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California Indian War Commentary (10 pages)
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Page: of 10
Amazon.com: Editorial Reviews: 'Extermina..uring the California Gold Rush, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/book-reviews/0870 1350 15/102-2428800-7205656
documents and measurable facts in such a way as to construct a rational,
modular organization of data chronicling events that seem to unfold in a rather
— pedestrian and predictable manner. Studies of gold rush mining laws, the
adoption of the state constitution in 1850, and other historical fact seem to
suggest an orderly and ultimately responsible reaction to the hectic events of a
nineteenth-century mining frontier. However a more analytical, thoughtful and
critical study of this era through its historical documents reveals quite the
contrary. There was, in fact, a complete breakdown of all legal and moral
constraints o rican immigrants! civic and orimin ior.
governor bluntly advocated Ifidian genocide by declaring, "A
war of « ion will continue to be waged between the races until the
. Indian race becomes extinct."
>
This work documents the creation of state laws that virtually enslaved
__ California Indians, despite the fact that California entered the Union as a "free"
state. It further reveals the systematic abrogation of guarantees of protection
for Indian land and civil rights according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
This international agreement had severed Mexico's tenuous hold on the
population and territory of Alta California. The state constitutional convention
deemed Indian citizenship, property, and civil rights and their right to testify in
court proceedings to be unimportant. Consequently the state's native peoples
were relegated to the legal status of extraconstitutional nonpersons. This legal
chicanery made possible the greatest orgy of land fraud, dispossession, slavery,
and mass murder ever witnessed in North American Indian history. The period
ww’ from 1850 to 1868 was essentially a twisted Darwinian laboratory showcasing
the triumph of brute force aided by a pathonogenic and technological assault on
a native people unparalleled in Western hemispheric history.
In fact nothing even remotely similar to the mass murder and cocomitant gut
wrenching vortex of population decline seen in this period has ever been
recorded in United States history. This is not to dismiss the traumatic removal,
aggressive military assaults, and dispossession of Cherokees during the 1828
Georgia Gold Rush in their beloved homeland. Nor does it trivialize the
devastating effects of the 1876 Black Hills gold discovery in the sacred Black
Hills of the Dakotas. Even the Alaskan Gold Rush at the turn of this century
fails to provide a comparable example of territorial loss or a comparable body
count.
As the 150th anniversary of the California gold discovery approached, I, along
with many other California Indians, struggled with my consciousness about how
I might participate in the California Sesquicentennial in an honest and dignified
manner. To ignore it would be to surrender to those who would trivialize the
-violent annihilation of something like half of our surviving population. For those
/ interested in only the bottom line, 100,000 California Indians died in the first
X two years of the Gold Rush. Not much here to celebrate.
Wyandot Indian historian Professor Cliff Trafzer and his coauthor Joel Hyer
3 of 5 04/14/2000 10:37 AM