Over 200,000 Native Americans Murdered During California Gold Rush 1848
- Admin
- Jan 13, 2018
- 6 min read
"The handiwork of these well armed death squads combined with the widespread random killing of Indians by individual miners resulted in the death of 100,000 Indians in the first two years of the gold rush."
Many free and enslaved people of African ancestry were part of the California Gold Rush (1848–55), and many were able to buy their freedom and freedom for their families, primarily in the South, with the gold they found.
Slavery in colonial California began with the systematic enslavement of indigenous Californians. The arrival of the Spanish colonists introduced chattel slavery and involuntary servitude to the area. White settlers from the Southern and Eastern United States brought their systems of organized slavery to California.
Mexican era Mexico inherited much of the South-west upon independence from Spain in 1821. President Vicente Guerrero, who was of Spanish, African and Native American descent, abolished slavery within Mexico in 1829. This law was intended by its proponents as a counter-measure against settlement by White Americans, who used slave labour in their Texas cotton plantations.
The California Genocide was the decrease in the indigenous population of California due to violence, relocation and starvation as a result of the U.S. occupation of California. The indigenous population of California under Spanish rule dropped from 300,000 prior to 1769, to 250,000 in 1834. After Mexico won its independence from Spain, and after the secularization of the coastal missions by the Mexican government in 1834, the indigenous population suffered a much more drastic decrease in population to 150,000. The period immediately following the U.S. Conquest of California has been characterized by numerous sources as a genocide. Under US sovereignty, after 1848, the Indigenous population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 in 1870 and reached its nadir of 16,000 in 1900. From 1846 and 1873, 4,500 to 16,000 California Native Americans were killed by non-Native Americans.
California was one of the last regions in the Americas to be colonized. Spanish missionaries led by Franciscan administrator Junipero Serra and military forces under the command of Gaspar de Portola arrived in 1769. The goal of this mission was to spread the Christian faith among the region's indigenous peoples. They built the first of 21 missions, San Diego de Alcalá, in present-day San Diego. Military outposts were constructed alongside the missions to house the soldiers sent to protect the missionaries.
Mexican sovereignty over Alta California was short lived, as after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed to end the Mexican-American War in 1848, the U.S. took control of California, and in the latter half of the 19th century both State and Federal authorities, incited aided and financed miners, settlers, ranchers and people`s militias to enslave, kidnap, murder and exterminate a major proportion of displaced Native American Indians, sometimes contemptuously referred to as "Diggers", using many of the same policies of violence against the indigenous population that it did throughout its territory.
A notable early eyewitness testimony and account: "The Indians of California" 1864, is from John Ross Browne, Custom's official and Inspector of Indian Affairs on the Pacific Coast systematically categorizing the fraud, corruption, land theft, slavery, rape and massacre perpetrated on a substantial portion of the aboriginal population.
By one estimate, at least 4,500 California Indians were killed between 1849 and 1870. Historian Benjamin Madley recorded the numbers of killings of California Indians between 1846 and 1873 and estimated that during this period at least 9,400 to 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Indians, mostly occurring in more than 370 massacres (defined as the "intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed non-combatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise").
Professor Ed Castillo, of Sonoma State University, provides a higher estimate: "The handiwork of these well armed death squads combined with the widespread random killing of Indians by individual miners resulted in the death of 100,000 Indians in the first two years of the gold rush."
Pre-contact Evidence of human occupation of California dates from at least 19,000 years ago. Prior to European contact, California Indians had 500 distinct sub-tribes or groups, each consisting of 50 to 500 individual members. The size of California tribes today are small compared to tribes in other regions of the United States. Prior to contact with Europeans, the California region contained the highest Native American population density north of what is now Mexico. Because of the temperate climate and easy access to food sources, approximately one-third of all Native Americans in the United States were living in the area of California.
Early Native Californians were hunter-gatherers, with seed collection becoming widespread around 9,000 BC. Due to the local abundance of food, tribes never developed agriculture or tilled the soil. Two early southern California cultural traditions include the La Jolla Complex and the Pauma Complex, both dating from 6050—1000 BC. From 3000 to 2000 BC, regional diversity developed, with the peoples making fine-tuned adaptations to local environments. Traits recognizable to historic tribes were developed by approximately 500 BC.
19th century The population of Native California was reduced by 90% during the 19th century—from more than 200,000 in the early 19th century to approximately 15,000 at the end of the century, mostly due to disease. Epidemics swept through California Indian Country, such as the 1833 malaria epidemic.
In 1834 Mexico secularized the Church's missions and confiscated their properties. But the new government did not return their lands to tribes but made land grants to settlers of at least partial European ancestry. Many landless Indians found wage labour on ranches. Following the United States victory in the Mexican-American War, it took control of California in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Its administrators worked to honour Mexican land grant title but did not honour aboriginal land title.
The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. The sudden influx of immigration and gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy, and California became one of the few American states to go directly to statehood without first being a territory, in the Compromise of 1850. The Gold Rush had severe effects on Native Californians and resulted in a precipitous population decline from disease, genocide and starvation. By the time it ended, California had gone from a thinly populated ex-Mexican territory, to the home state of the first presidential nominee for the new Republican Party, in 1856.
The effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. Whole indigenous societies were attacked and pushed off their lands by the gold-seekers, called "forty-niners" (referring to 1849). The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and Latin America, and they were the first to start flocking to the state in late 1848. Of the 300,000 people who came to America during the Gold Rush, approximately half arrived by sea and half came overland on the California Trail and the Gila River trail; forty-niners often faced substantial hardships on the trip. While most of the newly arrived were Americans, the Gold Rush attracted tens of thousands from Latin America, Europe, Australia, and China. Agriculture and ranching expanded throughout the state to meet the needs of the settlers. San Francisco grew from a small settlement of about 200 residents in 1846 to a boomtown of about 36,000 by 1852. Roads, churches, schools and other towns were built throughout California. In 1849 a state constitution was written. The new constitution was adopted by referendum vote, and the future state's interim first governor and legislature were chosen. In September, 1850, California became a state.
In accordance to Article IV of the Genocide Convention 1948, which requires all parties to prosecute those charged with genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide, regardless of their capacity as a ruler or public official, in a competent tribunal within the State where the crime took place or in a competent international tribunal that has proper jurisdiction over the case, any persons or agencies that commit acts of genocide within the territory of the United States must be held accountable for their crimes.
References
Glauner, Lindsay. "Need for Accountability and Reparations: 1830-1976 the United States Government's Role in the Promotion, Implementation, and Execution of the Crime of Genocide against Native Americans", DePaul Law Review 51 (2001): 911. pp916-917
Chapman, Charles E., Ph.D. (1921). A History of California; The Spanish Period. The MacMillan Company, New York.
Madley, Benjamin (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873.
California and the Indian Wars The California Militia and “Expeditions Against the Indians”, 1850 - 1859
Comentários