An american genocide, p.14
An American Genocide, page 14
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TURNING POINT: THE KILLING CAMPAIGNS OF DECEMBER 1849–MAY 1850
Their position being entirely surrounded, they were attacked under most embarrassing circumstances; but as they could not escape, the island soon became a perfect slaughter pen.
—US Army brevet captain Nathaniel Lyon, 1850
His mother told him to climb high up in the tree, so he did and from there he said he could see the solders running about the camp and shooting the men and women and stabing the boys and girls. [H]e said mother was not yet dead and was telling him to keep qui[e]t. [T]wo of the solders heard her talking and ran up to her and stabed her and child.
—Pomo survivor, n.d., paraphrased by William Ralganal Benson, 1832
Perhaps Shuk leaned too far when he threw his lasso. Maybe the young Pomo Indian’s horse, borrowed from his white employers without permission, reared when the rope shot over its head. Or, perhaps his mount slipped chasing that ox. Whatever the reason, the horse fell and Shuk landed on the sodden ground. Horse and ox then vanished into the rain-streaked night. Thus began, in December 1849, a cascading series of events that plunged the region’s Indian peoples into mortal danger and changed California forever.
By December 1849, the Eastern Pomo and Clear Lake Wappo Indians working for Charles Stone and Andrew Kelsey on Big Valley Ranch, ninety miles north of San Francisco, were starving. William Ralganal Benson, an Eastern Pomo man born in 1862 near Lakeport—just north of Big Valley—spoke with five Indian men who had lived on Big Valley Ranch at the time: Shuk, Xasis, Ba-Tus, Kra-nas, and Ma-Laxa-Qe-Tu. Benson was in a unique position to do so. In early adolescence, he became “the hereditary chief of both the Xolo-napo and the Xabe-napo divisions of” the Eastern Pomo people. Many years later, in 1932, Benson published a detailed account of their story.1
The killing campaigns of December 1849–May 1850
This photograph shows a Pomo man paddling a tule canoe on Clear Lake in what is now Lake County, California. Edward S. Curtis, “In the Tule Swamp—Upper Lake Pomo,” photograph, 1924. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Edward S. Curtis Collection, LC-USZ62-98670.
According to Benson, “the Indians who was starving hired a man by the name of Shuk [later known as Chief Augustine] and another man by the name of Xasis. to kill a beef for them.” While trying to lasso an ox, “Shuks horse fell to the ground. the horse and the ox [then] go away.” Returning to the Indian people who had hired them, Shuk and his partner Xasis called an all-night council in Xasis’s home. The gathering was deadly serious. When livestock went missing, some California ranchers were quick to blame nearby Indians. The loss of one horse could trigger indiscriminate retaliatory killings and even mass violence against entire indigenous communities. Thus, the men who met in Xasis’s house that night had reason to be afraid as they considered how to respond to the loss of their employers’ horse.2
The Eastern Pomo and Clear Lake Wappo people who labored for Stone and Kelsey at Big Valley Ranch were longtime residents of the Clear Lake region. Eastern Pomo peoples traditionally lived in intimate connection with Clear Lake. They resided near that nineteen-mile-long body of water in villages largely organized along kinship lines and led by a ká•xa•likh, or chief. They built circular or elliptical houses—sometimes dozens of feet long and large enough to accommodate multiple families—of tule reeds collected from along the lakeshore. They navigated its waves in tule canoes, traversed its islands and shores wearing woven tule leggings with laced tule moccasins, and nestled their sleepy infants in beds of shredded tules. Their annual cycles likewise centered on the lake. In February, March, and April they speared pike and trapped suckers, hitch, and chay from streams flowing into Clear Lake. In May and June, they snared blackfish and carp in the lake itself. In June and July, they harvested Clear Lake’s freshwater clams. Eastern Pomo people then transitioned to gathering bulbs, berries, clover, pinole seeds, roots, and acorns. In fall and winter they hunted waterfowl. Clamshell beads of standardized value served as currency and Eastern Pomos traded extensively with other California Indians, presumably including their neighbors, the Clear Lake Wappos. Less is known about the Clear Lake Wappo people, but although their language was different, they likely shared the Eastern Pomo focus on the lake.3
Both Eastern Pomo and Clear Lake Wappo people were part of larger Pomo and Wappo groups. Traditional Pomo territory can be divided into seven distinct language regions stretching across an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. These lands ranged from the hills northeast of Clear Lake to the redwood coast and from the lower Russian River region to north of what is now Fort Bragg. Wappo territory was smaller. It included a five-square-mile area adjoining southern Clear Lake, parts of what are now the Napa and Alexander valleys, and adjoining regions. Wappo people spoke five geographically specific dialects and lived in villages led by male or female chiefs elected, appointed, or chosen by other Wappos. By periodically traveling to the Pacific or buying foods with clamshell beads or magnesite cylinders, they created a varied cuisine. Their fare included abalone, clams, crabs, eels, and salmon, as well as duck, goose, quail, venison, and rabbit. Acorns, clover, roots, and dried seaweed added to their menus, and honey, sweet pitch, and salt provided additional seasonings. As neighbors, Pomo and Wappo people seem to have shared musical instruments and pastimes. Both peoples played the cocoon rattle, double-boned whistle, flute, plank drum, and rattle. Both also enjoyed similar games including dice, the grass game, guessing games, a stick-and-ball game called shinny, and contests of strength. Some Pomos and Wappos also shared less pleasant experiences.4
Stone and Kelsey routinely seared terror and pain into the minds and bodies of the Eastern Pomo and Clear Lake Wappo people living on Big Valley Ranch. They also sometimes killed them. Shuk’s loss of the pair’s horse threatened to unleash additional, possibly lethal violence. So the men meeting in Xasis’s house carefully considered three possible responses to the lost horse: appeasing Stone and Kelsey, admitting the loss of the horse, or killing the two men.
That they considered killing Stone and Kelsey may at first seem extreme, but the Indian people on Big Valley Ranch harbored six profound grievances against the two ranchers. These included de facto slavery, institutionalized starvation, torture, rape, abandonment at gold mines, and the threat of imminent forced removal. Examining each grievance provides insight into the range of crimes perpetrated by ranchers against California Indian laborers during the late 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, the demographic carnage these acts inflicted, and the reasons that California Indian laborers sometimes violently resisted their oppressors.
Charles Stone and Andrew Kelsey were reportedly the first Anglo-American colonists in the Clear Lake region. There were three Kelsey brothers, all of whom seem to have joined the Bear Flag Party that hoisted the Bear Flag at Sonoma in 1846, and all three were among the region’s Anglo-American vanguard. In the fall of 1847, Stone, Andrew Kelsey, his brother Benjamin Kelsey, and a man named Shirland bought perhaps 15,000 cattle and 2,500 horses from the Mexican landholder Salvador Vallejo along with “the right to use the lands where the animals were pastured.” They began grazing these and other animals on Vallejo’s vast Clear Lake ranch. However, according to nineteenth-century historian L.L. Palmer, it remains unknown “whether Stone and Kelsey ever purchased any right to the land or not, or indeed any right of any kind, as the place was very far removed from civilization then, and they were not likely to be molested.” Stone, Shirland, and the two Kelseys also took possession of the Eastern Pomo and Clear Lake Wappo people living on the ranch. They did this in accordance with the Mexican custom by which California ranchers transferred control of indigenous people with the land, much as some European landowners transferred serfs with estates. Thus, along with many newcomers who acquired Mexicans’ California ranches in the 1840s, 1850s, and early 1860s, the trio assumed control of an existing unfree labor system. Charles Stone and Andrew Kelsey, who remained at the ranch as managers, became overseers.5
Stone and Kelsey treated the Pomo and Wappo people on Big Valley Ranch as slaves. According to Palmer, Indians performed all of the work, and it was “slave labor of the worst kind,” the only pay consisting of “very short rations and a few bandana handkerchiefs.” From the five Indian men he interviewed, Benson learned how Stone and Kelsey imprisoned Eastern Pomo and Clear Lake Wappo people on the ranch:
This photograph shows William Ralganal Benson, a master basket maker, toward the end of his life, with what was probably one of his own works. Benson was “hereditary chief of both the Xolo-napo and the Xabe-napo divisions of” the Eastern Pomo people, according to legal scholar Max Radin. See Radin, “Introduction,” in Benson, “Stone and Kelsey ‘Massacre,’ ” 266. Roger Sturtevant, “William [Ralganal] Benson [Eastern Pomo] holding a fine Pomo feathered basket,” photograph, ca. 1931. Courtesy of Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the Regents of the University of California, Catalogue No. 15-18497.
These two white men had the indians to build a high fence around their villages. and the head riders were to see that no indian went out side of this fence after dark. if any one was caught out side of this fence after dark was taken to stones and kelseys house and there was tied both hands and feet and placed in a room and kept there all night. the next day was taken to a tree and was tied down. then the strongs man was chosen to whippe the prisoner.
Shuk, who would have been about eighteen years old in 1849, later became the Hoolanapo Pomo chief Augustine, the leader of an Eastern Pomo clan that Stone and Kelsey seem to have held at Big Valley Ranch. In 1881, Palmer described Augustine as “a very intelligent man” who “bears a good name among the white citizens for probity and veracity.” In an interview with Palmer, Augustine recalled that Kelsey “took Indians down to the lower valleys and sold them like cattle or other stock.” Indeed, Stone and Kelsey practiced chattel slavery, but with a lethal twist. To them, their Indian slaves were disposable.6
Unlike antebellum slave owners in the Southern United States, who in the 1850s often paid hundreds of dollars for an African American slave, and sometimes more than $1,500, Californians typically spent between $35 and $200 to acquire de facto ownership of an Indian. Supply and demand, in combination with rising tobacco and cotton prices, dictated this radical price difference. By the 1840s, the South’s supply of African American slaves came almost exclusively from biological reproduction. The federal government’s 1808 ban on the transatlantic slave trade to the United States limited new supply to births and a very small illegal international slave trade. Supply grew more slowly than demand and, in combination with rising demand for cotton and tobacco, pushed African American slave prices dramatically upward in the 1840s and 1850s. By contrast, the supply of potential de facto California Indian slaves remained relatively elastic (there were still tens of thousands of California Indians) and acquisition costs were low. Anglo-Californians, Californios, and Europeans could purchase California Indians from ranchers who already held them as unfree laborers, or from slave raiders. Alternatively, they could become slave raiders themselves, kidnapping California Indians and paying nothing to acquire de facto slaves. This factor was crucial in determining the relatively low cost of de facto California Indian slaves. At the same time, demand—undercut by a rapidly growing immigrant labor supply—rarely pushed prices to the levels of those for African American chattel slaves.7
The relatively low cost of acquiring de facto California Indian slaves—combined with profound racism—sometimes led to their treatment as disposable laborers. Some Californians treated Indians as disposable laborers based on a profound disregard for their value as human beings and how cheaply they could be replaced. This twisted moral and economic calculus helps to explain the brutal logic behind Stone and Kelsey’s abysmal treatment of Indian workers, including their institutionalized starvation.8
Thomas Knight, who settled in the nearby Napa Valley in 1845, explained that at Big Valley Ranch, Indian workers received so little food that they occasionally took and ate a bullock, despite the threat of corporal punishment. The Indians on Big Valley Ranch had difficulty augmenting insufficient rations with game because Stone and Kelsey held the Indians’ hunting weapons in “the loft of the house,” for fear that the workers might use these weapons against them. Benson explained that the people “were starving” because “stone or kelsey would not let them go out hunting or fishing.” He also reported that, one year, “about 20 old people died during the winter from starvation.” According to Benson, starvation was the primary reason some Big Valley Ranch Indians wanted to kill Stone and Kelsey—but hardly the only motive.9
Stone and Kelsey also tortured their workers and sometimes killed them in the process. Chief Augustine (Shuk) recollected, “Stone and Kelsey used to tie up the Indians and whip them if they found them out hunting on the ranch anywhere, and made a habit of abusing them generally.” Knight recalled that if a worker broke a rule, Stone and Kelsey would hang the worker “up by his thumbs, so that his toes just touched the floor . . . and keep him there two or three days, sometimes with nothing to eat.” After interviewing Pomo people between 1903 and 1906, anthropologist S.A. Barrett concluded that torture was routine: “Any offence of a worker was punished by whipping, a trivial offense drawing sometimes as many as fifty lashes.” Benson described torments, “such as whipping and tieing their hand togather with rope. the rope then thrown over a limb of a tree and then drawn up untill the indians toes barly touchs the ground and let them hang there for hours. this was common punishment.” Stone and Kelsey also brutalized Indians for entertainment. According to Palmer, “It is stated by white men that it was no uncommon thing for them to shoot an Indian just for the fun of seeing him jump, and that they lashed them as a sort of a recreation when friends from the outside world chanced to pay them a visit.” Torture sometimes led to death. Benson wrote: “From severe whipping 4 died.”10
Stone and Kelsey also routinely raped Indian women and girls, and countered resistance to their sexual assaults with torture and threats of violence. George C. Yount of Napa Valley recalled that Stone and Kelsey had sought “freedom for their unbridled lusts among the youthful females.” According to Benson, “When a father or mother of young girl. was asked to bring the girl to his house. by stone or kelsey. if this order was not obeyed. he or her would be whipped or hung by the hands . . . such punishment occurred two or three times a week. and many of the old men and women died from fear and starvation.” The terrible repercussions of resistance may explain why Augustine initially endured it when, “by all it is stated that they took Augustine’s wife and forced her to live with one of them as his concubine, and compelled her to cease all relations with her legal spouse.” These sexual assaults perpetrated by Stone and Kelsey were likely another major consideration for the men in Xasis’s house as they considered their options.11
This portrait shows a young Pomo woman wearing strands of clamshell beads, which Pomo people used as currency. The dark colored bead on one strand is probably a magnesite cylinder, a highly valued object. Edward S. Curtis, “Pomo Girl,” photograph, 1924, in Curtis, North American Indian, 14 supplement: plate 482. Courtesy of Rauner Library at Dartmouth College.
Stone and Kelsey also murdered Indians outright. Benson reported that Stone shot a young man “to deth” for taking wheat to his “sick and starveing” mother. Local whites added that Stone and Kelsey repeatedly slew their workers. Knight recollected, “Sometimes they would kill an Indian outright on the spot for some small offence. In driving them in to their place they would shoot any of the old or infirm ones by the wayside.” Yount recalled simply: “They murdered the indians without limits or mercy.”12
Like his brother Andrew, Benjamin Kelsey—a part owner of the ranch—treated Indians as disposable laborers. Like many California ranchers, Benjamin Kelsey redeployed Indian ranch hands as miners during the gold rush. In the spring of 1849, he went to Clear Lake. There he obtained between 50 and 100 Eastern Pomo and possibly Clear Lake Wappo men from Charles Stone and his brother Andrew and took them east to the goldfields. On arriving, Benjamin Kelsey began selling off supplies to other miners and eventually had no supplies left with which to feed the men he had brought from Clear Lake. From interviews with Pomo people, Barrett concluded that these men “were forced to do the hardest kind of work and were kept on very meager rations. Informants freely used the term ‘starved’ to describe the plight of these workers.” Augustine recalled simply that Kelsey “did not feed the Indians.” Conditions deteriorated further when malaria broke out. Benjamin Kelsey fell ill and abandoned the 50 to 100 men he had brought to the mines. Augustine explained, “Two . . . died there” and the rest “got dissatisfied and wanted to go home. . . . On the road they all died from exposure and starvation, except three men, who eventually got home.” According to other sources, Benjamin Kelsey’s willful neglect, combined with disease and exposure, killed as many as ninety-nine Indian men. Surviving Big Valley Ranch Indians were thus profoundly concerned when, in a new turn of events, Stone and Kelsey began preparing to move the community’s women, children, and elders east over the mountains to the Sacramento Valley.13
This menace of imminent forced removal was likely another major factor under discussion in Xasis’s house that night. Augustine recollected that Stone and Kelsey “tried to get the Indians to go to the Sacramento River, near Sutters Fort, and make a big rancheria there. They would thus get rid of all except the young men.” Benjamin Kelsey’s disastrous mining expedition—and the many men who had died as a result—preyed on their minds. Anxieties rose as Stone and Kelsey ordered the people to braid ropes with which to bind their friends, relatives, and neighbors for the impending march.14
