Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Two Indians walked into a bar in the wild wild west. . . Or to be precise, the two Indians – handsome in the way only Indian men can be – had found their stools, and were already whetting whistles at Black Oak Casino’s award-winning restaurant bar, crowning this gambling oasis in California’s sierras.
The one with the fruity margarita and chiselled profile was Dennis Hendricks, community elder to the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians in Sonora, grandson of reknowned activist Eva Hendricks (more on her later).
The other was Ron Patel, Black Oak’s manager from its start 15 years ago. Raised in the UK, he married a Liverpudlian lassie, got into casinos, and has prospered in the wild west since. The saga of how Indians – both kinds – won the wild west back has yet to be sung; but we can try.
Their pride and joy is the Seven Sisters restaurant above the main floor, where local wines are featured and fresh seafood flown in from Hawaii.
Below the lobster tails and steaks, Black Oak’s rotunda swarms with locals in a sea of slot machines. Beneath that, the family activity floor bustles with bowling lanes, and the booths with cocktails, Mexican platters and pizzas.
Dennis and Ron have built Black Oak Casino into a thriving entertainment complex, in the middle of, not exactly nowhere, in formerly depressed Sonora.
Until the Indian Gaming Act, Black Oak was a native reservation in a blighted neck of the sierras, where fine wines had not yet replaced mines.
Gold mining
Gold was found in Sutter’s Creek next door in 1848, where Mark Twain later wrote about the silver boom. Nearby, Sonora Pass is a wilderness, so remote that the hikers’ Pacific Crest Trail was its lone claim to fame.
Movies like For Whom The Bell Tolls and High Noon, The Lone Ranger and Bonanza were filmed against its rugged backdrop.
These days Route 108 is a garland of ex-mining towns such as Murphys with its Irish music, Calaveras with its Twain memorials, Columbia historic park, Victorian hotels and such. But gold is long gone, silver too, logging is done, and only a feeble pulse remained, with the bric-a-brac stores and Pentecostal churches predicting Armageddon. You’d predict it too, back then.
“There wasn’t a whole lot else going on,” recalls Dennis, who saw the logging industry decline first hand, and knew the local economy was on life support. The Me-Wuks – 600 or so souls in up to 100 households – were impoverished, as Indian reservations often are. He spoke of the dearth of education, the experience of Vietnam, lack of future.
Casinos
But the Indian Gaming Act of 1988 changed all that. With one sweep of a pen, the government legalised gambling on native reservations. Sixty-one casinos and 110 tribes now cater to enthusiasts nationwide: some huge, like Graton and Thunder Valley in northern California, or small as garages with one-arm bandits.
Dennis and supporters faced opposition until getting together with other tribes to learn to woo local support. “Of course there’s always opposition but we had relationships with community leaders and we pointed out we were creating jobs and bettering local economy.”
The start was slow and tentative, with a first “soft” opening of the casino in 2001.
The casino’s domed rotunda is copied from the “hangi” or ceremonial Me-Wuk roundhouse. Community days with introductions to Me-Wuk life run regularly. Annual spring Indian markets and autumn acorn festivals celebrate the staple diet of acorn porridge, with crafts like basket making.
Jobs sprouted overnight. Profits went into Me-Wuk health centres and clinics.
“What we wanted was a destination resort. After we caught on, we expanded in 2005 with a hotel and a pool and a hot tub.” A golf course and caravan park are next.
Okay, it’s not Circus Circus or Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Lowest bets are 60 cents, not a high-roller turn-on. But it draws families for weddings and birthdays.
Me-Wuk language survives. Dennis’ grandmother Eva and uncle Sonny, crusaded for Me-Wuk language revival. As a girl, Eva had been sent with her sisters to “Indian boarding school,” where mission folk tried to eradicate the language, so this was her own special quest.
From gold mines to Me-Wuk dictionaries and chuggable wines in 160 years, this neck of the Californian sierras is the new Gold Country.