California's forgotten investor-backed genocide squads
Mass murder pitched as an investment opportunity, backed by the power of the
U.S. government. What a perfect encapsulation of the American Way.
Yasha Levine
Jan 27
"A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until
the Indian race becomes extinct."
- Peter H. Burnett, the first governor of California, 1851
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We've been working on a historical segment of our water oligarch doc, trying
to trace California's transformation into an industrial society dominated by
forty million people, freeways, suburbs, and giant farms - all of it
underpinned by over a thousand damns and the biggest aqueduct system in the
world. So I've reading up on California's early history - particularly about
the genocide of California's Indian tribes.
Having grown up in San Francisco, I must say that I'm a bit embarrassed by
how little I know - or knew - about it. Seems ridiculous that I've been more
familiar with something like the Armenian genocide, which took place on the
other side of the world, than with the genocide that happened right under my
feet, in a place where I have lived on and off since my family moved here
from the Soviet Union in 1990. But I know I'm alone here. Lots of people in
America are more familiar with atrocities committed in far-away places than
those that took place right outside their door. I guess it's always easier
to project outward than it is to look at the horrors of your own society -
horrors that can't be easily unwound or separated from your own life, and
which go against notions of your own cultural superiority.
One thing I didn't realize was in what short a time frame the genocide
happened here, with most of it occurring in the span of a decade - starting
in around 1850, when the region was flooded by a locust-horde of crazed
settlers looking for gold.
True, the locals began to be decimated long before the Gold Rush. The
Spanish - with their germs and their forced enslavement - did a lot of the
early work. And Russia's fur trappers didn't do anyone any favors, either.
But the "real" genocide started with the Gold Rush - when a population of
about 150,000 California Indians was reduced to somewhere between 15,000 and
20,000 in the span of several decades. That's a 90 percent reduction.
Impressive considering how big the big and spread out California was, and
how primitive the methods: shooting, stabbing, slow starvation, and slave
death labor camps.
Why did the genocide happen? Well, after the Gold Rush, California
experienced the biggest, fastest human migration in probably all of human
history. And California's Indian tribes occupied all the good land - land
that the settlers needed for livestock, farming, and gold mining. The locals
weren't seen as truly human, so it was open hunting season on them. As
historian Hubert Howe Bancroft quipped, "The savages were in the way; the
miners and settlers were arrogant and impatient.It was one of the last human
hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all."
There's a great, brutal book that chronicles in painstaking detail the
genocide that took place here following the Gold Rush and sets the political
context in which it happened. It's called An American Genocide and it's
written by a Benjamin Madley, who grew up in Northern California in the
Shasta area. I highly recommend it, if you're into that sort of thing.
As gruesome and sad as the book is, one detail in particular knocked me off
the couch. Turns out that California ran it's own investor-backed genocide
squads - with 7 percent annual returns guaranteed by the state. A fine
example of California's genocidal settler-democracy in action!
California was made a state in 1850, two years after gold was discovered on
John Sutter's property east of today's Sacramento. The area had one of the
densest Indian populations in California. After this find, many of the
Indians there were either killed, enslaved, or driven off their land and
forced into the mountains, cutting them off from their normal sources of
food. It was a policy of slow starvation, and it happened up and down the
state. And if any Indians defended themselves or killed any livestock or
horses in order to eat, settlers saw this as an attack - part of the
savages' war against western civilization - and would call in state-funded
militias and U.S. Army troops to go and massacre any Indians they found in
the area.
In its first years of operation, California's legislature authorized the
creation of what were essentially genocide squads empowered to hunt and kill
any Indians they found. California's politicians expected that the federal
government would eventually foot the bill for these "expeditions." But they
didn't want to waste time waiting around for that to happen. They wanted to
send out the troops now. So the legislature passed a bunch of bond measures
that offered wealthy individuals the opportunity to invest in California's
"safety." And the state guaranteed returns, which it expected to be
eventually be paid out with federal cash when if finally came through.
As Benjamin explained:
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." The act specified the expectation that Washington, DC,
would reimburse California, but that meanwhile the state would pay 7 percent
annual interest to bondholders. Such generous interest encouraged both banks
and individuals to buy "war bonds," thus drawing both institutional
investors and others into collusion with legislators to support past and
future state Indian-hunting operations. The bond issue lured many
Californians into financially supporting the killing machine.
I wanted to see if I could find this law in the original, and I did. Here it
is in black and white - published in a summary of the various statutes and
laws passed in 1852.
And here are the bonds themselves, which were sold in what looks like sheets
worth $250.
Invest a $5.25 in genocide. You can't lose!
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Genocide pitched as an investment opportunity, backed by the almighty power
of the U.S. government. What a perfect encapsulation of the American Way. I
guess can you find cultural trait being play out today in places like Yemen
and anywhere else where investors can make bank by bankrolling and supplying
mass murder and starvation.
-Yasha Levine
PS: Thinking about it, I'm somewhat surprised that Jews in America don't
show more solidarity with the plight of American Indians, who had endure a
genocide that was in the long run a lot more devastating to their culture
and their society. I guess it's part of the larger problem here, where the
genocide is whitewashed and generally not very well known. The truth is that
the bad guys won. The genocide was a success. We're living on top of it.
