Many people are familiar with the Donner party, the group of white settlers who resorted to cannibalism to survive being trapped in an early-season blizzard while crossing the Sierra Nevada in 1846. But few people seem to know that the only victims to be killed before being eaten were the group’s Miwok guides, Luis and Salvador. I didn’t learn about them myself until the fall of 2002.
I was driving from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe with LeAnne Howe, the great Choctaw writer, when we found ourselves trapped in an early-season snowstorm in the Sierra. At one point, we were unable—because of snow in the sky, snow on the windshield, and snow on the road—to go any further. There, stuck in the middle of Interstate 80, LeAnne began with great reverence and no small amount of fear to tell me about Luis and Salvador. After several weeks of snow and more snow and no rescue possible, a small group of men, later known as the Forlorn Hope, went for help, led by the two Miwok guides. But soon, the explorers began dying, and in order to stay alive, the white settlers made the difficult decision to eat their dead companions. Luis and Salvador refused to participate and even tried to escape, but according to several accounts, they were murdered, butchered, and used for food. When LeAnne and I finally crossed Donner Pass, she asked to pull over to the side of the road. We got out and made an offering to Luis and Salvador.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
When I returned to San Francisco, I began researching Salvador, Luis, and the Donner party. It was then that I first learned about Rabbit Boss, the legendary novel from 1973 by Thomas Sanchez. Rabbit Boss is a sprawling, circular epic that traces various modes of displacement and eradication of the Washoe tribe from 1846 to the mid-1950s. The book opens with an unforgettable scene of Gayabuc, a young Washoe man, stumbling upon members of the Donner party engaged in a grotesque act of cannibalism. What he sees is beyond his understanding; in fact, his community does not believe him when he recounts the events. Eventually, the tribal leaders witness the horrors of the Donner party and come to see the white settlers as inhuman monsters, evil ghosts who devour not only one another but also both the spirits of the land and the people who inhabit it. In language that alternates between mythic, realistic, and poetic, Rabbit Boss examines the cultural, sociological, and environmental impacts of white expansion on the Washoe tribe by following four rabbit bosses—tribal leaders capable of locating rabbits, an important food source, in their dreams—across four generations.
But the thematics are only part of the complexities of Rabbit Boss. Its design, structure, and language are the protagonists. Divided into four books of four sections each, the novel is an unconventional mix of linear and nonlinear storytelling. Each of the four sections is devoted to a specific rabbit boss, but the order of the sections is not chronological. The narrative(s) weave forward and backward, sometimes overlapping and retreating. Weaving. Circling. Memory and prophecy merge. Time accelerates and retreats.
Sanchez was born in 1944 at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, a few months after his father was killed at the Battle of Tarawa in World War II’s Pacific theater. When his mother was forcibly hospitalized for mental illness, he was sent to the St. Francis School for Boys, on Monterey Bay, a kind of reform school for youth of color, orphans, and rough street kids. He then worked for several years on cattle ranches in the Sierra Nevada. In the mid-’60s, he found himself in San Francisco, living in the Haight and writing and participating in antiwar protests. In 1967, he earned a master’s degree in creative writing from San Francisco State, where he later taught. Rabbit Boss was his first novel, and it was published to astonishing acclaim. Sanchez has written five other novels, including the widely praised Los Angeles noir Zoot-Suit Murders.
Over the past decade or so, Sanchez has become reclusive, rarely allowing interviews or photographs. However, he agreed to speak with me to discuss the origins and writing of Rabbit Boss, though even that was not without mystery. First, in the many email exchanges leading to our meeting, I corresponded only with his archivist, never with Sanchez himself. On the day we were to connect, I was sent a list of instructions, a phone number to call when I left San Francisco, and the directions to a hotel in what we agreed would remain an undisclosed location. I was told to look for Mr. Sanchez at the bar. He would be “the bearded guy in a hat who looks like he doesn’t trust anyone.” When I arrived, he was not at the bar, but I am nothing if not patient. A while later, a member of the hotel staff came up to me and asked, in a somewhat hushed voice, “Are you waiting for Thomas?” I said I was. He paused and said, “Follow me.” I was taken to Sanchez, and I can say that the description proved accurate. I then trailed him to a remote location where there was no cell service and whose address I still do not know. Our conversation was conducted over a day at a ranch in Mendocino County.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Dean Rader: In his preface to the catalog of your archive in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the late California historian Kevin Starr claims that Rabbit Boss “is one of the three or four finest novels ever to be set in California.” You lived below the poverty line for years crafting a narrative centered on the Washoe tribe of California and Nevada. What kept you writing?
Thomas Sanchez: I only had the novel’s first two sentences for years: “The Washo watched. The Washo watched through the trees.” I didn’t know what they were watching, what they historically bore witness to that shattered their world, until finally the third sentence: “The Washo watched through the trees as they ate themselves.” It was the tragic cannibalization of the stranded Donner party in 1846 the Washoe witnessed. I didn’t know when I wrote those three opening lines that I was opening the door to a novel that would take eight years of my life to complete.
Robert Kirsch, who was the lead book critic at the Los Angeles Times for years, wrote, “Rabbit Boss is of a size and scope that is awesome. Sanchez is a man of tremendous vision.” How did you, as a young writer—barely in his 20s—conceive such a story?
As a young man, I worked on cattle ranches north of Lake Tahoe for years with Washoe men, side by side in blistering summer heat and snow-covered winters. I was fortunate enough to earn their confidence. Elders entrusted me with insight into profound history: from the 1846 Donner party, the 1849 gold rush, the 1859 discovery of silver in the desert, the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad blasting through mountains, the damming of rivers to flood valleys, clear-cutting of forests, freeways dissecting ancient hunting grounds—transformative urbanization desecrating California’s natural environment. All of this happened within the world’s most spectacular real estate that spanned from Nevada desert across mountains beyond Lake Tahoe: the native territory of the Washoe people.
What compelled you to capture, in one novel, the most tumultuous 100-year period in California history? Your California family dates back to the 1849 gold rush.
As a boy, while living on a farm in the Santa Clara Valley not far from where Steinbeck was writing Grapes of Wrath, my mother was cruelly and illegally incarcerated in what was then called the Great Asylum for the Insane. I was sent to a boarding/reform school consisting of mostly Latino, Black, white, and Native boys in a former work camp of prisonlike dormitories. It was brutal. What saved me was a profound man of Native ancestry named Joe Birdsong. He taught me determined stoicism, not to ask questions but instead observe the silent contours of emotions, to hear what the blind man sees, to provoke animated visions. Decades later, my homage to that man was naming him as the last living Washoe in Rabbit Boss, Joe Birdsong.
The New York Times included Rabbit Boss on its list of great California novels. The original review ended with a bold little barb: “This is the novel that Mailer’s ‘Why Are We in Vietnam?’ was meant to be.” Norman Mailer’s novel was a defiant cri de coeur against American aggression. What did your California novel about the Washoe have to do with the Vietnam War?
Two words, manifest destiny, the steaming metaphoric theme of Rabbit Boss. The implacable conquering march across the North American continent devouring all land and Native people. That didn’t end at California’s Pacific shore. It led to future wars in distant lands that were not all in defense of our homeland. One consequence was the Vietnam War, which I knew would drive a stake of division through the heart of my generation. Being a war orphan myself, I knew firsthand the lifelong shattering consequence of that.
Would you call yourself an activist-writer?
No. The agitprop writer dies on the sword of his own hubris. My activism was to hijack the American novel from its skewed ethnocentric canon of control, which at the time mostly excluded writers of the Western American experience. The direct activism of my life was off the pages. In the 1960s, I was engaged with the Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta–led strikes against agribusiness monopolies. I also taught at San Francisco State during the violent student and faculty strike when SWAT teams invaded the campus, beating students bloody. In the same era, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and dead soldiers were being sent home in caskets from Indochina. America seemed a house on fire. If I could save one thing from that inferno, it had to be Rabbit Boss.
That is why you expatriated to Spain—to save Rabbit Boss?
I sold the only thing I had of value, my used VW, and bought one-way tickets to Spain with no way back for myself, my 20-year-old wife, and five-month-old baby. My “writing office” was a windowless room above a village stable. I learned a lot about arhythmic and contrapuntal prose from snorting horses being gelded and braying burros being branded. While I was writing in Spain, Ash Green, of Alfred A. Knopf, optioned Rabbit Boss for 500 bucks in late 1970. That meant I made less than $100 for each year I had been working on the novel.
Five hundred dollars? My god.
Yeah. The next year, they ponied up another $500. But because it was an “option” rather than an “advance,” I still had no guarantee it would be published or that a contract would be offered. I wrote Rabbit Boss between Spain and Inverness, California, in absolute poverty.
Rabbit Boss was praised by a number of Indigenous writers and scholars, including the great Sioux historian and critic Vine Deloria, who wrote, “Rabbit Boss is etched in unforgettable prose. Sanchez is to be congratulated.” I wonder if you think he is referring to your portrayal of the real-life Wovoka, who preached a hybrid Christianity and Native religiosity called the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance culminated in the horrific 1890 massacre of Sioux at Wounded Knee by U.S. troops.
Wovoka preached a Ghost Dance gospel that Native people stop fighting each other and rise as brothers, giving them such power that white men’s bullets would pass through them as if they were immortal ghosts. That’s a paramount touchstone in Rabbit Boss because the first tribe the Paiute Wovoka proselytized his peyote cult to were the traditional enemy of the Paiute, the Washoe.
Months before Rabbit Boss was published in 1973, Sioux warriors and the American Indian Movement liberated Wounded Knee, even reclaiming the town. You were involved in that. It seems you walked out of the novel’s historical portrayal into an actual, kinetic present.
I believe a writer should pay the price of what is put on the page, not be shielded by the proposition that it is only fiction. Since Wovoka and the Ghost Dance were intrinsic to Rabbit Boss, and the tragic history was threatened again, it was my obligation to go to Wounded Knee. The town was defended by modern-day warriors and surrounded by government troops with orders to shoot to kill anyone attempting to get in. I was able to lead people in through the Badlands during a blizzard. One of those I brought in, a Cherokee-Apache, was shot dead in a fierce firefight. Later, the spiritual Sioux elder of Wounded Knee gave me a warrior’s medicine-bag amulet talisman for protection. Might have been what saved my life.
Steven Gilbar, the influential author and editor, compared Rabbit Boss’s scope of the Sierra Nevada to Melville’s vast sea in Moby-Dick.
That’s interesting you mention the sea. My father at age 21 sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge in World War II. His torpedoed ship in the Pacific had the greatest loss of life of any naval vessel in battle history when he went down with it. So I always asked myself, What is America? Is it worth fighting for? Is it worth dying for in the midst of chaotic uncertainty? If it is, what are its most salient ideals to aspire to? That is the great white whale of an answer we seek.
The film rights to Rabbit Boss were bought by the producer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but the film never got made. Can you tell me about that?
The producer of Butch Cassidy consulted with me constantly about the film. He envisioned Rabbit Boss as atonement for the brown people senselessly slaughtered in his famous film. A rare man of true conscience. Renegades John Huston and Sam Peckinpah wanted to direct. They played poker at Huston’s Puerto Vallarta place and ribbed each other—“Whoever wins gets to direct Rabbit Boss!” My experience in Hollywood was common with many novelists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the beginning, you are posturing with starlets orbiting around. One day, shaving, you cut yourself and no blood comes out. The vampires have sucked you dry. I had betrayed myself. I punched my hand into a wall, breaking it. I forced myself through the literal pain of writing back to myself. As the Beat poet Lew Welch wrote before disappearing into wilderness never to be seen again, “I saw myself a ring of bone.”
Paragraphs in Rabbit Boss go unbroken for pages. Within some paragraphs, you move in time through as many as four different generations. Why craft a novel that loops back on itself like this?
For ancestral Washoe, the dream world is as real as the present world. I wanted to construct the book as a circular basket weave. The most celebrated basket maker of the last century was Dat-so-la-lee, a Washoe woman. Her baskets inspired the book’s prose weave of dream world, present world, and ancestral world. Following the basket design through to the end is how ultimate discovery is made.
It has been half a century since Rabbit Boss was published. How do you think it should be regarded today?
Rabbit Boss is a new world for today’s readers. On my journey of creating it, I knew people who were alive in the late 1880s. Many of their life experiences animate the novel’s narrative. This can never be replicated by internet research or AI. The weave of the Rabbit Boss novel basket was designed to pass on to future generations.•
Dean Rader has authored or coedited 12 books, including Self-Portrait As Wikipedia Entry and Works & Days, which won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly appeared in 2023. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
