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fOREWORD In the early winter of 1848, Johann August Sutter, a former Mexican governmental official, local caudillo (warlord), and Indian slave owner, hastily convened a meeting with the chiefofthe Colma Nissenan Indians. Appointed by the military governor as the new United States Indian subagent and now apparently a rehabilitated ex-Mexican Patriot, Sutter shouldered the task of establishing official relations with the local tribesmen that he had until recently terrorized and enslaved. His first order of business was to negotiate a"treaty" with Coloma tribesmen that would lease the entire watershed ofthe American River to Sutter personally. After all, gold had recently been discovered at a sawmill he had commissioned to be constructed nearby. During the negotiations, Sutter was warned by the chief that the yellow metal he so eagerly sought "belonged to a demon who devoured all who searched for it:' In a moment of clarity, the military governor of Alta California denied Sutter's self-serving actions. Nevertheless, the chief's dire predictions proved to be devastatingly on target. In popular literature and school textbooks the events that followed the discovery of gold have for too long been portrayed as a great adventure, luring American males to the far west in search of personal fortunes and validating the hysterically popular doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The predominate theme in these representations has been the personal sacrifices, hardships, and ultimate disappointment in the great enterprise. The fate of the California Indians was, like Indian futures everywhere, doomed and dismissed into the waste bin of history. After all, these writers reasoned, the Indians were a stone-age people who, in social Darwinistic dogma, must inevitably yield to the overpowering force ofa technologically "superior people ." This book is about the human cost of that adventure. ix x "EXTERMINATE THEM" Underlying the events chronicled in this documented history of the California Indians in the gold rush is what I describe as the "chaos theory" of Gold Rush history. Historians and other writers have the tendency to assemble historical documents and measurable facts in such a way as to construct a rational, modular organization of data chronicling events that seem to unfold in a rather pedestrian and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 facts 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 ofthis era through its historical documents re,veals quite the contrary. There was, in fact, a complete breakdown of all legal and moral constraints on American immigrants' civic and criminal behavior. For example, California's first governor bluntly advocated Indian genocide by declaring, ''A war of extermination 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 from 1850 to 1868 was essentially a twisted Darwinian laboratory showcasing the triumph ofbrute force aided by a pathogenic and technological assault on a native people unparalleled in Western hemispheric history. In fact nothing even remotely similar to the mass murder and concomitant , 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...

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