California Sold Bonds to Pay for Indian Genocide Orchestrated by White Militias

Referring to wholesale massacres of California Indian tribes by self-organized white militias as “expeditions,” early California’s legislature figured that the U.S. federal government would eventually pay for rifles, food, wages and other expenses for the men of these deadly campaigns, going as far as to print bonds with George Washington’s portrait on them before officials in Washington D.C. even approved of the operations. Their assumption ultimately proved to be correct.

According to Indian-American historian and UCLA professor Benjamin Madley’s American Genocide: “On May 3, 1852–less than fifteen months after raising $500,000 for ranger militia expeditions against Indians–legislators passed a new $600,000 bond ‘for the payment of the expenses of the Mariposa, Second El Dorado, Utah, Los Angeles, Clear Lake, Klamath, and Trinity, and Monterey Expeditions against the Indians.‘” Madley adds: “The bond issue lured many Californians into financially supporting the [state] killing machine.”

Los Angeles itself was founded on the land of native Californians in 1781 by people who themselves were also “throwaways” for the Spanish crown. Yet before “La Reina del Pueblo de Los Angeles…” was born, there was the San Gabriel Valley mission, established in 1769, where the Tongva (or Kizh) woman Toypurina’s people were held captive. European-Spanish law ruled over this proto-version of L.A. for at least 50 years, after which Mexican and Latin American Independence in 1821 wrested power away. The new Mexican government was supposed to change the mission system which held hostage many native people, but not so unlike today, change took time. Then, it actually wasn’t change anymore.

As UC Merced professor Adam Torres-Rouff tells it in Before L.A.: “After a decade of debate, the territorial authorities, together with the Mexican government, ultimately closed the missions and secularized mission lands, between 1834 and 1836…Once approved, however, California officials failed to implement secularization as designed. Rather than equitably dividing mission property among the former neophytes, they engineered a bonanza for select Mexican Californians.”

This result was not good for native folks in the state, including in the Southern California area. Torres-Rouff points out that: “Rather than a liberal redistribution, secularization effectively dispossessed Indians from their ancestral and mission lands, and tens of thousands left California’s coastal areas for the less populated interior.” Moreover, these laws would not last more than a decade due to the U.S. invasion of Mexico, and in California, a revolt that was actually in violation of the U.S.’s 1794 Neutrality Act.

The select Mexican-Californians were Californios, or elite families in Mexico mostly of old-world Spanish heritage. But rather than ruling over California, these families mostly kept to themselves and their ranches, which led to a rather weak system of government. The 2,000+ miles between say, the city of Monterey in Northern California and Mexico City didn’t help either. Ambitious tradesmen and political forces to the east took note of this, and eventually became a crucial part in taking “Manifest Destiny” all the way to the west coast under President Polk.

On the morning of June 14 1846, a band of white U.S. settlers in the Northern California town of Sonoma were spurred by rumors of Mexican officials expelling them before Polk’s declaration of war on Mexico. They seized and trapped key Mexican generals, including General Mariano Vallejo, his brother Salvador Vallejo, and other officers.

According to Joseph Warren Revere’s A Tour of Duty in California (1849): “The next day a proclamation was issued by the patriots at Sonoma, setting forth their grievances, assuring the peaceable inhabitants of protection, and declaring their intention to establish a republican government, independent of Mexico, or perish in the attempt. A flag was also hoisted bearing a Grizzly Bear rampant, with one stripe below, and the words ‘Republic of California’ above the bear, and a single star in the Union.”

California was officially inducted into U.S. jurisdiction on September 9th, 1850, but even before then, a cast of delegates for the state had already ensured that violence against natives would be fair game. Nothing speaks to this more clearly than the California Act for the Governance and Protection of Indians (1850), which was one of the first laws passed by the state’s first legislature, modeled after those from earlier colonies turned U.S. territories. An American Genocide describes how: “In December 1849, a number of delegates met in Monterey, California to debate about whether or not California Indians should be granted citizenship and/or suffrage. Most of the delegates were against suffrage…” As a result, on April 21st, 1850 the official dehumanization of others–most of all, Native Californians–was written into state law by Governor Burnett; this report prepared by the California Research Bureau (CRB) for the California State Library details more of the specifics of just what the legislation approved:

These U.S. laws (or policies)–like the Mexican laws (or policies prior to them)–had irreversible effects on the lives of the original stewards of the lands from San Francisco through Southern California, whose cultures existed here thousands of years prior to European, Mexican, and American conquests. As a result, Madley notes that: “…between 1850 and 1873 California state judges found whites guilty of very few crimes against California Indians and sentenced only a handful of whites for such crimes.”

An L.A. Times article by Bill Boyarski in 1970 also noted the change in attitude and policy in California’s shift from Mexican to U.S. law: “In the city’s earliest years, when Spaniards and Mexicans ran things, California society was open. Blacks, descendants of Spanish slaves, helped found Los Angeles. Indians were subjected to the strict, paternalistic control of the Franciscan fathers. But at least the priests never engaged in the Indian slaughter favored by Americans who came West during the Gold Rush.”

That Gold Rush, which earned California its moniker as “The Golden State,” can and should be understood as a primary catalyst for the bloodbaths that would follow in the decades after 1846. In Los Angeles alone, Madley recounts that: “…between 1850 and 1870, Los Angeles’s Indian population fell from 3,963 to 219…”

This document from the California Tribal Court-State Court Forum likewise notes that “Before the missionary, fur trapping, and gold rush era migrations, California’s Native American population was estimated at about 200,000…Between 1840 and 1870, [the California Native] population declined to 12,000 due to disease, removal, and death.”

To a great extent these histories are rather esoteric to most of us, given that traditional education in the U.S. has buried them for centuries. As Californians, we’re also not frequently known for expertise in our own state’s history. But the state, as the keeper of laws–including officialized or sanctioned violence–has to be held more accountable. Our media coverage, or any official retelling of these facts, also plays an important role in our understanding–or lack thereof–when it comes to the places we come from, how they’ve been made, and how they might be remade.

J.T.