AN AMERICAN GENOCIDE
The United States
and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
By Benjamin Madley
Illustrated. 692 pp. Yale University Press. $38.
The state of
sunshine and pleasure is drenched in the blood of Indians, the victims of mass
killings. These peaked between 1846, when Americans conquered California from
Mexico, and 1873, when they snuffed out the last group resistance by natives in
the state. The slaughter of California’s Indians was rapid and thorough even by
the grim standards prevailing elsewhere in North America. Before 1846,
California’s native peoples suffered great losses from diseases and
dispossession. But Spanish colonizers and their Mexican successors wanted to
preserve Indians as mission inmates or as cheap and dependent farm labor. The
American newcomers, however, came by the thousands and treated natives as
menaces best destroyed, the sooner the better.
Lacking firearms, subdivided into many distinct groups, and greatly outnumbered
by 1852, the California natives were more vulnerable to attack than Indians
elsewhere. As Benjamin Madley writes in “An American Genocide,” by 1873, roaming
bands of Indian-killers played a major role in reducing native numbers by more
than 80 percent. Often the massacres erupted as indiscriminate retribution after
some starving Indians killed and ate a few cattle. Vigilante gangs also profited
by seizing native women and children for sale as slaves, principally in San
Francisco. A Sinkyone survivor, Sally Bell, recalled the morning when “some
white men came. They killed my grandfather and my mother and my father. . . .
Then they killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it in the brush
where I ran and hid.”
Nearly genocidal in their consequences, the mass murders raise the question:
Did they constitute genocide by official design? Madley, a professor of history
at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks so. He thoroughly documents
the extent of the killings and their horrific consequences. In addition to the
grim stories in his text, Madley devotes nearly 200 pages to appendixes listing
every known episode of violence involving California Indians.
“Genocide,” however, is rhetorically double-edged, provoking controversy as it
invites attention. A 20th-century coinage, “genocide” derives from the
industrial and bureaucratic scale of slaughter perfected by the Nazis. The term
distorts if projected back onto the mid-19th century, when governments were far
weaker and less cohesive in their purposes. Shedding more heat than light, the
word often distracts the author from telling his important story as he digresses
to dwell on the 1948 definition of genocide by a United Nations convention.
Emphasizing “intention and repetition” in the California massacres, Madley plays
up the designing role of state and federal officials, in contrast to previous
writers who stressed the autonomy and agency of local vigilantes. State
officials certainly applauded the massacres and often funded or rewarded the
killers. One California senator, John B. Weller, declared of Indians, “Humanity
may forbid, but the interest of the white man demands their extinction.” Madley
concludes that officials created and managed a “well-funded killing machine.”
Much of the evidence, however, shows elected officials reacting to many and
diffuse initiatives by their far-flung constituents, who could and did act on
their own well-developed racial hatred to commit mass murder. And federal
officials did not all collude in facilitating the atrocities. During the 1850s
federal treaty commissioners tried to reduce the bloodshed by isolating natives
on reservations farther from the killers. The label “genocide” ultimately
obscures the decentralized and populist nature of killings that involved
thousands of Americans, high and low in society.
Alan Taylor is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and the
author of “The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 29, 2016, on Page 19 of the
Sunday Book Review with the headline: Golden State Genocide.