Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

2. Emigrant Guides

2 Emigrant Guides And in fine, we are also led to contemplate the time, fast approaching, when the supreme darkness of ignorance, superstition, and despotism, which now, so entirely pervade many portions of those remote regions, will have fled forever, before the march of civilization, and the blazing light, of civil and religious liberty; when genuine republicanism, and unsophisticated democracy, shall be reared up, and tower aloft, even upon the now wild shores, of the great Pacific; where they shall forever stand forth, as enduring monuments, to the increasing wisdom of man, and the infinite kindness and protection, of an all-wise, and overruling Providence. Lansford W. Hastings, Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California (1845) As thousands of emigrants headed west in the 1840s and 1850s, they did so with recent examples to guide them. Many emigrants used printed trail guides, government reports, travel narratives in books and newspapers , or what they learned by word of mouth to help them prepare for and then cross the territorial expanse between the United States and California.These sources served the twin purposes that many believed crucial for the survival of emigrants on the road west: they educated about the trail and the savage Indians that lived along the way and offered suggestions for dealing with both challenges. Lansford Hastings ’s influential trail guide, published in 1845, was just one of many printed examples; it was perhaps the most infamous of guides due to its inaccuracies. Hastings’s guide included two elements that were commonplace in travel instructions and advice: the suggestion that Emigrant Guides 71 emigrants use democratic forms to organize themselves and the warning that all should fear and guard against the hostile Indians emigrants were certain to meet. This type of advice was also often disseminated by word of mouth or in the printed form of government reports, trail guides, and travel narratives that emigrants carried west to California and Oregon. The recommendations within such resources typically provided directions, warnings, and suggestions for a successful trip. They also often contained suggestions for employing traditional EuroAmerican ideals in a practical manner. The direct democracy emigrants employed as an organizing principle and as a way of legislating rules, conferring executive power, and adjudicating disputes among the company was an important tool that embodied the practical application of emigrant values. As the excerpt from Hastings’s guide attests to, this notion of democracy was not only concerned with the journey at hand, but was also bound up with the goals of reconstituting the United States wherever emigrants might settle, satisfying an inevitable “march of civilization” coming to be known as Manifest Destiny. Besides using direct democracy as their organizing principle, emigrants used race, religion, history, and national destiny, discussed in the previous chapter, to explain the context of their journey and the character of the Indigenous peoples they met. When one looks back at these pieces of advice, especially when democracy figured prominently, a sense of irony seems inescapable. When one realizes that these Euro-Americans were on the path to committing genocide, convinced of their racial superiority and all the while proclaiming a love of individuality, freedom, and equality—which they saw, along with God, as their guiding light—the contradiction is clear. For the past thirty years or more historians have had a clear picture of what life was like on the overland trails of the 1840s and 1850s.1 Emigrants undertook long, difficult, and dangerous journeys, but only very rarely was the danger ever due to hostility from Native peoples.2 Sifting through the tremendous amount of available evidence provided by myriad diaries, letters, memoirs, and published trail narratives, one sees that few emigrants were attacked, let alone killed, by Native 72 part 1 Americans.3 The historian John Unruh Jr., a well-known overland trail scholar, has calculated that no more than 4 percent of emigrants who died on the overland trails died from attacks by Native Americans.4 Scholars like Unruh and those who have built upon his work have calculated that up to 90 percent of the deaths on the trail were the result of disease.5 But one would not have known this from the rumors, stories, and trail literature of the nineteenth century; one would have believed the source of the deaths along the trail had savage origins. A common notion existed among Euro-Americans that Indians were bloodthirsty savages and the...