Required reading for a full understanding
of our conquest of the American West
and, perhaps, our current state of affairs
Killing for Land in Early California: Indian Blood at Round Valley 1856-1863 by Frank H Baumgardner III. Algora Publishing. 2006. $23. (Out of print but still available with some searching.)
A couple of months back, I reported on Carranco and Beard’s Genocide and Vendetta, the expose of atrocities committed just north of here by white settlers upon their discovery of a fertile and hidden Round Valley. Here’s a link: https://thechurchoftheopenroad.blogspot.com/2018/05/genocide-and-vendetta.html
Recall that the volume, published in 1981 by the University of Oklahoma Press, inflamed the passions of the descendants of the victors to the extent that a bogus plagiarism law suit prompted the U of O to suspend publication. Many of the copies, it has been reported, were snatched up and destroyed by those eager to erase this bloody portion of California history. Remaining few may be had by ponying up prices ranging from $350 to $1140, depending on condition, either on line or, if you’re lucky, at a used book store.
My concluding admonition was “Let’s do what we can to ensure voices are not stilled by those they might offend or expose.”
An Amazon search (although I did not purchase my copy from Jeff Bezos) found Baumgardner’s Killing for Land, a text that might cover the same ground. The independent Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah was able to find a new copy for me.
Baumgardner references Carranco and Beard frequently but also cites period newspapers, federal and state reports and records, dissertations, census reports and personal interviews in order to detail how local land owners and wanna-be cattle barons thwarted the government’s attempt to provide sanctuary to displaced Native Americans. While serious corruption occurred on the watch of some Indian administrators – corruption that lead to those folks looking away as Euro-American war parties set off to slaughter the natives based upon false claims of horse and cattle depredations – many others reported that the Native Americans were peaceable, willing to learn farm trades and desirous of learning the language.
Set in history against the backdrop of the Civil War, folks in Washington, while in receipt of reports and requests for monetary support for the Round Valley Reservation, barely afforded those requests passing attention. Thus, seed supplies for the Nome Cult Farm, established on the reservation to create self-sufficiency, were denied or ignored. Government Agents had little resource to repair fences pulled down by settlers or establish tribunals to call those guilty Euro-Americans to task. With the fences down, Government livestock wandered off to be appropriated by the settlers. Crops were grazed off by settler’s cattle or trampled to dust.
With the assent of the Agent, Native Americans from as far away as Chico-Oroville (the Concow) and Placer-Nevada Counties (the Maidu) starving, left the “protection” provided by the government to return to their ancestral homelands. Leaving in October, before the streams were too full to cross and before the snow flew, more than 450 Concow struggled to return to Butte County only to find white settlers there unwilling to allow them back. Returning over the Mayacamas (Coast Range) just 277 survived. 184 had departed or died on the trail. It was California’s “Trail of Tears.”
Captain Charles D Douglas, Commander of Company F, 2ndInf, Round Valley California, in a message to headquarters wrote: “Now the Question is which of the two parties is to blame for this wild and disorderly state of Indian affairs, the Government Agents or the Settlers?”
The lens of history shows us that it was a combination of factors: Poor support for managing the reservation coming out of DC, superior weaponry in the hands of settlers, greed, corruption and bald-faced lying under oath, all coupled with the remote and rugged nature of the terrain made supervision and first-hand observations of the Mendocino Indian War less than a footnote in the troubled history of the times.
The area Yukis, Wailaki and Pomo were doomed from the moment the first whites set eyes on the place.
In the text’s final line, Baumgardner cheekily concludes: “There may be a little poetic justice in the recent success of Native American tribes through the legalization of casino gambling.”
My conclusions are darker:
1 “…California Indians were among the most gentle and ‘primitive’ of North America’s aboriginal peoples. Most were generally at peace and harmony with their environment, and that harmony – exemplified in their view of nature and themselves as parts of a whole and their acceptance of what life offered them – branded the California Indians as hopelessly ignorant, lazy, backward and ignoble in the eyes of many of the whites.” [quoting Elizabeth Renfro in The Shasta Indians and Their Neighbors, 1992]. Renfro’s quote sounds starkly similar to the thoughts of some of my fellow citizens regarding blacks, Mexicans, Muslims… After all: Who are we if we cannot say we are better than someone else?
2 George Santayana reminds us: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Reading about the corruption, theft, falsehoods and protection of the guilty from the Round Valley Wars, an apt then-and-now comparison might be drawn.
3. Therefore, I’d again suggest: Let’s do what we can to ensure voices are not stilled by those they might offend or expose.
This is a difficult volume to read, very textbook-like but, I would hazard, quite essential if we are to gain understanding of and an appreciation for a fragment of history those once in power would just as soon have us forget.
It is well worth asking your local independent book seller to search out a copy for you.
© 2018
Church of the Open Road Press
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