Transcript
This episode contains racist language, discussion of sexual assault and graphic descriptions of violence that may be disturbing to some audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
It’s late March, 1846 on the upper reaches of the Sacramento River near what’s today the city of Redding in Northern California. At this time, though, it falls within the Mexican Province of Alta California, but not for much longer. Mexico’s hold over the region is tenuous.
Ever since the Louisiana Purchase 43 years earlier doubled the size of the United States, many Americans have had their gaze even further Westward. And recently, as US strength has grown, that sentiment has been heating up. In 1844, James K Polk was elected president on a platform of American expansionism, and within a year of taking office, he signed the bill annexing Texas as the 28th state of the union. Now, he has his eyes set on the West Coast.
Around this time, the term Manifest Destiny is also coming into vogue – referring to the idea that the United States is divinely ordained to keep expanding across the North American continent from sea to shining sea. Inherent in this concept is the idea of American virtue and exceptionalism, as well as a belief in the superiority of White Anglo-Saxon Christian civilization over any foreigner, native or heathen who stands in the way.
To this end, Americans expeditions are already making incursions into Alta California to survey the land. After conducting what were considered two successful such expeditions, US Army Captain John C Fremont has been tapped by the War Department to lead his third in 1845 to survey the Rockies and Great Basin region. Though ostensibly intended as a scientific expedition, Fremont has been quietly told that it’ll become a military expedition if tensions with Mexico break out into war.
Indeed, Fremont’s actions on this expedition have gone well beyond the scientific from the get-go. On his journeys around the region, he’s been provoking Mexican officials by planting American flags in prominent places, and he’s been trying to rile up nationalistic fervor against Mexico among American settlers his band has encountered.
In the Spring of 1846, likely motivated by indications of impending war with Mexico, personal meetings with President Polk indicating a desire to seize California, and his own personal ambitions, Fremont blatantly deviates from his mission. Rather than survey rivers in the Rockies as ordered by superiors, he’s leading his troops 900 miles West into California where he begins to further antagonize Mexican authorities.
On March 30, Fremont and his party arrive at the Lassen Ranch in the Sacramento River Valley, where he gets unsubstantiated reports from American settlers that there are some 1,000 Indians in the area preparing to attack White settlements. In response, Fremont heads up the Sacramento River in search of the supposed plotters with his party, which includes 60 White men, nine Delaware Indians, two California Indians and five local settlers who’ve volunteered to join the hunt.
On April 5, they spot a large group of Wintu Native Americans numbering perhaps around a thousand camped beside the river. They’re taking advantage of the twice-yearly influx of salmon that comes as the melting winter snow fuels the cold, fast-flowing stream. Contrary to reports that this was a war party preparing to attack, the majority of the Wintus there are reportedly women and children.
The 60 White men in Fremont’s party are heavily armed, each with at least a Hawken rifle, two pistols and a butcher knife…and many carry even more weaponry than that. One member of the party would later recount that as they approached, Fremont gave the order to ask for no quarter and to give none.
The troops surround the encampment from three sides, trapping the Wintu against the frigid rapids on the fourth, precluding any viable shot at escape. As Fremont’s band advances, the Wintu men scramble to form a defensive line to protect the women and children behind them, but they have very little time to react.
Without offering any opportunity for surrender or negotiation, Fremont’s men open fire. Their Hawken rifles have a firing range of several hundred yards, allowing them to safely cut down the Wintu from a distance, far from the reach of their bows and arrows.
After this first phase of the assault, the attackers advance on the tribe with pistols and swords. One of the expedition members, Thomas Breckenridge, who claims not to have participated in the killing, later writes of the event. Perhaps trying to spare his fellow soldiers’ reputations, he implausibly places most of the blame for the massacre on the five local settlers who had volunteered to join the raid.
“The settlers charged into the village taking the warriors by surprise and then commenced a scene of slaughter which is unequalled in the West. The bucks, squaws and paposes were shot down like sheep and those men never stopped as long as they could find one alive.”
By this point, the Wintu are desperately trying to flee wherever they can—some into the surrounding foothills, some into the treacherous river. With most of the Wintu men killed and any conceivable threat of resistance neutralized, the final phase of Fremont’s wholesale slaughter commences. Troops chase down those trying to flee, shooting them at point blank range or tomahawking them down from horseback one by one. At the same time, other troops gather on the banks of the river to shoot at those attempting to swim across it.
Reports on the extent of the carnage vary widely. Expedition members Breckenridge and Thomas Martin later place the number of natives killed at somewhere between 120 and 175. However, William Isaac Tustin, a local eyewitness who wasn’t part of the Fremont expedition, with presumably less incentive to downplay the death toll, estimated that 600-700 natives were killed on land. He added that he couldn’t even count those who had died while trying to flee in the river—either by drowning or gunshot. “But I have no doubt there was fully two or three hundred more,” he wrote.
If Tustin’s estimates are to be believed, that would mean as many as 1,000 California Indians were slaughtered in this single event—which would make it one of the deadliest massacres in American history.
And it was a completely one-sided massacre. For a tribe that was allegedly preparing to attack White settlements, there’s scarce mention of any Wintu armed resistance to the attack. And none of the primary accounts of the event mention a single one of Fremont’s men being killed, or even wounded. Considering much of the massacre was close-quartered killing, that would seem to suggest the Wintu were barely armed at all.
Breckenridge, who again, claims he didn’t participate in the killing, later wrote: “I think that I hate an Indian as badly as anybody and have good reason to hate them, but I don’t think that I could have assisted in that slaughter. It takes two to fight or quarrel, but in that case, there was but one side fighting and the other side trying to escape.”
But while Breckenridge was critical of the massacre, he nevertheless suggested that there was a positive outcome from it.
“The Indians had received a wholesome lesson from our party, so the Sacramento Valley Indians did not desire any further evidence of our fighting qualities.”
Kit Carson, one of the troops who did participate in the attack, similarly said: “It would be a long time before they ever again would feel like attacking the settlements. It was a perfect butchery.”
This justification of wholesale slaughter as a lesson to keep other Native Americans in line, and afraid of ever attacking Whites, was one that would be seen again and again in the years to come.
Immediately after the Sacramento River Massacre, Fremont’s party set up camp on the site, ate the Wintu’s salmon, then moved on the next morning. But the group wasn’t through yet.
As they continued up north along the river, the killings continued, Breckenridge wrote.
“Fremont’s men had orders while in camp or on the move to shoot Indians on sight. While on the march, the crack of a rifle and the dying yell of native was not an unusual occurrence.”
At one point in Oregon, a group of around 15-20 Klamath Indians retaliated to the random killings of their people, attacking Fremont’s party at night and killing a few of his men. As would also become common in the years to come, Fremont responded in a grossly disproportionate manner, making no distinction between those who had attacked him, and other random natives in the region who’d had no involvement whatsoever. Two days later, his men killed and scalped two Klamaths, but Fremont wasn’t satisfied. The following day, he launched yet another massacre on an Indian encampment, killing at least 14 without enduring a single casualty on his side.
The following month, now back in California, Fremont again heard rumors of an impending Indian attack on White settlers. And yet again, he decided that the best course of action was to preemptively attack random Indians, moving from one small settlement to another and ultimately slaughtering at least another 14 in this round of violence.
By now, the Mexican-American War had begun in earnest, and California would soon be fully in American hands.
Fremont and his men would never suffer any consequences for their mass murder of California Indians. In fact, Fremont would go on to do quite well for himself. In 1847, he became military governor of American occupied California. And upon its ascension to US statehood in 1850, he would become one of the state’s first two US senators. In 1856, he would even become the Republican Party nominee for president.
In retrospect, the Sacramento River Massacre would come to be seen not as an isolated stain on American history, but as the beginning of genocide—one that would remain poorly understood and rarely taught in American schools for a century and a half afterwards.
As the United States took full control of California and White settlers poured in after the discovery of gold, natives would increasingly be viewed as either labor to enslave, or a nuisance to exterminate. The tactics and justification of the Sacramento River Massacre would be repeated on a massive scale, while dehumanization of natives in popular media, detrimental government policy and state-sponsored campaigns of terror would threaten to completely annihilate the indigenous people of California, on this episode of Manmade Catastrophes.
[Theme music]
Prior to the arrival of Spanish colonizers to California in the mid-16th century, the region looked very different than it does today, to put it mildly. Dense forests and massive grasslands blanketed California, along with large freshwater lakes and thick flowing rivers that were much larger than they are now. And so, the region teemed with an abundance of plant and animal life, including antelope, deer, elk, rabbits, birds, salmon, mountain lions and bears—some of which have long gone extinct in the region today.
Humans had lived in California for at least 13,000 years, and over the millennia they had become quite good at striking a balance with their natural environment, so as to continuously have abundant hunting and gathering grounds. Rather than domesticating animals, they carefully curated the forests, groves, wetlands and grasslands to maximize game populations, while using techniques like controlled burning to revitalize land and prevent larger catastrophic fires from wiping out food supplies. Meanwhile, they sustained a sort of wild agriculture, tilling natural food supplies and selectively harvesting from certain areas in a rotation to maintain long-term sustainability. Harvests of seeds, nuts, grains, berries and other sources of nutrients and carbohydrates added to native Californians’ rich, diverse diets.
Under these conditions, the California Indians thrived, reaching a population of more than 300,000 prior to the arrival of Europeans—likely about one-third of the total indigenous population in the area that’s now the United States. And these California Indian populations had incredible cultural diversity, speaking as many as 100 different languages across at least 60 major tribes and hundreds of smaller cultural and political units – many of which participated in complex trading networks with one another.
It would be a mistake to overly romanticize life at this time for Native Californians though. Violent conflict and forced servitude between tribes were realities of this period. But compared to life in many other parts of the world at this time, with their abundant resources and relatively sparse population, California Indians on the whole lived relatively peaceful, prosperous lives.
Of course, the seeds of major change were planted with the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century. The Spanish first started exploring the Baha California coast in the 1530s, and the first recorded landfall in Alta California came when Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s expedition landed in San Diego Bay in 1542 and claimed what he thought to be the Island of California for the Spanish Empire.
What early Spanish explorers could see from the coast didn’t suggest there were many resources to tap in Alta California, and coastal winds and currents made sailing there from Spanish colonies further south difficult. So, mercifully for the natives, it would be another two centuries before Europeans would take much of an interest in the region and establish a meaningful permanent presence there.
But that presence would eventually come and come hard. In the late 18th century, as exploration and colonization of the North American continent was heating up among the British, Friench, Dutch and Russians, Spain decided it had better establish an actual presence in Alta California, or risk losing it and leaving vulnerable its valuable silver mining operations in Northern Mexico.
So in 1769, Spanish military forces and Catholic missionaries moved North and began the project of colonizing Alta California by building military forts and mission churches. In what’s today San Diego, Father Junipero Serra established California’s first Catholic mission, and he would go on to found eight more around Alta California. These huge mission compounds were ostensibly intended to bring in and house Natives, save their souls by converting them to Christianity, and introduce them to what the Spanish considered a more civilized European way of life.
But under this system, California Indians almost immediately began to suffer and watch what had been their way of life for thousands of years start to disappear.
One of the first and most devastating things these colonizers brought was disease. The European lifestyle, which tended to include high-density living in urban population centers, as well close proximity to a range of domesticated livestock, had over the millennia resulted in a witch’s brew of diseases. Europeans had developed a resistance to these ailments, but California Indians, with their sparse populations and hunter-gatherer lifestyles, were biologically defenseless against them. Over the coming years, diseases like smallpox, pneumonia, measles, diphtheria and the flu decimated Native American communities.
But the Spanish presence would have catastrophic effects on Natives’ lifestyles in other ways too. The introduction of domesticated livestock and European-style agriculture wreaked havoc on the ecosystem that Native Californians had carefully cultivated for thousands of years to sustain their hunter-gatherer way of life.
At first, some natives were enticed to the Catholic missions with gifts, food and just mere curiosity. But as time went on and the environment they subsisted on was ravaged, the realities of increasing hunger and disease forced many to seek refuge in the missions. Over the coming years, tens of thousands of California natives would enter them, and very often, they would die in them not long after.
Many of the missionaries had a low regard for natives, viewing them as savages with the mental capacity of children who needed to be educated, civilized, and when necessary, disciplined. And from the Spanish perspective, if a native entered a Catholic mission and was baptized, they became wards of the church and forfeited their right to individual self-determination…which included the right to even leave the missions.
Exploitation, forced labor and beatings were rife in these missions, as was the practice of separating children from their parents and banning any religious or cultural practice that didn’t conform to European Catholic norms.
Because the economy of Spanish colonizers was heavily dependent on the Indian labor in these missions and the death rate among the Indians who entered them was high, runaways were aggressively pursued. Those who tried to escape were chased down and brought back to face discipline including whipping, shackling and being placed in stocks. Similar punishments could result from skipping church, disobeying mission leaders, having sexual relations, or simply displaying laziness. At one point, Serra himself wrote that he wanted Indians to suffer two or three whippings on different days, noting that they may serve as a warning and be of spiritual benefit to all.
To his credit, Serra did speak out against some of the even more extreme violence and exploitation natives suffered outside the missions at the hands of Spanish soldiers. During this period, sexual assault of native women by colonizers was routine…even to the point of raiding Indian encampments for the sole purpose of assaulting the women. In 1773, Serra wrote in a letter to a military officer complaining that soldiers were catching Indian women with their lassos and subjecting them to their quote, “unbridled lust.” He added that if Indian men tried to defend their women, the soldiers would shoot them.
This situation went on for decades, and the missions themselves were no havens from sexual exploitation. One native man, who’d been brought to one of Serra’s missions near modern-day Los Angeles as a child, recounted the routine rapes that women and girls endured, even at the hands of church leaders.
“They took all the best-looking Indian girls and put them in the nunnery. The priest had an appointed hour to go there. When he got to the nunnery, all were in bed in the big dormitory. The priest would pass by the bed of the superior and tap her on the shoulder, and she would commence singing. All of the girls would join in, which had the effect of drowning out any other sounds. While the singing was going on, the priest would have time to select the girl he wanted and carry out his desires. In this way the priest had sex with all of them, from the superior all the way down the line. The priest’s will was law.”
While sexual assault of native women was illegal, punishments for the crime, if even prosecuted, were more lenient than those for the same acts committed against non-natives. Sometimes the punishment for raping an indigenous woman or girl could be as little a few weeks in jail. It was one of many ways that officially codified natives’ status as lesser humans than the colonists.
In fact, some of the rape victims themselves could end up suffering worse punishments than their perpetrators. If women were caught trying, through various methods, to induce abortions of pregnancies caused by their rapists, they could be beaten, shackled and have their heads shaved.
Between the hard forced labor, assaults, torture, meager rations, and epidemics exacerbated by close-quartered living, more California Indians died in these missions than were born in them. Of those that were born, one in three didn’t live to see their first birthday. And in a given year, some 10 to 20 percent of the adult population in these missions perished. It dispensed with any notions that these compounds had a civilizing or modernizing effect on the lives of those they took in. In 1780, even the governor of California Felipe de Neve criticized the missions, writing that “the Indians’ fate is worse than that of slaves.” Some contemporary scholars and Native American activists have characterized the missions as concentration camps. So it’s no surprise that over the years, a number of rebellions by Indian captives against their mission captors rose up, which were brutally suppressed.
However, Junípero Serra, the man who began the mission system in the region, to this day remains revered among some in California and among Catholics for his missionary work. A statue of him stands in the US Capitol building representing California, and in 2015, the pope elevated him to Catholic Sainthood.
While the missions were directly detrimental to tens of thousands of natives who entered them, even those who never set foot in a mission were heavily affected by the Spanish presence, and the disease, environmental destruction and military brutality that came with it. This was exacerbated after 1812 with the arrival in Northern California of Russian colonizers, who for the following three decades also got in the habit of rounding up Native Californians and forcing them into slavery.
The population of around 310,000 California Indians that existed in 1769 when Spanish colonization began in earnest, fell to just 245,000 by 1830. The decimation of indigenous populations had begun. But the worst was still yet to come.
In 1821, there was some cause for hope among California Indians when Mexico won independence from Spain. Upon independence, natives became full Mexican citizens, theoretically with the right to vote, hold office and own land. And five years later, those confined in the Catholic missions were allowed to request emancipation from them, provided they had been Catholic since birth or for 15 years. And many did so.
But in practice, conditions for most California Indians hardly improved; displacement and exploitation went on. As slavery in the missions was in retreat across California, it continued to pop up elsewhere. Agricultural development was expanding in the region, driven by European and Mexican settlers, and labor needs increased in tandem. Although slavery was officially outlawed across Mexico and its territories in 1829, Indian labor, coerced in one way or another—whether it be through subsistence wages, debt servitude, or outright forced slavery—was the main source of agricultural labor.
Meanwhile, foreign diseases continued to ravage native populations. In 1833 alone, as many as 50,000 California Indians died during an especially deadly malaria outbreak. This period also began the sort of wanton massacres that would later become commonplace under US rule. Mass killing of natives by private individuals all the way up to Mexican military units occurred over things like land disputes, economic competition, alleged theft, resistance to kidnapping for forced labor, or as indiscriminate retaliation to Indian attacks.
And in a preview of things to come, sometimes mere rumors of impending Indian attacks were enough to invite a massacre. In 1843, based on reports that a group of Indians were planning to attack colonists, Mexican military captain Salvador Vallejo led hundreds of his men to slaughter 170 Pomo Indians. And this wasn’t Vallejo’s first massacre. Years earlier, he had reportedly led an expedition of Mexican troops in search of natives to bring back to his Sonoma ranch as laborers. After being rebuffed repeatedly by natives, his men reportedly slaughtered 150 Pomo men, women and children by shooting, stabbing and even burning them alive.
In 1846, one Pomo leader told a US Navy Lieutenant of his experiences with Mexican forces.
“They hunt us down and steal our children from us to enslave them. They are always ready to wage a war of extermination against us. We desire nothing more than to be allowed to live in peace like our ancestors.”
The 27 years that Alta California was held by Mexico saw a continuation of the precipitous decline in the indigenous population that had begun with Spanish colonization. By 1848, less than 150,000 California Indians remained, half of what there had been at the beginning of Spanish colonization 80 years prior. Still, natives in some parts of California had managed to mostly escape the reaches of colonizers’ violence, disease and environmental destruction. But that was about to change.
Mexican forces would no longer be a problem for California Indians, but unfortunately, after emerging victorious in the Mexican-American War and seizing California, American forces and settlers would bring much more systemic and far-reaching death and destruction that would scarcely leave a single native in the region unscathed.
While there had been mass death of indigenous people under the Spanish and Mexicans, including periodic instances of mass murder, it could be argued that this mostly stemmed from goals of economic exploitation and forced assimilation, rather than a desire to completely annihilate the native people. But under American rule, this debate would be put to rest. What had previously been mostly unconnected and periodic instances of mass killing under the Spanish and Mexicans coalesced into an unequivocal full-blown genocide under the Americans.
Of course, no contemporaneous sources referred to it as a genocide—that term wouldn’t be coined for another century. But looking at modern definitions of the concept—even the loosest among them—there’s no doubt that what happened in California qualified. The United Nations defines genocide as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group through any of five acts:
First, by killing members of the group.
Second, by causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
Third, by deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part.
Fourth, by imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
Or fifth, by forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
As we’ll see, California Natives were subject to not just one of these criteria, which would qualify it as a genocide, but to each and every of them. And contemporaneous media reports and statements by powerful figures in government and military make it clear that the attempted extermination of the entire ethnic group was intentional.
When exactly this genocide began, though, is up for debate. Some may argue it began with Spanish occupation, others may say the beginning came in the 1850s when mass killing became routine and unambiguously systemic. But some consensus is building around 1846, the year of John C Fremont’s Sacramento River Massacre and the beginning of the US occupation of California that set the final conditions for systemic mass murder.
The Mexican-American war formally began in May of 1846, and while it would go on for nearly two years, the fighting in California would be minimal and confined mostly to a few months at the beginning of the war. Mexico’s hold on California was weak, and by late 1846, it was, for all intents and purposes, in US hands.
The situation for California Indians though didn’t immediately change during the transition from Mexican to US rule. Dehumanization, violence and forced servitude continued to be everyday realities. Under the interim military government of California from 1846 to 1850, little was done to prevent the ongoing enslavement of natives.
One of the most notorious enslavers of this period was John Sutter, an immigrant who had fled Switzerland due to mounting debts and made his way to Alta California in 1839. There, he convinced Mexican authorities to grant him nearly 50,000 acres of land and give him complete legal and judicial authority over it on the condition he prevented further American and European settlement in the area and kept native tribes in line.
By 1841, he’d built a sprawling ranch-slash-fort on the land and quickly reneged on his first obligation, welcoming foreign settlers entering the region with open arms and encouraging them to settle down there. Within a few years, Sutter’s ranch became a common pit stop for Americans migrating to California.
However, Sutter did keep his second promise to keep native tribes in line and did so with enthusiasm. His ranch depended on Indian labor, and while some of that labor was paid or voluntary to some extent, much of it consisted of kidnapped slaves—as many as several hundred of them. Sutter formed militias that conducted raids on Indian encampments for the purpose of keeping them in line and attaining slaves. He reportedly told an overseer to keep his Indians servants “strictly under fear” and not hesitate to kill Indians who refused to come work at the ranch.
A German immigrant to the area who had leased land from Sutter later wrote:
“When Sutter established himself in 1839 in the Sacramento Valley, new misfortune came upon these peaceful natives of the country. Their services were demanded immediately. Those who did not want to work were considered enemies. The villages were attacked, usually before daybreak when everybody was still asleep. Neither old nor young was spared by the enemy, and often the Sacramento River was colored red by the blood of the innocent Indians. During one campaign, one section of the attackers fell upon the village by way of land. All the Indians of the attacked village naturally fled to find protection on the other bank of the river. But there they were awaited by the other half of the enemy and thus the unhappy people were shot and killed with rifles from both sides of the river. Seldom an Indian escaped such an attack, and those who were not murdered were captured. All children from six to fifteen years of age were usually taken by the greedy white people. The village was burned down and the few Indians who had escaped with their lives were left to their fate.”
White settlers passing through the ranch were treated to both lavish hospitality, and to horrific scenes of Indian mistreatment. Later accounts by these settlers described Indian laborers being locked to sleep in cramped rooms with no beds or furniture, and fed like pigs from troughs made of hollowed out tree trunks with no plates or utensils. Those who disobeyed orders could be whipped, deprived of food or even murdered. Years later, a fellow Swiss immigrant that had been employed on Sutter’s ranch, recounted that Sutter had kept a quote “harem” of enslaved Indian women and girls on standby that he would molest and rape at will…some as young as 12 years old.
While many of the countless early American settlers who passed through Sutter’s ranch were aghast at scenes like this, other impressionable new arrivals saw it as a precedent for acceptable treatment of natives in the area. Indeed, Sutter was known to sell, lease or even gift native slaves to new settlers. It would set the tone for what was to come under American rule. Other settlers followed suit by establishing ranches dependent on Indian labor and conducted slave raids to fuel it, many of which turned deadly.
In early 1847, five natives escaped from one ranch, and slavers retaliated by storming the Indians’ home village, killing five and wounding many more.
The following month, a group of slavers came to what was reportedly a friendly tribe of Indians, which welcomed the men and offered them food. But then the visitors began to restrain members of the tribe, killing more than a dozen who tried to escape. After tying together the mostly women and children who remained, the attackers began to march them to settlements where they would be enslaved. En route, they killed anyone unable to make the trek, including an infant that was snatched and murdered in front its mother.
Three of the slavers who took part in the raid were later arrested by the Army and even prosecuted, but they were ultimately acquitted by a judge at trial. That would be the last time for a very long time that American authorities would make any attempt to stop the kidnapping of California Indians.
Soon after California fell into American hands, newspapers published by Americans started to pop up in the region—and they began frequently publishing inflammatory commentaries portraying natives as marauding savages and criminals. You also began to see some of the first talk of extermination. One piece in the California Star from January 1848 discussed the problem of how to handle Indians in the newly acquired American territory.
Indians, and particularly those in California, are, as we all know, mentally and morally an inferior order of our race; are unfit and incapable of being associated with whites on any terms of equality, or of being governed by the same laws, and if retained among us, must have necessarily a code of treatment applicable to their peculiar character and condition.
It went on to suggest placing Indians under some sort of apprentice system under whites and banning them from passing through populated parts of the country without passes.
Either this plan must soon be adopted, or else they driven out of the settlement—already educated, Christianized border robbers—against whom a continual war will necessarily be waged for depredations committed until all are exterminated.
Under the late order of things in California, as indeed in most parts of the Republic of Mexico, the Indians, if not in name, were de facto slaves, and ruled and treated accordingly. The drunken, roving, vagabond life must have led in California since our flag, once up, added to the greater facilities, and even encouragement for robbing and murdering, shows the impolicy of having removed all restraints formerly held over them.
Two months later, a commentary The Californian newspaper gave another ominous signal while wading into what was becoming an important question regarding California’s presumed eventual elevation to US statehood: Would it be admitted as a free state or a slave state? The commentary argued in favor of being a free state, and began progressively enough, saying that slavery was wrong and that Blacks have equal rights to life, liberty, health and happiness. But then the piece took a dark turn in its attitude toward natives.
“We desire only a White population in California. Even the Indians among us, as far as we have seen, are more of a nuisance than a benefit to the country; we would like to get rid of them.”
This would not be the last time an abolitionist stance would adopt an incredibly twisted logic when it came to Native Americans. In the years ahead, as the question of slavery became more heated in national politics, some would decry the practice—including the enslavement of Native Americans—not on the grounds that it constituted unconscionable treatment of those enslaved, but because it presented unfair competition to White labor and promoted economic inequality among Whites. As historian Benjamin Madley put it in his book An American Genocide, “In a free state increasingly defined in part as one free of Indians, genocide could occupy the moral high ground in some men’s minds.”
During this time, crimes by Indians against Whites got significant attention from both authorities and media, while the reverse was largely ignored. Genuine incidents of Indian violence and theft mixed with highly dubious accounts, some of which went so far as to portray Indians as vicious cannibals. This vilification and dehumanization was helping chip away at any inhibitions White Americans might have had about slaughtering natives, and it was laying the groundwork for mass murder.
For the moment though, the incentive for extermination didn’t yet exist for most American settlers in California. The area was still sparsely populated by Anglo-Americans and Europeans. They numbered only around 10,000 to 14,000, compared to the roughly 150,000 natives still living there. While Americans vastly outgunned the California Indians, they were at more than a 10-to-1 disadvantage in manpower, making any sort of attempt at systemic killing at this point risky. But perhaps more compellingly, the California economy – especially its crucial agricultural sector – relied heavily on labor from the large native population. Without California Indians, this sector would simply collapse. For now, natives’ far superior numbers worked in their defense.
But that was about to change very quickly with the discovery of something that would vastly change the fortunes of a whole lot of people—many for the better, but for the California Indians, it would spell complete catastrophe.
In late 1847, John Sutter—the owner of the sprawling ranch that enslaved hundreds of natives—had a problem. A deadly outbreak of measles had wiped out many of the Indian laborers on his ranch, so to make up for some of that lost manpower, he looked to machine power. He tapped an American carpenter named James Marshall to build a sawmill 50 miles north of his ranch to supply lumber for his operations.
But on the morning of January 24, 1848, Marshall noticed a glinting rock on the construction site…rock that turned out to be gold.
It wasn’t the first discovery of gold in California, but it was the first in a location that indicated it might be easily accessible. And it would come at a time of improving mass communication and increasing migration to the region, making it by far the most consequential discovery.
Sutter and Marshall desperately wanted to keep this discovery secret, fearing gold hunters might overrun the area and interfere with their existing operations. They ordered others at the mill who knew of the discovery to keep their mouths shut. But one loose-lipped mill worker couldn’t help himself from blurting out the news on multiple occasions in nearby towns. By March, two months later, word of the discovery made it into California newspapers. By June, men in San Francisco and other nearby settlements were abandoning their jobs and businesses to search for gold. And by August, it was being reported in East Coast newspapers. In December, President Polk put to rest any skepticism by confirming reports of an abundance of gold in the region. And with that, the gold rush was on.
For his part, Sutter’s worries about being overrun proved well-founded. Most of his workers abandoned him to join the gold rush, squatters and thieves decimated his ranch, and the land grant given to him during Mexican rule was eventually rescinded…driving him to financial ruin from which he never recovered.
His legacy though fared a bit better. Despite his atrocities against California natives, he’s been widely portrayed in school textbooks heroically as an enterprising early settler who played a key role in California’s early development. His name can still be seen across California adorning street signs, schools, hospitals and other landmarks. In 2010, then-Governor Jerry Brown even paid homage by naming his dog Sutter Brown.
Over the course of 1848, the California Gold Rush came hot and fast, as wide-eyed fortune seekers from around the United States packed up their lives and headed West in search of easy riches. Those who arrived to the area during that first year came to be known as 48ers, but the much larger wave would be the 49ers the following year. From the beginning of 1848 to the end of it, the non-native population of California roughly doubled to 20,000. But within another year, that number would multiply again five-fold to 100,000. Native Californians were rapidly losing their numbers advantage.
The gold mining focused on three main regions – one patch in California’s Northwest corner bordering Oregon known as the Northern Goldfields, and two connected patches known as the central and southern goldfields that stretched nearly 200 miles down the northern interior of California. Unfortunately, these were also areas heavily populated with California Indians.
In the beginning, when there was an abundance of gold for the taking, the rush actually benefited many Indians to varying degrees. Their labor was now needed more than ever—not just for the gold-mining operations, but for all the new industries sprouting up around it, as well as old industries that were seeing White workers leave in droves to join the gold rush.
But even as the early wave of 48ers were arriving, they were decimating the environment and food sources that natives in the region relied on, much as the early Spanish settlers had done. Only now it was happening on a much larger scale and in a much shorter timeframe. Many Indians who otherwise would have had no desire to join the gold rush economy were forced to by their dwindling resources. And it’ll probably come as no surprise at this point that mistreatment of Indian workers was widespread, and forced labor persisted. But still, mass killing was mostly held at bay during the early months of the gold rush.
That uneasy existence between natives and gold prospectors would start to melt away though as more and more White settlers arrived. As Westward migration in the United States heated up more generally, brutal attacks by Natives on migrating White settler parties became a more prominent theme in East Coast literature. Largely used to color themes of danger and adventure in making the Westward journey, these books frequently portrayed Indians as roving bands of savage predators just waiting to pounce on vulnerable White migrants.
While there were indeed regular attacks by Indians on traveling settlers, the extent of the problem was highly exaggerated. Between 1840 and 1860, Indians killed Whites on the Westbound trails at a rate of about 18 per year—accounting for just 4 percent of the settler deaths that occurred on the journey. Disease, while much less dramatic for literary purposes, was responsible for 20 times as many migrant deaths.
These sorts of exaggerated accounts instilled fear of Natives among Whites to the extent that they began to undertake the journey with a more militaristic mindset. They were coming more heavily armed and more trigger-happy.
But for some migrants, fear wasn’t the only thing motivating slaughter of natives. This was particularly true for men coming from Oregon in that first group of 48ers.
In late 1847, Cayuse Indians attacked a mission on the Oregon Trail operated by Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa. Among several grievances, Indians in the region had been battered by measles and blamed Whitman’s mission for the outbreak. They also believed that, at best, Dr. Whitman was providing natives with ineffective treatment, possibly even poisoning them. In the Whitman Massacre, as it came to be known, 13 people were killed at the mission, including the Whitmans and their children.
This event kicked off the Cayuse War in the Pacific Northwest that would be ongoing for the following eight years. In the immediate aftermath, a militia of hundreds of Oregonians formed to hunt down the Whitman Massacre perpetrators—which went on to kill many Indians in the region who’d had no involvement at all. But the militia was unable to find those who’d actually participated, infuriating many around Oregon.
So for many of those migrating south to California early in the gold rush, fear mixed with a thirst for vengeance, and Oregon men quickly gained a reputation as particularly indiscriminate killers of natives.
Sometimes, any theft or other minor crime could put Indian scapegoats in the crosshairs for murderous retribution. One miner who arrived to California in 1849 gave this account.
“The first man I met after my arrival in the interior was an Oregonian on horseback, armed with a revolving rifle in search of Indians. He had had a horse stolen, and presumed it was taken by an Indian; he swore he would shoot the first redskin he met, and I had no reason to doubt his word. Still, the chances were 99 out of 100 that the horse was stolen by a White man.”
Often though, no pretext was needed at all for random killing. Another account described two Oregonian men riding on a trail and, whereupon they spotted an Indian man, they flipped a coin to decide who would be the one to kill him. That he was to be murdered in cold blood by one of them was simply a given.
This sort of senseless killing inevitably led some natives in the region to fight back—but when they did, that usually only provided more pretext for White settlers to form militias and go on wanton killing sprees, fueling a cascading cycle of violence.
But one of the primary emerging motives for slaughtering natives was hardly unique to Oregonians. As White settlers poured into California trying their luck at striking it rich, the easily accessible gold was quickly tapped and more and more new arrivals were finding their hopes of instant wealth unfulfilled. So, mining regions became killing fields.
Sometimes Indians settlements that were on land with mining potential needed to be cleared out. Sometimes Indians themselves needed to be eliminated as competition for gold mining. Other times, unsuccessful would-be gold miners found themselves penniless and desperate, so they turned to violently pillaging Indian settlements. And then, as new sources of White labor continued to swell in the region, Indian labor more generally was becoming seen as less of a necessity, and more as competition to down-on-their-luck Whites.
Of course, White prospectors and laborers presented competition to one another. And a down-on-his-luck white man could just as well rob White settlements for goods. But the reality was, stealing from or murdering a Native was unlikely to result in any sort of punishment. And for many, the widespread dehumanization of natives meant there would be far less moral scruples about targeting them. So the calculus of targeting natives rather whites was rather simple.
The sorts of massacres that had been intermittent in prior years were now beginning to happen one after another, wiping out dozens, even hundreds at a time—and that only includes the acts that made it into historical records.
A Swiss immigrant in the region at the time named Heinrich Lienhard reported that new arrival miners were advocating for indiscriminate mass reprisal against Indians for the smallest of crimes, even when it wasn’t clear who the culprit was, and they were increasingly adopting the rhetoric of complete annihilation. “Whenever anything is stolen, the so-called-Christean miners would invariably say “Kill every damn Indian you can find,” Lienhard wrote.
Even John Sutter, who was obviously no softie when it came to violence against Natives, reportedly began to express horror in 1849 at the scale of what was happening in the region, reporting that late immigrants and Oregon trappers had commenced a quote “war of extermination, shooting Indians down like wolves—the men, women and children—wherever they could find them.”
Given that the term genocide had yet to come into existence, terms like “extermination” or “annihilation” are as close an approximation as any for the time, and those terms were beginning to appear everywhere in relation to Natives. Some used it disapprovingly to describe what was happening, while others openly advocated for it. But whether they were in favor of or aghast at the idea, most in the know seemed to agree by this point that extermination, AKA genocide, was underway.
And by this point, the motivation for killing was rising to something beyond just fear, economic incentive or even vengeance. With killing becoming so common and normalized, some were making a sport of it and relishing the practice in particularly morbid ways.
If you’ve been at all influenced by 19th or 20th century American pop culture in the form of books or movies relating to Native Americans, you might think of scalping as an act predominantly committed by Indians. But in fact, in California during this period, Natives were almost exclusively the victims of the practice rather than the perpetrators. There are numerous reports of those killing Indians having cut off their scalps and even entire heads or other appendages to keep as trophies. But still, it was somehow about to get even worse.
Up to this point, US authorities occupying California had certainly been derelict in any real effort to protect Native Californians, and US military units had even been active participants in the mass slaughter. But it could still be argued that up to this point, the unfolding genocide wasn’t a state sponsored affair, at least not in the way Hitler’s Holocaust or Pol Pot’s Killing Fields were. But that too, was about to change.
1849 came to a close with Native Californians’ worlds having been turned completely upside down over the previous two years as the population of White settlers grew 10-fold. But decades of horrors still lay ahead, and 1850 would present another turning point. That year, actual legislation would be enacted all but sanctioning the California Genocide, and leaders all the way up the Governor of California would openly profess that a war of extermination against the Indian race is inevitable until they become extinct.
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In the next episode, we’ll dive into the second and final part of our look at the California Genocide. As California ascends to US statehood, the mass killing of natives becomes institutionalized and government-sponsored, with millions of dollars poured into efforts to eradicate an entire race of people, while those people in turn desperately fight for survival.
This episode was based on numerous sources. One of the most notable was the book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, by Benjamin Madley. For links to that and other sources, head to our website at manmadecatastrophes.com, where you can also see a transcript of this episode and see our full archive and other ways to listen. Thanks for subscribing and see you soon for part 2 of the “The California Genocide.”
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