Newsweek: 'California Slaughter: The State-Sanctioned Genocide of Native Americans'

By Alexander Nazaryan
August 17, 2016

The tally is relentlessly grim: a whole settlement wiped out in Trinity County “excepting a few children”; an Indian girl raped and left to die somewhere near Mendocino; as many as 50 killed at Goose Lake; and, two months later, as many as 257 murdered at Grouse Creek, scores of them women and children. There were the four white ranchers who tracked down a band of Yana to a cave, butchering 30. “In the cave with the meat were some Indian children,” reported a chronicle published later. One of the whites “could not bear to kill these children with his 56-calibre Spencer rifle. ‘It tore them up so bad.’ So he did it with his 38-calibre Smith and Wesson revolver.”

There have been books written about the systematic slaughter of California Indians, but none as gruesomely thorough as Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide, from which the above accounts come. He estimates that between 9,000 and 16,000 Indians, though probably many more, were killed by vigilantes, state militiamen and federal soldiers between 1846 and 1873, in what he calls an “organized destruction” of the state’s largely peaceful indigenous peoples.

Read the full article: http://www.newsweek.com/2016/08/26/california-native-americans-genocide-490824.html

Posted September 16, 2016, 3:09 PM PST