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 September 1849 in Monterey, California, which has recently been annexed by the United States. And 48 men are filing into a small building that doubles as a schoolhouse and government assembly hall. The men have an urgent task ahead of them. Since gold was discovered the previous year, the non-native population of California has exploded 10-fold, and the region remains the epitome of the Wild West. Since California was won in the Mexican American War and put under military control, communication with Washington, DC on the opposite side of the continent has been slow, and governance by the central US government weak. A more formal local government and legal structure needs to be established, so these 48 men have been tasked with writing a constitution for California, which will also bring it one step closer to US statehood.
The men come from around the region and represent a broad set of backgrounds. Only six of them were actually born in California, being of Mexican and Spanish ancestry. Another six are from foreign countries, including John Sutter—the Swiss immigrant who established a sprawling ranch and fort 10 years prior that relies on hundreds of Native American laborers—some paid, but many enslaved. But most of the delegates are Americans from the East Coast, and most of them are very recent arrivals to the area.
None among these delegates are full-blooded indigenous Californians. But they’re about to make a decision absolutely critical to the fate of natives—a decision as to whether or not they’ll be allowed to vote.
Despite there being no California Indians among the delegates, their disenfranchisement is not a forgone conclusion. The delegates are relatively young—some as young as 25, reflective of the demographics of those who set out on the treacherous Westward journey—and they could be relatively liberal compared to older East Coast politicians. Many of the delegates also employ Indians or, as in the case of the six who were born in the region, have some Indian blood in their ancestry. Maybe they’ll be sympathetic to natives, or see their enfranchisement as beneficial to their economic interests.
Indeed, some delegates do argue in favor of voting rights for natives on several grounds. Some believe they’re obligated to enfranchise Indians under the treaty that ended the Mexican American War, which stipulated that Mexican citizens in California, including natives, were eligible to become US citizens, presumably with the same voting rights. Natives were technically allowed the right to vote under Mexican rule, even if few were actually able to do so in practice, due to income, occupation or property requirements, or a number of other logistical and social barriers. Some delegates fear that if natives aren’t given the right to vote, this constitution won’t be accepted by the US congress, and thus, neither will California’s bid for statehood.
Some take a middle ground, suggesting giving voting rights to some natives with certain restrictions. But many are fiercely against granting the vote to any natives. Whites who employ, or are otherwise influential with natives could manipulate them, and march hundreds of Indians to the polls to vote as instructed, one delegate argues. Natives also aren’t assimilated or educated in the ways of American government—and a wild Indian living in the mountains would have just as much right as anyone to vote, another adds. They’re simply too uncivilized to vote, echoes a third.
After debate rages on for hours, the delegates break for dinner. They file out and many head down the dirt road to the only restaurant in town, where they have a hearty meal along with coffee and booze. Then at 8 o’clock that evening, they head back to the hall to resume debate on the question of Indian suffrage. But, for whatever reason, not all of the men come back. When they reconvene, only 41 of the 48 delegates are present.
While remarks earlier in the afternoon from those in favor of granting Indians the right to vote had focused mostly on legal technicalities, in the evening, two delegates stand to make impassioned moral arguments.
The first is Louis Dent, a 27-year-old Monterey delegate from Missouri.
“It might be a weakness in me, but I’ve always entertained a peculiar deference for the Indians. They were the original proprietors of the soil. From them we derived it, and from them we derived many of the blessings which we now enjoy. They have already been deprived of their original independence. Why should we pursue them, and drag them down to the level of slaves?”
Shortly after, 26-year-old New Yorker Henry Tefft chimes in with agreement.
“I cannot in justice to my own feelings allow the motion to pass without expressing, with the gentleman from Monterey Mister Dent, the deep sympathy which I feel for this unhappy race. It might be a prejudice that has grown as I’ve grown, and strengthened with my strength, but from my earliest youth, I have felt something like a reverence for the Indian. I’ve admired their heroic deeds in defense of their aboriginal homes, their stoicism, their wild eloquence and uncompromising pride. I was pleased to see a provision allowing Indians the privilege of voting incorporated in the Constitution of Wisconsin. I hope this question will be considered calmly and dispassionately in all its bearings, and that gentlemen will not, by acting hastily, exclude all Indians, absolutely and entirely, from the right of suffrage. Has not injustice enough already been visited upon the Indian race? They have been driven back from the haunts of civilization into the wilderness; driven from one extremity of the land to the other. Shall they now be driven into the waves of the Pacific? Shall we deprive them of the advantages of civilization? This native population is better entitled to the right of suffrage than I am, or a thousand others who came here but yesterday.
This emotional plea though, will ultimately be fruitless. After debate stretches late into the night, the time finally comes to vote on the measure. Shockingly, it results in a 20-to-20 tie, forcing the convention chairman to cast the tiebreaker, and he votes against granting natives suffrage.
If a single vote had swung in the other direction, or a single delegate in favor of granting suffrage had made it back to vote instead of retiring for the evening, California history may have been very different, and tens of thousands of California Indians just might have had a fighting chance to block the systemic slaughter that now awaited them.
The constitutional convention wore on for several more weeks, and there was more debate around giving some land-owning or tax-paying Indians suffrage, but ultimately that too came to nought in another vote swung by a single delegate. The California constitution would give only every White male US citizen, and every White male citizen of Mexico who elected to become a US citizen, the right to vote.
In the face of fierce insistence by some delegates for some sort of Indian enfranchisement, there was an ostensible compromise added into the constitution, saying that the right to vote could be granted to specific Indian individuals or descendants of Indians as deemed proper by a two-thirds vote by the California legislature. The addition theoretically left the door open to some Indian enfranchisement. But in practice, it’s laughable to think that any sort of meaningful representation could be gained when any Indian who wanted to vote would have to somehow get the matter before the California legislature and persuade two-thirds of it to agree.
So it was now codified into California’s highest law: California Indians would have no say in the laws that governed them, and no political defense against state-sanctioned acts of violence toward them.
Unfortunately, those acts would come very soon. Just months later, the first session of the new California legislature would convene and pass a law that laid the final legal cover for a systemic genocide, on this episode of Manmade Catastrophes.
[Theme music]
A quick note on terminology before we get started. Several terms have traditionally been used to describe those who are native to North America, including native Americans, natives, Indians, and indigenous people. According to the National Museum of the American Indian, these are all acceptable terms, so throughout this episode, I’ll be using them interchangeably.
In our last episode, we looked at how Spanish colonization and later Mexican rule kicked off the precipitous decline in the Native Californian population, followed by the beginning of routine mass killing under early American occupation, and the further upheaval brought by the influx of White settlers coming for the Gold Rush. If you haven’t heard that yet, you might want to go back and listen to that episode before diving into this one.
In this episode, we’ll finish our look at the California Genocide by exploring how the increasingly frequent mass killings of the late-1840s morphed into a full-blown state-sponsored campaign of annihilation.
In the wake of the Gold Rush, California’s population is now exploding and White settlers are overrunning some regions. California Indians are rapidly becoming seen less as a crucial labor source, as they had been for centuries under Spanish, Mexican and early American rule, and more as a nuisance that many would prefer to get rid of.
Indiscriminate killing of natives is already on the rise, punctuated by periodic, but increasingly frequent instances of mass murder. And some newspapers are already publishing commentaries advocating the eradication of Indians. The transition between Mexican rule and California’s admission to US statehood presents a critical juncture as to what natives’ legal status will be. The ratification of California’s constitution granting them virtually no political participation is an early blow…and it’s not about to get any better.
In November 1849, a month after the constitution was ratified, it elected as its first governor Peter Hardeman Burnett, who had moved to California just 10 months earlier to join the Gold Rush. Raised in Missouri to a slave-owning family, he’d come to California from the Oregon Territory, where he’d served as a legislator and a judge, and had introduced harsh laws against Blacks—including one forcing free Blacks to leave the territory or face severe lashings. He would also later go on to be an early proponent of Chinese exclusion in California. So it probably won’t come as a shock that he was no friend to Native Americans either.
In early 1850, the newly elected California legislature convened for the first time—meaning that along with the governor and courts, California had become largely autonomous politically. Also in 1850, the non-native population of California would continue to grow, reaching 165,000. This meant that for the first time, Indians were officially outnumbered—a minority in their own native land.
And what to do about the growing tensions and violence between natives and White settlers was one of the first pressing problems the legislature would need to tackle. They could do so by granting more rights and protections to natives. And one state senator named John Bidwell introduced a bill to do just that. The bill was hardly a shining beacon for indigenous rights—it had several provisions that maintained Indians’ second-class status. But it did offer them certain labor protections, custody rights of their children, freedom of movement, limited land rights, and protections from abuse by non-Indians.
But ultimately, even those rights were too much for the legislature to stomach, and real protection of Indians was not the route they took to address the growing violence—instead they opted for subjection of Indians.
Assemblyman Elam Brown introduced a bill that would go down as maybe one of the most ironically named laws in American history: “The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.” With almost no deliberation, the bill was passed the week after being introduced and signed by Governor Burnett.
This hastily passed bill all but sealed the fate of California Indians.
Though some provisions explicitly banned coercing labor from natives, the act provided major loopholes and legal avenues to enslavement, despite the fact that the California Constitution had outlawed slavery.
One way it did this was by allowing anyone to quote “obtain” an Indian child from their parents, provided they gained the consent of the child’s parents or quote “friends” of the child—a very vague status easily prone to misuse. These children could then be kept—and worked—by the custodian until they were 18 for males and 15 for females, with the custodian keeping their earnings.
Another way the act allowed for enslavement was declaring that if an Indian was convicted of a crime, any White person could pay their bond and the Indian was then compelled to work for that White person until the debt was repaid.
This was made worse by the fact that the act also criminalized very minor and ill-defined offenses by natives. Any Indian found quote, “loitering and strolling about, or frequenting public places where liquors are sold, begging or leading an immoral or profligate course of life, shall be liable to be arrested on the complaint of any resident citizen of the county.” And if authorities agreed that the Indian was a vagrant, they could be turned over to the highest bidder to perform labor for up to four months.
Oh, and Indians could make complaints to authorities about White people, but quote “in no case shall a White man be convicted of any offense upon the testimony of an Indian, or Indians.”
While these provisions were bad enough on their face, the unspoken implications made them far worse. Essentially, an Indian could be arrested just for walking or sitting around somewhere where Whites didn’t like it. Or they could be accused of any crime by Whites—and Whites’ testimony could be enough to convict them, but not vice-versa. And once arrested, the Indian could be farmed out for forced labor for any task to anyone willing to pay.
And even if a White man didn’t want to go through these legal loopholes to obtain Indian slaves, they could simply kidnap or enslave them illegally and still have little to worry about. Afterall, those slaves wouldn’t be allowed to testify against them in court. It’s a legal framework seemingly designed to be abused, and it would be.
But the provision preventing Whites from being convicted of any crime based on complaints or testimony of Indians alone—even corroborating accounts from multiple Indians—would have even darker implications. It essentially meant that a White man could stroll into an Indian community and kill a native in cold blood in front of dozens of witnesses. But the killer couldn’t be prosecuted unless one of those witnesses was White AND willing to step up and stick their neck out against a fellow White on behalf of Indians—something that would very rarely happen.
Over the following two and a half decades, many Indians would be prosecuted and executed for attacking or killing Whites, but vanishingly few Whites would ever be punished at all for identical crimes against natives. This legal framework made it very easy to kill Indians, and many, many settlers would take advantage of it.
In one infamous example of California’s pathetic excuse of a legal framework when it came to Indians, a White man in Humboldt County was reportedly found with a young Indian child. Authorities asked what he was doing with the child, to which he replied “I’m protecting him. He’s an orphan.” When asked how he knew the child was an orphan, the man shamelessly responded: “Because I killed his parents.”
Indiscriminate killing by private individuals was now emboldened and turbocharged. But California Indians were about to be squeezed not just by these killers at the bottom, but also by higher level state-sponsored militias and even the US military. Less than a month after the passage of the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was passed, a shocking event would unfold marking an escalation in the California Genocide—one that would see not just scores of individual actors targeting Natives, but large militias going on Indian hunting expeditions with full government support and funding.
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In 1847, two American settlers named Charles Stone and Andrew Kelsey bought a cattle-ranching operation near Clear Lake, California from Salvador Vallejo—the Mexican military captain we heard about in the last episode, who enslaved natives and led at least two massacres on Pomo tribes. Along with the land and some 15,000 cattle, Stone and Kelsey acquired the quote unquote “rights” to the Pomo natives living in the area, and they quickly gained a reputation as particularly brutal enslavers, even by the increasingly cruel standards of the time.
The pair were known to lure natives onto the ranch with offers of paid work, only to imprison and enslave them. High fences were built around villages where Indians lived, and if any were caught outside those fences at night, they would be whipped, tied down or thrown in sweat houses for days.
Stone and Kelsey kept their slaves in a perpetual state of near starvation, giving them the smallest of rations. And the Indians were banned from going out to hunt or fish for themselves; not that they were readily able to anyways. All their weapons and implements that could be used for these purposes were confiscated. One winter on the ranch, 20 Indians starved to death.
The slavers saw Indians as relatively disposable compared to enslaved Black people in the American South at the time. The Transatlantic Slave Trade had ended four decades earlier. That, combined with huge and growing demand for tobacco and cotton farming labor, meant enslaved Black people were of limited supply, and thus, they commanded high prices. So most slavers made reasonable efforts to keep them alive. Indians in California, however, still had large free populations that could easily be captured and enslaved. When sold, they brought in prices around one-tenth of what their Black counterparts in the South yielded. So slavers like Stone and Kelsey weren’t particularly bothered by seeing slaves die—either due to neglect or straight up murder.
In fact, the pair seemed to revel in torturing and killing slaves. They would force Indians to stand or hang by their thumbs for days at a time for the smallest of infractions. They would punish children or other family members of those who’d committed these infractions just to compound the psychological effect. When Stone and Kelsey had visitors, they would sometimes entertain them by shooting at Indians to watch them jump in terror. And whipping dozens of times for inconsequential reasons, or no reason, was commonplace—so much so that several Indian slaves died from excessive whipping.
Rape of Indian girls and women was also rife, and refusal by family members to bring their daughter to Stone and Kelsey for sexual assault could result in harsh punishments for all.
And routinely, Stone and Kelsey would casually murder Indians on their ranch. Stone reportedly shot and killed a young Indian just for taking wheat to his dying mother. And those who became too sick to work could be summarily executed and disposed of.
By the fall of 1849, conditions were coming to a head. Andrew Kelsey and his brother Benjamin led a group of around 100 Pomo Indians from Clear Lake on a mining expedition to gold fields more than a hundred miles North. Eventually, the Kelseys returned, alone, Benjamin stricken with Malaria. Pomo women pressed the brothers on where their family members who’d joined the expedition were, and the Kelseys assured them that they weren’t far behind. But as weeks passed and the Pomo men still were nowhere to be found, the Kelseys said that maybe they were killed by other tribes, then they went about tying up and whipping any women who continued to press the matter.
But finally, a few emaciated Pomo men limped back onto the ranch and recounted the true story. When the expedition had arrived to the gold fields, the Kelseys realized there was more money to be made from selling their supplies and rations than their was panning for gold. So they sold nearly everything that had been brought to feed and sustain the 100 Pomo men. Then not long after, malaria hit the group and the Kelseys fled…leaving the disease-stricken men with almost nothing in the way of food, tools or any hope of survival. Those among the sick and starving men who were able tried to make the arduous journey home, but nearly all died en route. Of the original 100, only three made it back.
When confronted with this version of events, not only were the Kelseys unfazed and unrepentant, but soon after announced that they would be moving most of the remaining men to set up a new ranch, and the women, children and elderly would be moved to a separate location.
The remaining Pomo were starving and scarred from years of abuse. They’d just found out a huge chunk of their community had died due to needless neglect, and now, they were all about to be separated and subjected to god knows what in their new locations. Savvier slavers might have recognized that they were backing their slaves into a corner and putting themselves in a very precarious position, but apparently not Stone and the Kelseys. Their flagrant abuse continued unabated.
Andrew Kelsey reportedly took the wife of a Pomo chief and forced her to live with him as a sex slave and cease any contact with her husband. Another account says a young Pomo man was lashed 100 times then shot in the head for either insulting or threatening Benjamin Kelsey’s wife—or perhaps for flirting with a Pomo woman Kelsey kept as a sex slave. And yet another account says that a Pomo man was beaten and killed simply for asking for more food. How exactly these events played out and whether any of them served as a proverbial final straw is unclear, but there was one event that finally convinced the Pomo that they had no choice but to rise up. And it wasn’t even something Stone and the Kelseys did, but something it was presumed they would do.
On a rainy night in December 1849, two Pomo men snuck out of their camp. They’d been hired by a starving Pomo family to kill an ox for food, so they borrowed one of Stone and Kelsey’s favorite horses in order to lasso one. But during the attempt, one of the men was thrown off the horse, and it ran away into the night never to be seen again.
This small trip-up now presented a crisis to all the Pomo in the area. As we heard in the last episode, missing livestock in the area was often presumed by Whites to have been stolen by Indians—and could result in random retaliatory killings—the sort of killings Stone and Kelsey were famously all too eager to engage in. A group of Pomo had an emergency meeting to decide what to do.
Should they try to pay Stone and Kelsey somehow for the horse? Should they just tell them it was stolen? Or should they take more drastic measures? Any course of action was likely to result in Pomos being killed. And even if this incident hadn’t occurred, with everything else going on at the ranch, odds were they would all die soon anyways in one way or another. After some debate, it was reasoned that if they were going to die, they may as well go down fighting. They made the fateful decision to kill Stone and Kelsey.
They hatched a plan to have Pomo children that served Stone and Kelsey secretly take all the guns, knives, bows and arrows they could find from the compound. And the wife of the Pomo chief being kept as Andrew Kelsey’s sex slave reportedly doused the pair’s gunpowder stores with water, rendering their personal guns useless. Now, the final phase of the plan is set in motion.
At dawn one morning, 16 Pomo men gather outside Stone and Kelsey’s house. Stone emerges holding a cast iron pot full of coal for the outdoor cooking fire, then looks up in confusion. The Pomo men stare sternly at Stone, but none move—all hesitating to be the first to cross a line they know can never been uncrossed. But finally one man grabs a bow and unleashes an arrow into Stone’s stomach, and the rest of the men pounce. Stone yanks the arrow from his stomach and fights the men off with his pot, managing to get back into the house and lock the door.
Then, Andrew Kelsey emerges from the house to try to talk the men down. He yells for them to stop, and insists that he’s been good to them. “Yes, you’re such a good man that you’ve killed many of us,” one of the Pomo men snaps back. Two men pounce on Kelsey, stabbing him twice, but he manages to break free and run toward a nearby creek. En route, he’s shot in the back with an arrow, but keeps plodding along, leaping into the creek and yanking the arrow from his back. But when he gets to the opposite shore, badly bleeding and weakened, he’s confronted by two more Pomo men. They each grab one of Kelsey’s arms to restrain him, and one of the men calls over his wife. “This is the man who killed our son,” he tells her. “Here’s your chance for revenge.”
With that, the woman takes a spear and drives it through Kelsey’s heart and they leave his body for the coyotes. Back at the house, the Pomo men follow a blood trail inside and up the stairs to a bedroom, where they find Charles Stone’s lifeless body. They throw him out the window and one of the men sticks his head out, triumphantly announcing to all those who’ve gathered outside: “Come, take all the food you wish.”
Stone and Kelsey’s reign of terror is over, and for the moment, the Pomo Indians are free to do what they want and indulge in all the meat, corn and wheat they can handle. But none are so naïve as to think they’re truly free. Even though it’s widely known among other settlers in the region that Stone and Kelsey were exceptionally cruel, Indians killing two prominent White ranchers is an act that can’t be left unpunished.
The clock is now ticking. Retaliation will come and it will come soon and come hard. The Pomo that are present immediately decide to disperse into the nearby mountains and islands on Clear Lake. They quicky slaughter livestock and stock up on meat and other rations for what they presume will be a long hideout. Then they go their separate ways, left to imagine what they might have just unleashed. But none could have guessed the enormity of was about to come down on them and the rest of the California Indians.
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After Charles Stone and Andrew Kelsey’s murders, Kelsey’s brothers Samuel and Benjamin were out for blood. At the time, they were 70 miles south of the ranch in Napa Valley, but that wouldn’t stop them from quenching their thirst for vengeance on any Indian within reach. The brothers separately rounded up vigilante groups.
Benjamin headed north and went about slaughtering untold numbers of natives in the area—none of which, obviously, had anything to do with his brother’s murder…or had any connection whatsoever to the Pomo Indians of Clear Lake. His group went from ranch to ranch, asking White owners to identify which Indians were their slaves and which were so-called wild Indians. Any determined to be the latter were tortured, shot or even burned to death.
Samuel led his band of vigilantes south and was even less concerned with delineating free and enslaved Indians…much to the chagrin of local settlers. In Sonoma, the posse announced that they would hunt down and kill every Indian they could find in the country, male and female, and they tried to do just that, even pulling Indian servants out of White households and executing them on the spot. During their rampage, they killed dozens, maybe even hundreds of Indians, and burned down entire villages. Reportedly, the entire valley was lit up by the flames.
Eventually, it was too much for ranchers in the area to tolerate. Armed companies formed to stop the Kelceys’ separate killing sprees. Benjamin and some of his party were arrested and released on bail, while Samuel and six of his men were jailed. Their case ultimately became the first to go before California’s new Supreme Court—but with few prisons, laws, jurisdictions or even a basic legal system yet established, the court was ill-equipped to do anything with the men. It ordered them to be released and to later pay bail of $10,000, and eventually, when ordered, to stand trial for murder. But that would never happen. The men skipped town and would never be held accountable for their massacre.
But there were plenty of others anxious to avenge Kelcey and Stone’s murders, and to demonstrate to other natives what happens to those who commit violence against White settlers. But like the Kelsey brothers, others gearing up for vigilante justice weren’t very concerned whether those they targeted actually had anything to do with the Stone and Kelsey murders. In their minds, Indians were collectively guilty. And killing large numbers of them would send a message and keep everyone in line.
The first official group to take up arms in retaliation was the US 1st Dragoons—a mounted infantry unit also based near Napa Valley, which had been in service for nearly two decades policing the Oregon trail, the California frontier, and fighting in the Mexican American War. Upon learning of the Stone and Kelsey murders, Lieutenant John W. Davidson led some two dozen Dragoons up to Clear Lake.
On their way, they stopped at a large Indian village, likely of Wappo Indians, which again, had no connection to the Pomo or the Kelsey and Stone murders. The Dragoons reportedly walked into the village without incident, then suddenly opened fire on the villagers, killing around 35 of them.
Finally, Davidson’s detachment made their way to Clear Lake and when they arrived they could see a group of Indians gathered on an island some 300 yards from the shore. Despite there being at least four separate Indian groups living in the area that spoke different languages, Davidson concluded that those he could see on the island must have been involved in the Kelsey and Stone murders. But by this point, his men were tired, their supplies were running low, and they had no boats or equipment that could be used to launch an amphibious attack on the island. So they returned to Napa and Davidson wrote a report in January 1850, recommending that later in the spring, another mission with more men and several boats should be sent to Clear Lake so that they could surprise the Indians on the island and quote, “cut them to pieces.”
The recommendation was accepted by Major General Persifor Smith, who would soon become Military Governor of California, and plans were hatched for an invasion of the island that coming May of 1850 when the weather was more amenable. But in the four-month interim, many locals had a bloodlust that couldn’t wait. Ad hoc vigilante militias formed, some with as many as several dozen men, who took their own initiative to slaughter random natives and burn down their villages in retaliation for Stone and Kelsey’s murders. It isn’t known how many Indians were killed in this round of violence, but it was likely at least well into the hundreds.
By the time May came, the planned military assault on Clear Lake had been well publicized. Under General Smith’s orders, Lieutenant John Davidson returned, along with Captain Nathaniel Lyon, some 75 men and several large boats and howitzer cannons. The area surrounding the lake had mostly been abandoned by Indians, particularly those who had been present for Stone and Kelcey’s murders. Most had fled to the mountains in anticipation of the attack.
Clear Lake’s Bo-no-po-ti island, as it was known as at the time, was a seasonal fishing camp for Pomo Indians. It was thought to have several hundred people residing on it that May, though it’s unlikely any of them had ever worked on Stone and Kelsey’s ranch, which was on the other side of the lake and tended to draw labor from different, unconnected Pomo communities.
Contrary to military reports that there were 400 warriors on the island, and that they were harboring Stone and Kelsey’s killers, as a temporary fishing community, it was likely mostly women, children and elderly, and it’s unlikely that anyone there had been involved with the murders. Those who had been involved were probably smart enough to know they needed to get much further away, deep into the surrounding mountains.
Lyon’s expedition approached Clear Lake from the south and worked its way north, killing several remaining Indians en route. One was reportedly hanged with a fire lit beneath him, while another was tied to a tree and burned to death.
The island was situated within an inlet of water at the North tip of the lake, surrounded by a crescent of shoreline a few hundred yards away on three sides. Lyon’s men situated themselves around that crescent, virtually surrounding the island except for the South side, which looked out upon several miles of open water. Those on the island would have nowhere to flee.
General Smith had expressed his desire to quote “chastise the Indians near Clear Lake”, and he made clear that he had no interest in capturing any supposed criminals, or making any attempts at negotiation. He had ordered Lyon to quote “waste no time in parley to ascertain with certainty the offenders, and to strike them promptly and heavily.”
With the island surrounded, Lyon reportedly went even further than these orders, taking the extraordinary step of killing two captured English speaking Indian guides that had assisted his expedition and led them to the island. This precluded any means of translation between his troops and the Pomo, and any hope of negotiation.
The cannons were positioned on the mainland to the North and East of the island, while the main contingent of troops was positioned ready to launch their amphibious invasion from the West. A smaller contingent began the assault by boat from the South. Smith’s official report would later claim this boat was met by a shower of arrows. But according to Pomo accounts, the boat landed without incident, and Pomo leaders even put their hands up and attempted to negotiate before being shot upon. Then, according the Pomo accounts, no more than four or five Pomo men attempted a very brief resistance with slings and bows before they were quickly cut down by the soldiers’ gunfire.
After the assault began, artillery fired on the island from the East sending the island’s inhabitants fleeing to the West side of the island, where they were intercepted by the main infantry force that had crossed by boat. At that point, the Pomo started falling fast, shot down as they desperately scurried in all directions. According to Pomo accounts, soldiers chased down those trying to make a swim for it off the island, whether they were men, women, children or the elderly—shooting them, bayonetting them or even clubbing them to death with their guns or boat oars. If anyone managed to swim away from the island, they were met by troops and gunfire on the opposite shore.
A few Pomo managed to survive by hiding under water in the marshes and breathing through reeds, but for the most part, it was yet another completely one-sided wholesale massacre. In his report of the attack, Lyon stated that the island became quote “a perfect slaughtering pen,” and noted that his side sustained no casualties and no injuries.
Like previous massacres, estimates of the death toll vary widely. Even a completely objective assessment would have had a hard time accounting for all the dead, as many were killed in the water or the marshes and were never recovered. Those bodies that could be found reportedly took five days to be gathered by survivors, according to Pomo accounts.
In his report, Lyon said that he could confirm at least 60 Pomo Indians were killed, but added that he had little doubt it was upwards of 100. Other estimates from the time put the number of Pomo that had been on the island that day at anywhere between 400 and 800, and Pomo accounts seem to indicate that there were no more than a small handful of survivors. To boot, Major Edwin Allen Sherman, who surveyed the area two months after the massacre, later claimed that Lyon had been too modest in his report.
“There were not less than 400 warriors killed and drowned at Clear Lake and as many more squaws and children who plunged into the lake and drowned, through fear or committing suicide. So in all, about 800 Indians found a watery grave in Clear Lake.”
If true, that would make the Clear Lake Massacre, or Bloody Island as it would come to be known, one of the deadliest massacres in American history—in the same league as the Sacramento River Massacre of Klamath Indians four years before it.
Nearly two weeks after the massacre, the Daily Alta California ran a damning article on the events titled “Horrible Slaughter of Indians,” which was based on reports from US Army Captain John Frisbie. It described a tribe that incurred terrible punishment despite quote “undisturbed peaceful relations with White settlers.” It noted how the operation was retaliation for the Kelsey and Stone murders, but impugned this justification by detailing the barbaric practices known to have occurred at the ranch. Then it detailed how the Indians were surrounded, and men, women and children were fired upon indiscriminately as they gave no resistance. “The work of butchery was short,” the article concluded. “It was the order of extermination fearfully obeyed.”
General Smith and Lieutenant Davidson immediately condemned this report, claiming that no extermination order was ever given or carried out—a claim strongly undermined by Captain Nathaniel Lyon’s own report to Smith, later obtained by the Daily Alta California, which corroborated the paper’s original article and other eyewitness accounts. In his report, Lyon described how his troops rapidly cleared the island, and explained that he had instructed them to hunt down and eradicate any survivors, in accordance with Smith’s orders.
After the Bloody Island Massacre, Lyon and his men weren’t finished. They continued their march along a nearby river and a few days later encountered a village inhabited by another Pomo offshoot. Like at Clear Lake, Lyon’s men summarily entered the community and opened fire, then relentlessly chased down and slaughtered any man, woman or child who tried to flee. “Their number killed I confidently report at not less than 75,” Lyon later wrote in his report. “And I have little doubt it extended to nearly double that number.”
After that, Lyon and Davidson broke off into two separate groups, and according to some accounts, Davidson’s detachment perpetrated yet another massacre before the expedition was finished. A traveling prospector would later recount seeing an Indian community in flames in the distance just before encountering Davidson and his men riding away from the scene. According to the prospector, some of Davidson’s men recounted setting the community ablaze then exterminating the entire tribe—an account that seemed to be corroborated when the prospector visited the burned community a few days later and saw several charred bodies.
The unabashedly critical article of the expedition that had appeared in the Daily Alta California would turn out to be an outlier. And in fact, shortly after Smith and Davidson’s condemnation of the article, the paper published what seemed to all but be a retraction, saying it was anxious to hold Captain John Frisbie responsible for misleading them and doing injustice to General Smith and the expedition’s officers.
Some other papers reported straightforward accounts unflattering to the Lyon expedition, but stopped short of openly criticizing it. Others still printed accounts wholly in line with Smith and Davidson’s highly dubious claims, and even outright expressed support for their campaign. The San Francisco Herald inaccurately described the massacre as a “battle” where many of Lyon’s soldiers were wounded, and the paper defended it as a righteous campaign to punish Indians. Most national newspapers followed the Herald’s lead with this narrative wholly sympathetic to the perpetrators of the massacre.
As the months went by, newspaper commentary critical of Indian killing campaigns became more watered down and less and less frequent. Outside of newsrooms, government and Army officials were even more sympathetic, heaping Smith, Davidson, Lyon and the expedition’s troops not with any sort of condemnation or punishment, but with effusive praise. Those involved would not suffer any personal or professional consequences—they would instead be treated as heroes and continue to move up the military ranks. It sent a clear message to the public, to political leaders, and to military detachments across the country: slaughtering natives is not only acceptable, it’s righteous and heroic.
Another critical corner had been turned. Just days after its original article critical of the Clear Lake Massacre, the Daily Alta California ran a commentary from its editor, warning that if relations between Whites and Indians continued to degenerate into an open collision, there could only be safety in a war of extermination, waged with relentless fury far and near.
A few months later, California officially ascended to US statehood. Then in January of 1851, the state’s first governor, Peter Burnett, delivered the inaugural state of the state address. He described natives as savages for whom war and theft are customary, noting that since they’re too uncivilized to create their own goods and tools, they can’t help but steal from White men. Then he echoed the Daily Alta California’s supposition that genocide might be the only solution to conflict between natives and Whites.
“The white man, to whom time is money, and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property. After being robbed a few times, he becomes desperate and resolves upon a war of extermination. This is the common feeling of our people who have lived upon the Indian frontier. The two races are kept asunder by so many causes, and having no ties of marriage or consanguinity to unite them, they must ever remain at enmity. That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.”
Another critical piece of legislation that was passed around this time, and signed into law by Governor Burnett, was that establishing volunteer militias in California.
Ordinary citizens, who didn’t necessarily have any real qualifications, could now form their own militia, provided they petitioned the governor outlining the need for it, advertised their enlistment location, elected officers and reported their member list. Once approved, they could then seek weapons and supplies from the governor.
Many of these militias began to spring up, often with protection against natives as their stated reason for needing to exist. And with Governor Burnett, they had a friend in a very high place.
In June 1850, one of the first implementations of the act would come after an outbreak of violence in Southern California. A group of Quechan Indians had been running a business guiding incoming settlers across the Colorado River. But a group of Whites had begun encroaching on this business, going so far as to destroy a Quechan boat and murder an Irish worker employed by the Quechans. After a subsequent Quechan envoy for negotiation was badly beaten, Whites proceeded to kill and scalp four more Quechans. The tribe fought back though, reportedly killing 11 of the White ferrymen in retaliation. And with that, they had given the highest authority all the pretext he needed to bring down the hammer.
A militia leader in Los Angeles was called upon by Governor Burnett to punish the Indians, and supplied with government money and weapons to do so. More than 125 volunteer militiamen proceeded to confront the Quechans, and while the details of the assault aren’t clear, it seems none of the militiamen were killed, while more than a dozen Quechans were. But the greater significance was that now a precedent had been set for obtaining government sanction, funding and arms for hunting Indians.
Over the following decade, thousands of Californians enrolled in some two-dozen major militia campaigns, and would be directly responsible for several thousand Indian deaths, and indirectly responsible for countless more. Local groups were incentivized to exaggerate or completely contrive Indian threats in order to receive funding and arms. But often, exaggeration wasn’t even necessary. Yet again, even petty theft of livestock could be grounds for invoking the terror of the militias on Indian communities. Governor Burnett himself had seemed to suggest in his 1851 speech that theft by natives was in part grounds for complete extermination.
But concern with theft didn’t exactly go both ways. As the Quechan suppression on the Colorado River illustrated, another pretext for militia mass murder could simply be that Whites wanted land or resources controlled by Indians, and when they tried to seize it and met any Indian resistance, it amounted to a declaration of war that needed to be suppressed.
In 1851, skirmishes in the Yosemite Valley were becoming increasingly violent as gold miners attempted to displace the Ahwahnechee Indians occupying the region. By now, California’s second governor, John McDougall, had taken office and seemed intent on carrying on and strengthening Peter Burnett’s policy of supporting Indian-hunting militias. He appealed to the state legislature seeking funding, and in February that year, they obliged, voting to borrow half a million dollars for past and future anti-Indian operations—a sum equivalent to some $19 million today.
A militia known as the Mariposa Battalion was formed consisting of hundreds of volunteers, which ultimately accomplished their goal by rampaging through the valley, burning food supplies, homes and entire villages while killing untold numbers of Ahwahnechee in the process.
These sorts of expeditions were now very well-funded, and a man joining one as an entry-level private could earn as much or more than he could as a laborer or miner in the region. In turn, industries that supported and supplied these militias sprang up, often inflating prices in the process. A whole economy developed around killing indigenous people, and for many participants in that economy, it could be very lucrative.
And this wasn’t just a state-level phenomenon. Some local jurisdictions too began instituting taxes or issuing bonds to raise money in support of Indian-hunting campaigns. Some offered direct bounties for native lives, even offering payment for scalps or other body parts. From this grim incentive scheme would emerge many professional killers.
One of the most notorious was Hiram Good, who led vigilante groups from 1857 to 1865 and became one of the most bitterly hated figures among Northern California Indians. One of his contemporaries later wrote that Good would adorn his pants with Indian scalps, sewing them through a string and hanging them down from his belt to his ankles. At one point he also reportedly had some 40 scalps hanging from a tree by his house. One can only imagine how many Indians were killed by just this one individual.
In Shasta City, authorities reportedly began offering $5 for every Indian head brought to them. A Swiss immigrant in the area later recounted:
“Human monsters of Americans made a regular business of getting these. A friend of mine who was in Shasta City at that time assured me that in one week, he saw several mules laden with eight to twelve Indian heads turned into the precinct headquarters.”
For a war of extermination against a supposedly less civilized race, many attacks on Indians were done without the slightest pretense of dignity. In one especially notorious incident, after a rash of violence between White settlers and Modoc Indians, infamous Indian killer Ben Wright invited a Modoc community to his camp for a supposed peace conference, even proactively spreading word around Modoc villages that there would be an extravagant feast at the parlay. But when several dozen Modoc showed up, taking him at his word, Wright had his men open fire on the unarmed delegation, killing anywhere from 30 to 90 of them. Wright and his men proceeded to the nearby town of Yreka with Modoc scalps hanging from their rifles and pouches, where they received a hero’s welcome.
By this point, some newspapers had shifted from warnings of a possible or impending eradication of natives, to cheerleading the fact that such an eradication was well underway. California’s Marysville Evening Herald proclaimed in 1853:
“Extermination is no longer even a question of time—the time has already arrived, the work has been commenced, and let the first White man who says ‘treaty’ or ‘peace’ be regarded as a traitor and coward.”
In 1852, US Senator from California John Weller, who would become California’s fifth governor in 1858, said that Indians “will be exterminated before the onward march of the White man,” and that “the interest of the White man demands their extinction.”
In 1856, a San Francisco Bulletin editorial stated, “Extermination is the quickest and cheapest remedy, and effectually prevents all other difficulties when an outbreak of Indian violence occurs.”
In the mid-1850s, California’s Indian-killing machine got federal help when the US Congress provided funding to pay down the state’s quote unquote “war debt” and war bonds that had been sold to fund the Indian-hunting militias. This funding solidified the militias and their genocidal mission, guaranteeing their continued existence and growth. As the years went on, more local, state and federal funding poured into campaigns to eliminate Indians. And many of those who were spared from the direct killing campaigns were forced onto reservations, where institutional neglect, starvation and malnutrition would often end in the same result.
Laws also continued to become more stacked against natives. The age that Indian minors could be indentured to Whites was extended from 15 for females and 18 for males to ages 21 and 25, respectively. And adults that were indentured – AKA enslaved – as vagrants, criminals or prisoners of war could now be held for 10 years, rather than just the previous 4 months. In practice this essentially meant a militia could enter an Indian community, kill Indians at will, enslave adults as prisoners of war, and take guardianship of the orphans of those they’d killed and enslave them too, all pretty much legally.
In 1854, California Indians were left even more defenseless with the passage of the “Act to Prevent the Sale of Firearms and Ammunition to Indians.” As its name indicated, the act made it illegal to sell or transfer guns or ammo to Indians, punishable with stiff fines or jail time. This had the obvious effect of preventing natives from defending themselves against random violence and wanton massacres, but it also made it more difficult for them to hunt for food. The growing population of American settlers with rifles had thinned out herds and made game more widely and thinly spread—leaving traditional bows, arrows, slings and spears with less and less utility.
This was just one avenue through which Indians were thwarted from eating. The California Genocide wasn’t just a matter of killing natives directly. When native communities managed to flee and hide from Indian hunting militias, those militias would instead often settle for burning down these communities’ homes and destroying their food supplies. If these communities weren’t destroyed by bullets to the head, they would often be destroyed more gradually by starvation and the elements.
The United Nations now defines genocide as the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, racial, ethnic, or religious group.
As we’ve seen, statements by military and political leaders all the way to the top in California, buttressed by scores of media commentaries, made it clear that the destruction of Native Californians was intentional. And this was attempted through not just one of the five parameters that qualify it as genocide under the UN framework, but all five.
One, Indians were killed directly – systemically and on a mammoth scale.
Two, they were caused serious mental and bodily harm, through widespread rape and physical and psychological torture.
Three, conditions of life were deliberately created that would lead to the group’s physical destruction, through burning down their communities, destroying their food sources, driving them to inhospitable regions, and precluding any legal means for them to defend themselves.
Four, measures were imposed to prevent births in the group, either by separating men and women, banning their procreation or outright killing men so as to prevent it.
And five, Indian children were routinely forcibly transferred from their parents, be it through murder of their parents or legally sanctioned kidnapping.
Throughout the 1850s, mass slaughters and other atrocities too numerous to list here were carried out by both sanctioned and unsanctioned militias, by formal military units, and by smaller posses and lone individuals. Infants were thrown in fires, children were scalped, women were dismembered, elderly were beheaded – all manner of depravity was witnessed and recounted—sometimes by the very perpetrators themselves; an indication of how socially acceptable these crimes against humanity could be at the time.
For a more comprehensive list of Indian massacres and atrocities, you can visit our website at manmadecatastrophes.com and scroll down to the resources section of this episode. Or the book An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley gives a thorough chronicle of these events.
But unfortunately, no exhaustive accounting the period’s horrors exists. Some events with no survivors, or none that were able or willing to later bear testimony, are simply lost to history. It’s almost certain that many of the atrocities that made up the California Genocide will never be known. And it’s likewise very possible that some of the most prolific serial killers in American history were murderers of Indians active in California during this time, and you’ll probably never know their names.
By the time the 1850s came to a close, the state-sponsored campaign to eradicate native Californians had been incredibly effective. When gold was first discovered in 1848, California natives outnumbered non-natives 10 to 1. But by 1860, just 12 years later, that ratio had flipped. The non-native population grew from 15,000 to nearly 380,000, while the Indian population had been absolutely pummeled, shrinking from 150,000 to just 35,000 over the same period.
And still, the killing was far from over. Even after the worst of the mass murder had wound down, the native Californian population would continue to shrink for decades, reaching a low point of just 15,000 in 1900.
Given how steeply the odds were stacked against native Californians, who were decimated by a witch’s brew of foreign diseases, hunted relentlessly by execution squads, and deprived of any reasonable conditions for survival, it’s miraculous that even this many survived, and a testimony to their resilience.
The Indian-killing campaigns extended through the 1860s, and even as the US Civil War broke out and Union coffers thinned, the California militias continued to receive funding to suppress natives.
But by the end of the Civil War in 1865, the large-scale massacres that had defined the previous decade and a half were winding down. Federal funding for the militias dried up, and perhaps just as significantly, there were simply very few Indians left to kill.
In the late 1860s into the early 1870s, killings by vigilante groups and individuals, and sometimes by military units, continued on a smaller scale. And despite the 13th amendment of the US Constitution outlawing slavery, forced servitude of Native Americans in California also persisted in various forms. Indian convict leasing—an often abused system that resulted in de facto slavery—remained legal until 1937.
But the tide was beginning to turn. With the conclusion of the Modoc War in Northeastern California between US forces and Modoc Indians in 1873, formal military campaigns against Indians were drawing down, and some of the last mass murders of Indians in California took place that year.
Also in 1873, new laws mandated that testimony from Indians could no longer be automatically discarded, seriously weakening the ability to enslave or kill natives with impunity.
Going forward, assimilating Indians or pushing them onto reservations became the preferred method of dealing with them, rather than extermination; though both these approaches were racked with their own problems, and the California Indian population continued to decline for another three decades.
While 1873 certainly didn’t mark the end of California Indians being murdered, attacked, enslaved, raped or otherwise abused, it is generally considered the book end of the systemic genocide period. But it would be a long time before anyone described it as such.
Within a decade, works began to be published describing atrocities against Native Americans over the previous century. In 1880, George Manypenny, who’d served as US Indian Affairs Commissioner from 1853 to 1857, published the first known book to detail the attempted extermination of Native Americans, titled Our Indian Wards. The following year, writer and poet Helen Hunt Jackson published her book A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes, which chronicled massacres and other mistreatment of Native tribes. As soon as works like these came off the presses, they incurred backlash. Future President Teddy Roosevelt called them “worse than valueless”.
While works like these had some influence in their time, and even prompted some government policy to redress Indian mistreatment, they would struggle to get their message to reach the consciousness of ordinary Americans. In fact, it would be more than century after The California Genocide concluded that it would be thoroughly studied and documented by scholars, and come to be defined as a genocide.
For years, many Indians who had survived the California Genocide kept their traumatic stories to themselves, often even hiding their very identity as Indians for fear of what speaking out or making themselves conspicuous as a still highly-discriminated against group could mean—and who could blame them?
In the early 20th century, more accounts began to be published by Native American survivors of the genocide and by others who’d witnessed, or even participated in, the atrocities. But again, these accounts confronted an American public, government and education system that wasn’t eager to hear them. Across the country, the history of Native American abuse was sanitized, whitewashed and misrepresented in schools. And Hollywood was even worse, more often than not portraying Indians as bloodthirsty savages and foils to the heroic White cowboys.
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After the horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust came to light in the wake of World War II and the term genocide came into mainstream use, scholars began to more closely re-examine the events in California. But it wasn’t even until the 1990s that historians started to refer to those events as the California Genocide—and even then, and still now, it’s not without controversy among academics. But as far as the American public is concerned, the California Genocide is not something most people are familiar with—either the term or the underlying events themselves.
Throughout the 20th century and up to today, it’s been common for the California Gold Rush to be taught to schoolchildren with little to no context about what it meant for Native Californians. Westward settlers likewise have been depicted as brave, enterprising pioneers who opened up new frontiers in America, with little acknowledgement of all those who were complicit or active participants in a campaign to wipe out the native population.
However, that may finally be starting to change. In 2019, the 40th governor of California, Gavin Newsom, spoke before a group of Native American tribal leaders. He announced an executive order apologizing to the Native American people of California, and announced the creation of a Truth and Healing Council to give Native Americans an avenue to set the record straight and provide their historical perspective. He added that California must reckon with its dark history, and that it needs to be described in history books.
Gavin Newsom: It’s humbling for me having believed I was educated, to have been so ignorant about our past, to have been so unaware of how ashamed I should be as a Californian, fifth generation, about how so many of your ancestors were treated. Coordination, collaboration, vigilantes, militiamen, federal soldiers working in concert. It’s called genocide. That’s what it was, a genocide. And so I’m here to say the following: I’m sorry, on behalf of the state of California.
In September of 2024, Newsom went a step further and signed a bill into law that will require California schools to teach about the historic mistreatment of Native Americans. For Kindergarten through 12th grade curriculum, schools teaching about Spanish colonization and the California Gold Rush will have to include lessons on the mistreatment and perspectives of Indigenous people, and the state’s Department of Education must consult with Indian tribes when updating history and social studies curricula.
However, the state still has yet to fully reckon with its past. Many of those who sanctioned or directly participated in crimes against humanity, like John Fremont, Peter Burnett, John Weller, John Sutter and the Kelcey brothers, still have their names adorned across the state on school buildings, street signs and other monuments.
Elsewhere in the United States, there’s even more resistance to fully educating Americans on historic atrocities against the country’s indigenous people, with some dismissing the prospect as woke education, unpatriotic, or an attempt to undermine young Americans’ confidence in their nation and rack them with guilt.
Fortunately though, indigenous voices are increasingly being heard. In California, the native population rebounded very slowly in the early 20th century, and began to grow more rapidly by the second half of the century. Finally, in the beginning of the 21st century, numbers had grown back to around where they were prior to first contact with Europeans.
And with these growing numbers, along with new civil rights movements in the United States, has come a growing voice. Some of the monuments and other tributes honoring mass murderers and enslavers have started to come down in California. And nationwide, greater respect is starting to be afforded to Native people, with measures like the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October, and the discontinuation of offensive Indian mascots on several sports teams.
But still, the nation and the state of California have a long way to go to make sure the lessons of the California Genocide are learned and understood—lessons about how the gradual dehumanization of an entire race of people, aided by government leaders, news media and pop culture, removed moral inhibitions to their mass murder; how economic interests, government legislation, and racist tropes led to their enslavement and later attempted extermination; and how for a century afterwards, very few wanted to acknowledge what the country had been complicit in, all the way up to the highest levels.
In 1935, during a Senate hearing, US Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier perhaps put it most succinctly when he recounted the “swift depopulation” of California Indians.
“They were totally deprived of land rights. They were outlawed and all treated as wild animals, shot on site. They were actually murdered, enslaved and worked to death…driven back to totally barren vastness, and they died of starvation. Their life was outlawed and their whole existence was condemned, and they died.”
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That concludes our two-part look at the California Genocide. 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.
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