An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 . By Benjamin Madley

Abstract

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 . Lamar Series in Western History. By Benjamin Madley. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. xi + 692 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $38.00.) Prior to its nineteenth-century Euroamerican conquest, California was the most densely and diversely settled portion of the native North American West, with approximately 150,000 Indians. And yet by the time of the 1870 census, that number had plunged to just 30,000. Scholars have debated the reasons for this precipitous decline, with some citing starvation and disease as well as other forces of social dislocation attendant to the gold rush. But in An American Genocide , Benjamin Madley offers another explanation (one raised–if only obliquely–in decades past, though never pursued so doggedly): genocide. After reading his important and relentlessly grim … agraybill{at}smu.edu