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

6. The Murder State

6 The Murder State That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected; while we cannot anticipate this result with but painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert. Peter H. Burnett, governor of California, “Address to the Legislature” (1852) As these words by California’s first U.S. governor demonstrate, California ’s Indigenous population was abandoned to the whims of white citizens by the state government from the beginning. Burnett’s conviction that the “inevitable destiny”of Native Americans was extermination was commonplace among many Euro-Americans in California, as they were in the East. Like thousands of others who had come to California to strike it rich, Burnett believed that God had ordained the end of Native peoples as part of Manifest Destiny. He abandoned any thought of stemming the tide of such extermination because as part of God’s master plan, genocide of the Indian “race [was] beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert.”1 Indeed in the minds of some nineteenth-century Euro-Americans, to turn away from genocide would be to contravene God’s plan. More important, in Burnett’s mind, to do other than let the extermination move forward would ignore his constituency’s demands upon him as their top elected representative. In this Burnett was not alone. His successor, Governor John Bigler, wrote in 1852,“I deplore the unsettled question of affairs in the North [of the state]; but the settlement of new countries, and the progress 232 part 3 of civilization have always been attended with perils. The career of civilization under the auspices of the American people, has heretofore been interrupted by no dangers, and daunted by no perils. Its progress has been an ovation—steady, august, and resistless.”2 Clearly Bigler contextualized his role in much the same way Burnett did, as an instrument of the people to be wielded in concert with, not contradiction of, the historic forces of Manifest Destiny and the popular will of the citizenry. Expressions of the popular will concerning Indians were most often seen in the form of citizens’ petitions to the governor’s office. Every governor of California received petitions from local communities during the 1850s and 1860s asking that the state do something to curb the “Indian troubles”in their region. Some asked that the governor make an appeal to the federal government for troops, hoping that pressure from California’s top official would convince the army to take stronger measures against pestiferous Native groups. Other petitioners asked that the state militia be called up, reminding the governor that he was empowered to do so as its elected commander in chief. But many groups of citizens asked rather that the governor empower them. Drawing up petitions at town hall and county meetings, citizens called attention to the threat posed to their lives and property by Native Americans in their vicinity. As the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War, convened in 1860, would find while interviewing many of these petitioners, it was really a threat to property rather than lives that drove men to petition the governor. Yet despite this realization, the majority of the Committee’s members concurred with the settlers’motives. As most of the men in government in California in its first decade were, like the petitioners, failed gold seekers going in new directions, the petitions found a great deal of sympathy from them. In fact the Committee was convened not to investigate Native American genocide, but why the efforts to exterminate them had cost so much money to achieve. Reporting to their colleagues in the California Senate and Assembly , members of the Committee sought to identify why hundreds of thousands of dollars had to be expended to solve the problems of The Murder State 233 Native-white relations. The majority and minority reports that followed in the wake of their 1860 investigation, which took dozens of depositions from settlers and ranchers in the region, but none from Native Americans, painted a bleak picture of what life had become for Native peoples.3 Most striking were the open admissions of complicity in genocide. Many admitted under oath to killing Native Americans, including men who were not part of authorized volunteer companies, who were simply killing in order to protect their self...