Understanding Genocide in California under United States Rule, 1846–1873

Abstract

Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000.1 Diseases, dislocation, and starvation caused many of these deaths. However, abduction, unfree labor, mass death on reservations, individual homicides, battles, and massacres also took thousands of lives and hindered reproduction. Historian Gary Clayton Anderson claims that what happened in California during these years should primarily be defined as ethnic cleansing, or forced removal, and not genocide.2 Forced removals did occur, but ultimately this was a case of genocide, sanctioned and facilitated by state and federal officials. The organized destruction of California Indians under United States rule was not a closely guarded secret. Mid-nineteenth-century California newspapers and private individuals, as well as state and federal officials, frequently addressed and often encouraged what we now call genocide. As early as 1890, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft called the killing “one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”3 Fifty-three years later, historical demographer Sherburne F. Cook wrote the first major study of the topic. Using varied sources, he quantified the violent killing of 4,556 California Indians between 1847 and 1865, concluding, “since the quickest and easiest way to get rid of [the Northern California Indian] was to kill him off, this procedure was adopted as standard for some years.”4 In the same year that Cook published his groundbreaking article, legal scholar Raphael Lemkin coined a new word for an ancient crime. Defining the concept in 1944, he combined “the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide ,” or killing, to describe …