Ponying up for Genocide
The state of California never hesitated to raise the money and pay the bills for its campaign to wipe out the tribes.
Only days after Gov. Peter Burnett made his speech declaring an inevitable war of extermination against Native Californians, the state legislature knew just what to do. After all, organized violence seeking to destroy peoples and tribes had played a central role in American California from its first days.
In April 1846, Capt. John C. Frémont ordered his 76 heavily armed soldiers and scouts — the legendary Kit Carson among them — to attack a large gathering of Wintus on the Sacramento River near what is now Redding. Local American settlers claimed the Wintus were staging a war dance; in fact they had come together to fish the spring salmon run. Hawken rifles backed by handguns and sabers easily bested spears, bows, and arrows. No one counted the dead Wintu women, children, and men, who likely numbered in the hundreds. Frémont lost not a man in what was less a fight than a “perfect butchery” as scout Kit Carson called it.
Three years later, events around Clear Lake and along the Russian River showed again how well-organized violence could clear the land of its burdensome Native Californians. Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, who ran a cattle ranch near the lake, treated the local Eastern Pomo and Clear Lake Wappo peoples as personal serfs and slaves. They kept them on starvation rations, whipped any who stepped out of line, raped women and girls at will, and killed for the most trivial of reasons. When one of the ranchers’ horses went missing in December 1849, the Natives knew the punishment would be terrible. Five men banded together to bushwhack Kelsey and Stone before they even knew the horse was gone.
The retribution for those killings, exacted by vigilante posses and U.S. Army units, took as many as a thousand Indigenous lives over the following months. Few of those slain — who again included women and children — had anything to do with the deaths of Kelsey and Stone.
The Sacramento River and Clear Lake massacres served as California’s proof of genocidal concept: massive, anti-Indigenous violence on the least pretext, a pattern that would repeat again and again.
At the same time, the state was stripping Native Californians of legal protection. New statutes — one titled with cruel irony as “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” — denied the right to vote by limiting citizenship to white males; legalized de jure custodianship of Indigenous minors and convict leasing, thereby creating slavery under another name; permitted corporal punishment like whipping; and disallowed trial testimony by tribal people against Euro-Americans. As long as no white person was willing to testify for the prosecution, settlers could get away with murder, mayhem, or rape of Native Californians at will. And they did.
Meanwhile, special commissioners appointed and funded by the federal government were in the process of negotiating 18 treaties with 119 tribal signatories that set aside 7.488 million acres as reservations. At first California’s political leaders accepted this effort as good policy. But by the time the last treaty was signed and the whole package sent to the U.S. Senate for ratification, the political winds shifted entirely. California’s congressional delegation lobbied against the agreements as indulgently generous to the undeserving tribes. Meeting in a closed-door executive session, the Senate unanimously rejected the treaties and filed them under a secrecy order in an obscure archive far from public view. There they would remain hidden until early in the next century.
The Senate’s action meant the federal government was stepping aside and allowing California’s political class to do what it wanted. And what it wanted was the extermination Gov. Peter Burnett promised in his 1851 speech.
In short order state legislators raised the money to pay for the war by floating $1.5 million in bonds — the equivalent of some $55 million today — at an attractive interest rate. These bonds represented the largest line item in the state’s budget; nothing was more important than killing off the tribes to free up their land for the taking.
Twenty-four militias funded by state bonds hunted down Native Californians, usually on the pretext of punishing livestock rustling or avenging the rare killing of Euro-Americans, then transported survivors to reservations where food was nonexistent and health conditions proved lethal. Militiamen received generous compensation for time and materials, including horses, food, weapons, and ammunition. The U.S. Army added to the effort by mounting one killing campaign after another. All the while, local posses and vigilante groups slaughtered Native Californians at will and with impunity, sometimes for bounty money, sometimes for kicks.
By the time John Muir landed in San Francisco in 1868 and walked to Yosemite, Native California’s population had been cut from 150,000 twenty years earlier to about 30,000. And the killing was not yet over.
Cast out of Eden at the Commonwealth Club
On Wednesday, July 24, 5:30–6:30 p.m., I’ll be in conversation about the book with Andrew Dudley, cohost and producer of independent media network Earth Live, and signing copies at the club’s in-person People & Nature Forum, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco. This event will be recorded for broadcast by C-SPAN Book TV. Details and ticketing for this event available on the Commonwealth Club website.