The three-story house that John Bidwell built in Chico was, for generations, a monument to the man many call the city’s founder. Since a fire gutted it in the early hours of Dec. 11, 2024, it has been a charred shell behind a fence. Now the people whose village stood on that ground first want it back.
The Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria has proposed that the state return the site of Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park to tribal ownership, run it jointly with California State Parks, give it a name of the tribe’s choosing and replace the ruined mansion with a Maidu village for teaching and ceremony. The five-point plan surfaced publicly for the first time this month, in a draft endorsement circulated at Chico State’s Academic Senate, ChicoSol reported on Oct. 16.
The decision will not be made in Chico. Jason De Wall, chief of State Parks’ Northern Division, told ChicoSol that the department will gather public and stakeholder comment, then send a proposal to the California Legislature, which will decide what replaces the mansion.
What the tribe is asking for
The draft endorsement from the Academic Senate’s Executive Committee lists the tribe’s requests, attributed to Chairperson He-Lo Ramirez: an “ancestral land return,” a “co-management agreement for Bidwell Mansion SHP,” renaming the park “to respect the Mechoopda village that existed on the Bidwell Mansion grounds (and Chico State) before colonization,” replacing the mansion with a Maidu village modeled on places like Sue-meg Village and Chaw’se, and making the park a place where Maidu culture is “practiced & shared with all California residents.”
“Mechoopda does not seek to erase John Bidwell and his life story,” Ramirez said in the statement quoted in the draft, “but wish for a more holistic education about him and his negative impact on Tribal communities be told at the State Park.”
ChicoSol reported that the tribe did not respond to its requests to verify the document. Muwekma Times has not contacted the tribe. De Wall told ChicoSol that State Parks has been meeting with the tribe separately from the general public, and that on Aug. 12 Ramirez presented the tribe’s vision to stakeholders.
A fight over who wrote what
At the Oct. 8 Senate meeting, faculty mostly spoke in favor. Lindsay Briggs, a public health professor who is Native American, said looking at the mansion “was painful.” “Native people are here … having a village would be very significant for our campus,” she said. Agriculture professor Kasey DeAtley, a sixth-generation Bidwell descendant, sent a statement supporting “a fuller history of this land, including the history and continuing presence of the Mechoopda,” while urging the Senate not to “replace one history with another.”
The sharpest dispute was over one line. Ramirez’s statement says Bidwell, as a state senator, wrote the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, the law that let settlers hold California Indians in forced labor and indenture, including children. Michael Magliari, an emeritus history professor who has studied the Bidwells for decades, told the Senate that Bidwell neither wrote nor voted for that act, and that records show Bidwell wrote an earlier, separate bill that died in committee. The Executive Committee took the wording out of the endorsement. The Senate will take the measure up again in December, chair Jason Nice said.
Whatever Bidwell’s role in that law, the record of what happened to Mechoopda land in his time is not seriously disputed. On Aug. 1, 1851, according to the tribe’s own history, headmen of nine communities, including Luck-y-an of the Mechoopda, signed a federal treaty at Bidwell’s ranch that set aside a 227-square-mile tract as their permanent home. The U.S. Senate rejected that treaty and 17 others in secret on July 8, 1852, and kept them hidden until 1905. Retired Chico State researcher Michelle Shover has said Bidwell’s letters show he helped get rid of the Mechoopda’s stake in that treaty, likely because he did not want to lose a workforce of about 300 Native people, ChicoSol reported. Those 18 broken treaties are now the subject of “Promised Lands,” an exhibition that opened Oct. 3 at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles.
Terminated, restored, and still landless
The Mechoopda know better than most what federal policy can take away and what a court can only partly give back.
After Bidwell bought Rancho Arroyo Chico, more than 22,000 acres, in 1849, most of the Mechoopda moved onto his ranch, where they worked for him. Annie Bidwell later deeded the village to the Presbyterian Church’s Board of Home Missions in trust for its Native residents, and the United States took over that trust in 1939. Then came the California Rancheria Act of 1958. The government terminated the Chico Rancheria with a notice published June 2, 1967, ending the tribe’s federal status and the land’s trust protection. The tribe then lost the rancheria through what federal records later called “unscrupulous land sales.”
In 1986 the Mechoopda and three other rancheria communities sued. The case, Scotts Valley v. United States, took its name from the same Pomo band whose Vallejo casino fight we covered this week. It ended with a 1992 stipulated judgment in which the government agreed the Chico Rancheria had not been lawfully terminated, and Interior restored the tribe to federal recognition on May 4, 1992. But the rancheria itself was not restored. Its land had become part of the City of Chico and the Chico State campus, a federal judge later noted, so the parties agreed the old boundaries would not come back. The tribe, which says it has 560 members today, has rebuilt a land base piece by piece, including a parcel of about 631 acres south of Chico that the Bureau of Indian Affairs approved for trust in 2008.
That is why the Bidwell grounds matter. The tribe’s request is not only about a building that burned. It is a chance to get back a piece of the homeland, beside the campus that now covers part of the old rancheria, that the 1992 settlement could not return.
The view from Ohlone country
For the Muwekma Ohlone, the Mechoopda story is a close cousin of our own, with one cruel difference.
The Mechoopda were thrown off the federal rolls by a formal termination notice. That gave them something concrete to challenge, and a court could rule the termination unlawful. The Verona Band, the Muwekma’s predecessors in the Pleasanton and Niles area, never had a rancheria for the Rancheria Act to terminate. Interior’s own 2002 decision accepted that the Tribe had “unambiguous previous Federal acknowledgement until 1927,” the year a federal agent decided against buying the band land. After that, Washington simply stopped dealing with the Muwekma. No notice was ever published for a judge to strike down. Instead the Tribe was sent through the Part 83 petition process and denied in 2002. It now has until Feb. 14, 2030, to ask Interior for a second look.
The Mechoopda case also shows where land return is actually happening in California right now: through the state and private land trusts, not Washington. The Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation got 84 acres back near Monterey this year with state money. The Muwekma’s 2025 request to return the Presidio to Indigenous care has gone unanswered. If the Legislature hands a state historic park to the people whose village stood there, it will set a precedent that every Ohlone community should be watching.
What’s next
State Parks will hold an open house on its Reimagine Bidwell Mansion planning effort from 2:30 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 25, at the Bidwell Mansion SHP Visitor Center, 525 Esplanade, Chico, with short presentations at 3 and 4:30 p.m. The department says it will present its planning alternatives, “perspectives from the Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria,” and a road map for recovery and construction. The display will stay up at the visitor center for several weeks for people who cannot attend. The effort, launched in September 2025, is meant to end in a Vision Plan for the park.
Sources: ChicoSol (Oct. 16, 2026) and the Chico State Academic Senate Executive Committee’s draft endorsement it published; California State Parks news release (Oct. 5, 2026); Mechoopda Indian Tribe history pages; Butte County v. Hogen (D.C. Cir. 2010) and the district court opinion (D.D.C. 2009); National Indian Law Library summary of Mechoopda Indian Tribe v. Schwarzenegger; BIA Pacific Region trust acquisition findings (March 14, 2008); Red Pop! News on the Autry Museum’s “Promised Lands” (Oct. 17, 2026); Interior’s 2002 Muwekma Final Determination.
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