Killing for Land in Early California: Indian Blood at Round Valley, 1856-1863 (review)

Under U.S. rule, the Yuki Indians of Northern California's Round Valley region died rapidly. From 1854 to 1864 alone, the Yuki population plunged from "as many as twenty thousand" (p. 34) to just a few hundred. What accounted for these many deaths? Frank Baumgardner suggests that the primary cause was a "bloody conflict" (p. 264). Building on the work of Virginia Miller, Lynwood Carranco, Estle Beard, and other Round Valley historians, Baumgardner attempts to explain, "how and why a deadly conflict raged that lasted five years and was so very deadly to one side" (p. 10).

Baumgardner begins by describing the Yuki and by suggesting that Round Valley violence was part of a larger "genocidal struggle between two peoples of vastly different cultures over control of the entire northern half of California" (p. 18). He next describes the establishment of what later became the Round Valley Reservation, the escalated killing of Indians, and settlers', soldiers', and Indian Office officials' "conflicting views" (p. 50) over local Indian policy. After narrating "Gen. Kibbe's 'Expedition'" against other Indians north of the Yuki, Baumgardner describes the zenith of Round Valley violence. In September 1859, after vigilantes led by Walter Jarboe had killed many Indians earlier in the year, the Governor of California hired these men to hunt down Indians beyond the reservation. In total, Jarboe's men "killed . . . well over four hundred" (p. 179) Indians and in 1860 California legislators "paid the company over $9,000 for its many deadly raids" (pp. 97-8). Baumgardner next discusses why many settlers supported and participated in Indian killing. He then devotes five chapters to analyzing specific primary sources and four chapters to chronicling the continuing violence and death on and around Round Valley between 1861 and 1864. Finally, he offers an eight-page Conclusion.

Baumgardner contributes to our understanding of Round Valley history by bringing previously unutilized primary sources to bear and by adding new context and insights. However, like most scholars of the cataclysm, Baumgardner grapples superficially with the central issue of genocide. In his Preface, he notes that California "immigrants . . . with long-range weapons . . . had the power to annihilate entire Native American tribes" (p. 2). He also writes of "the genocidal and vigilante type of violence" (p. 258) in "Northern and Northwestern California," "the genocide process" (p. 116) as it applied to one series of killings near Round Valley, and Jarboe's having "committed genocide" (p. 122). Yet, in the end, Baumgardner frames the Round Valley catastrophe as "conflict," not genocide.

It was both. Using the definition in the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, it is difficult not to interpret Baumgardner's narrative as a history of genocide. According to the Convention, genocide is evidenced by "intent to destroy [a group], in whole or in part" coupled with specific genocidal acts such as "killing members of the group" (United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, p. 280). Baumgardner documents evidence suggesting whites' genocidal intent as well as the killing of many hundreds of Indians, by "death squads" (p. 57), paid state militiamen, soldiers, and individual whites in multiple homicides and massacres. By contrast, there is no credible documentation of any Indian articulating "intent to destroy" the white community, and Baumgardner quotes whites describing local Indians' generally peaceful intentions. What happened in and around Round Valley was not merely a "bloody conflict." As Baumgardner points out, many Yuki were "exterminated" (p. 262), while "Euro-Americans lost fewer than ten settlers during the seven-year period in the Mendocino War" (pp. 7-8).

Baumgardner's chapter on the California Legislature's 1860 Majority Report of the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War might have specifically cited these legislators when they proclaimed: "We are unwilling to attempt to dignify, by the term 'war,' a slaughter" (California Legislature, Majority and Minority...