'The Interest of the White Man Demands Their Extinction’

NATHAN: Now we’ve spent quite a lot of time on this show today talking about the people who came to California during the Gold Rush. But what about the people who lived there for centuries? Before becoming a US territory, California had been colonized by Spain, Russia, and Mexico. Colonization had been devastating to native peoples.

Those living along the coast were often forced to convert to Catholicism, into labor in the Spanish missions, or on private ranches. Overworked and underfed, many died of infectious diseases.

ED: By the 1840s, perhaps 150,000 native people remained in California. The majority lived in the rich Central Valley, or in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the very places where miners would soon be heading to find their fortunes. I recently spoke with historian Benjamin Madley, he says that as Americans arrived, they brought a new, targeted violence against the California tribes. That violence was inflicted by the state and federal governments as well as by everyday people. They all justified enslaving and killing native peoples as the unavoidable consequence of American expansion.

BENJAMIN MADLEY: Once gold is discovered, the killing accelerates quite rapidly. Particularly as an influx of prospectors and forty-niners moved south from Oregon. And these Oregonians saw them as a dangerous problem to get rid of, an obstacle between them and the gold. But, the turning point is really in late 1849, early 1850. There were these two white slaveholders living on the shores of Clearlake named Stone and Kelsey and they routinely raped California Indian women, tortured them to death, reportedly shot them to death for entertainment.

And so the Pomo and Wappo people, who were living under their rule, rose up and killed the two of them. And so, in response, vigilantes first murdered and massacred large numbers of California Indian ranch workers and farm workers in the Sonoma and Napa Valley. And then the United States Army launched two separate genocidal killing campaigns.

ED: And why was that the turning point?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: That was the turning point because the initial vigilantes who killed large numbers of California Indian people in Napa and Sonoma counties became the subject of the very first case of the new California State Supreme Court. And all eight men were released on bail. So this communicated a strong message to the people of California about how the state legal system was going to respond to the mass murder of Indians. And that was by granting Indian killers a pass.

ED: So what did the government do other than sanction this? Other than look the other way?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: California governors authorized 24, that’s two dozen, separate state militia expeditions against California Indians between 1850 and 1861. And these expeditions killed at least 1,340 California Indian people. At the same time, the state raised three separate bills that raised over $1.5 million. A huge amount of money at this time in history for Indian hunting militia operations.

And so these state militia expeditions then inspired, I think, over 6,400 murders of California Indian people by vigilantes. And when I first began the research, I thought that the killers must have been some kind of rogue element. But state endorsement for this genocide was only very thinly-veiled. In 1851, California’s first governor Peter Bernet declared and I quote, that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

ED: So making a race extinct is almost the exact definition of genocide right?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: Yes, and between 1846 and 1873, California’s indigenous population plunged from perhaps 150,000 people to just 30,000. So we know that diseases, dislocation, and starvation caused many of these tens of thousands of deaths, but then near-annihilation of California’s Indian population was not, as it is often described, the unavoidable result of two civilizations coming into contact for the first time.

This was actually a case of genocide. Sanctioned, paid for, and facilitated by state and federal officials. For example, in 1852, California’s US Senator John Weller, who later became the state’s governor in 1858, he told his colleagues in the United States Senate that California Indians and I quote “will be exterminated before the onward march of the white man.” And he insisted that the interest of the white men demands their extinction. So this was not a crime that was hidden. This was something that you could read about almost every week in every little newspaper up and down the state of California.

ED: So do the indigenous people fight back?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: They do but it’s difficult for them to do so and I’ll tell you why. So attackers frequently surrounded California Indian villages and opened fire at dawn or under moonlight when Indian people were asleep. Once most of the men had died trying to protect their village, the attackers closed in for the final exterminatory executions which they carried out with sabers or bayonets or hatchets or simply with rocks or sometimes their bare hands.

ED: I’m assuming that women and children were also killed in these raids.

BENJAMIN MADLEY: They were often killed but they had a value, so they tried generally not to kill them but to sell them into slavery.

ED: So it’s hard not to notice the irony of California entering the United States as a free state at the same time that it is deeply implicated in a different kind of slavery.

BENJAMIN MADLEY: Well one thing to understand about California is that while it entered the Union as a free state, it had a very strong and vocal pro and free-labor movement. So not only were there hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of African-American chattel slaves brought into California by Southerners, by 1860 the state has passed a law that allows for the indenture of any Indian. And that could be a child, a woman, a prisoner of war, anybody. They’ve also put into effect a system of prisoner-leasing. So, for example, people could be arrested for public drunkenness if they were an Indian under California law. White people would then hire them as leased prisoners by paying the judge for a week of their labor. And then at the end of that week, they would give them hard alcohol and then they would immediately be rearrested for public drunkenness and then leased out again, often to that very same person who had incriminated them by giving the alcohol in the first place.

ED: Wow. So as everyone knows, back in the east, people are arguing passionately about African-American slavery. Do people draw analogies from one way or the other to that trade and that subjugation?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: Absolutely. One of the really interesting things that happens in California is that sometimes Free Soilers, the very people who are arguing for the abolition of slave labor, they seek to justify the massacre of California Indians as the erasure of California’s preexisting unfree labor economy under Mexican rule.

ED: So let me get this straight. So they’re actually engaging in this genocidal behavior because they want to erase slavery.

BENJAMIN MADLEY: That was sometimes the case.

ED: Do you think the gold rush appreciably changed this history? Did it accelerate it? Did it give a rationale for all this killing? Or is this something that would have happened anyway?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: The Gold Rush was absolutely central to the genocide of California Indian people. It attracted the largest mass migration of the 19th century in the United States to California. Before the Gold Rush, there were perhaps 13 or 14,000 non-Indian people in California. By 1860, that number exceeded 360,000 individuals. So there was a huge influx of manpower to carry out the actual killing. By the same token, the gold in California’s natural environment provided a huge amount of money with which to carry out the killing. California politicians knew, from the beginning, that the federal government would reimburse them for the money they had expended on killing California Indian people because California’s mining operations were providing so much money. A massive injection of capital to the national economy and to the federal treasury.

ED: My sense is this is not a central feature of the story of the Gold Rush. Did I just miss those days of school?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: You did not miss anything. What has changed very recently was that the governor of California, Jerry Brown, acknowledged that what happened in California was in his words, “an actual genocide.”

ED: Does that have practical consequences?

BENJAMIN MADLEY: One of the big questions is, will state officials tender public apologies along the lines of the ones issued by presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s for the forcible relocation and imprisonment of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Should state officials offer compensation along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion that Congress has now paid these Japanese-Americans and their heirs.

Another question for the state and federal government bureaucracy is whether or not they’re going to change the names that commemorate and valorized some of the perpetrators of this genocide. And these investigations are going to be painful. We can’t bring back the dead. But they’re going to help all of us, both native and non-native, to make more accurate sense of our past and ourselves.

JOANNE: Benjamin Madley is a professor of history at UCLA and the author of “An American Genocide, the United States and the California Indian Catastrophe 1846 to 1873.”

NATHAN: That’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your burning history questions. You’ll find us at BackStoryradio.org. Or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

ED: This episode of BackStory was produced by Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angelique Bishosh, Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Gregg, Courtney Spanya, and Erin Teeling

Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketza, Paddington Bear, and Jazaar. Special thanks this week to Kelly Jones and Joey Thompson, who lent us his voice as well as his research. And, as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.