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

3. The Overland Trail Experience

3 The Overland Trail Experience Digger. . . . I first heard the name from specimens of an abandoned class of the mountaineer type of white men. Some of these were indeed as degraded as it is possible to imagine.They seemed to think no more of killing an Indian than shooting a coyote. One of these men whom I saw boasted of the number of Indians he had killed, keeping the account by notches which he cut on his tomahawk handle that counted nearly a hundred.This was the sort of man that brought the name Digger from the Rocky Mountains to California. John Bidwell to Miss Miller, December 28, 1894 The way that most of the tens of thousands of emigrants experienced the overland trail to California in the 1840s and 1850s was much different than what they might have expected based on the stories circulated back in the United States, especially in newspapers, travel narratives , government reports, and emigrant guides.The course advised by men like Hastings, when put into practice, often produced situations with much different outcomes. Moreover a variety of scenarios not anticipated in the trail guides occurred, offering myriad examples of Euro-American ideas of race, religion, national destiny, and democracy operating on the overland trails in an atmosphere of abject fear of Indian attack. Ezra M. Hamilton’s experience provides an important window on the way that anxiety and fear blended to create ridiculous scenarios that sadly helped to strengthen Euro-American hatred and disregard for Native peoples. Hamilton headed west in 1853 to prospect for 110 part 1 gold. He traveled over the California-Oregon Trail with a company of emigrants, who, like himself, were concerned about Indian attack. The company followed the advice recommended in almost every trail guide: to go heavily armed and to keep a watch at night. Hamilton was armed with knife, rifle, and Colt revolver, plus plenty of ammunition. To defend against attack, each night the group mounted a two-man guard. One night, while on guard duty and finding his fellow guard sleeping, Hamilton determined to pay him out for his disregard of duty. He sharpened a stick of green willow wood about three feet in length. Creeping up to the sleeping man, he stabbed the shaft into his leg and retreated into the darkness to watch the outcome of what he considered a joke to pay the man for his laziness. But something much more than he intended followed. The man awoke, screaming and in pain, seeing the “arrow”sticking out of him. Already roused by his scream, the rest of the company rushed to him, and the man proceeded to report an Indian attack.The men of the company were incensed and immediately took up their arms and stood prepared to fight. So bloody-minded was the group that Hamilton dared not reveal his prank, knowing, he said, that he might be hanged on the spot.1 Native Americans were punished for Hamilton’s joke gone awry. From that night on, the company proceeded with the full and true knowledge that savage Indians had attacked them. They redoubled their defensive efforts and stood ready to kill any Native Americans that might come too close. Luckily none crossed paths with the company , with the possible exception of Hamilton, but members of the group would contribute to the myth of Indian savagery and hostility, as they would tell others along the trail and once in California of the attack their group had suffered. They arrived in California with both fear and an unsatisfied desire for revenge for the false attack and all the days and nights of trepidation that followed. As one pair of scholars has pointed out, in the mind-set underpinning genocides,“vengeance is psychologically satisfying.”2 And as these travelers never exacted any vengeance on the trail, they likely sought it elsewhere. Emigrants traveled west in a state of high anxiety and fear of at- The Overland Trail Experience 111 tack by Indigenous populations, despite the reality that few emigrants encountered such. Rumor and disquiet, not reality, ruled the American perception of the Native peoples of the Trans-Mississippi and Far West.3 This anxious state profoundly affected both how emigrants dealt with the Native Americans they came across on the trail and how they treated the Native population of California at journey’s end. It also affected the minds of the emigrants in...