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

Introduction: Defining Genocide

Introduction Defining Genocide Now sir I have purchased of the State of California Eden Valley with School Land Warrants. I have by the laws of this State the right of possession—I demand protection from the State. . . . I am attacked by Indians in front and the tax collector in the rear. . . . I did hope that at least our State Government could afford to investigate the grievances which I have laid before your Excellency, If thought advisable to send some Gentlemen to Eden + Round Valleys.To make such an investigation I will be happy to afford here any facilities—I may be found at Benicia. Serranus C. Hastings to Governor John B. Weller, May 4, 1859 Judge Serranus C. Hastings was an important man in 1859, when he wrote his indignant cry for aid to the governor of California, John B. Weller. As the former first chief justice of the California State Supreme Court and the third attorney general, Hastings commanded a great deal of respect because of his office and his place as a founder of California law and order. And so on his past merits alone one could expect that the governor would take note of such a letter. But his influence did not stop there. Indeed by the time he wrote this letter, Hastings had left the bench and the prosecutor’s seat, but he arguably exercised greater public influence in pursuit of his interests in private life. As Hastings admitted in the excerpt above, he came to own all of Eden Valley, which was only part of his vast real estate holdings. He also owned hundreds of head of cattle and horses and was one of the 2 Introduction wealthiest men in the state, and so was influential in another way. His wealth lasted him the remainder of his life and allowed him to make an endowment to create the Hastings School of Law in San Francisco, which continues to operate and bear his name today. Hastings’s role as a jurist of the highest order and the endower of a prestigious law school are ironic distinctions given the injustices he helped perpetrate. Despite his wealth and notoriety, Hastings is emblematic of many of his fellow migrants to antebellum California. His indignant tone and demand for due representation and protection was not unique and can be detected in numerous letters, petitions, reports, and newspaper articles written by myriad whites from the United States emigrating to and settling in California. Indeed Hastings and many others used the democratic process and the structures of republican government to call for and execute a massive genocide of “Indians”during the second half of the nineteenth century.1 Hastings and his fellows committed, directly and indirectly, some of the foulest depredations that men have committed against their fellow men in human history, and they did so openly and under the color of authority, legally, and in the name of freedom and democracy, with the countenance of the silent majority of the nonIndigenous population acting as interested but apathetic bystanders. In fact the landed interests of men like Hastings formed the central motive for genocide in California. The overlay of Euro-American culture, in particular its democratic institutions, made freedom, happiness, and property holding for California Indian peoples nearly an impossibility, as Euro-Americans devised a system that legally treated all Indians more like animals than people—indeed often with less respect than animals —and allowed for their legal mistreatment. Mostly this was done to achieve the goal of getting lands owned by the Indigenous peoples of California into the hands of Euro-American settlers. It is the openly arrived at and executed genocide of Native peoples in order to secure property with which I am concerned in this study. The years 1846 to 1873 saw the creation, through the democratic processes and institutions of the people of the United States, of a culture organized around the dispossession and murder of California Indians. Introduction 3 This paradoxical, democratically imposed system naturalized atrocity against Indian peoples and led to their near eradication by 1900, an extinction avoided in large part by Native Americans’own strategies of resistance and noncooperation.The history of the motives and mechanisms for the genocide of California’s Indigenous peoples, however, is one only slowly making itself part of the mainstream narratives of California and U.S. history. Compared to other topics in state and national history articles...