An American Genocide

Prior to its nineteenth-century Euro american conquest, California was the most densely and diversely settled portion of the native North American West, with approximately 150,000 Indians. And yet by the time of the 1870 census, that number had plunged to just 30,000. Scholars have debated the reasons for this precipitous decline, with some citing starvation and disease as well as other forces of social dislocation attendant to the gold rush. But in An American Genocide, Benjamin Madley offers another explanation (one raised–if only obliquely–in decades past, though never pursued so doggedly): genocide. After reading his important and relentlessly grim book, it would seem hard to argue otherwise. The strength of Madley’s approach is his encyclopedic recounting of Indian killing in the Golden State, perpetrated by all manner of armed groups, including miners, vigilantes, militias, and even the U.S. Army, with the active (and crucial) support of state and federal legislators. These instances of homicidal violence against native peoples fill nearly two hundred pages of appendices at the end of the volume and range from relatively small skirmishes to little-known massacres of untold hundreds, which are all the more horrifying for their obscurity. To his everlasting credit, Madley does not merely count the bodies of the slain men, women, and children but seeks also to “understand the magnitude of the rupture and profound pain caused by their loss: each murder severed personal, familial, and tribal links” (p. 13). At the same time, he fixes the blame meticulously, whether on the killers (like the former Quaker Ben Wright, whose rampages sped the decline of the Modocs) or their abettors (such as Peter Burnett, who, as the first governor of the state of California, helped implement a policy of extermination). If Madley’s sympathies are clear (and how could they not be?), he refuses to editorialize, allowing the actions (and often the words) of the murderers and their enablers to speak plainly and brutally for themselves.

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