching and mining expansion throughout the eighteen fifties and sixties.

By eighteen sixty-seven, Native communities across Southern California had been stripped of most of their land. The raid and its violent aftermath were part of a long, largely unrecorded pattern of displacement and resistance that the word fight barely begins to capture.