Following the American conquest and the discovery of gold in 1848, Native Californians were subjected to a sustained campaign of killing, abduction and dispossession. Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide documents state and federal officials organising and paying for militia expeditions, and shows the Indian population falling from roughly 150,000 to about 30,000 between 1846 and 1873. California's 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians permitted the indenture of Native children and of adults convicted of vagrancy, producing a traffic in unfree labour. Eighteen treaties negotiated in 1851-52 were rejected by the Senate, leaving most survivors landless. On 18 June 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom issued a formal apology on behalf of the State of California, used the word genocide, cited roughly 16,000 Native people killed in organised massacres, and established a Truth and Healing Council.
State-funded California militias, federal troops and settler vigilantes killed, enslaved and dispossessed the Native peoples of California during and after the Gold Rush
Sherburne Cook estimated about 150,000 Native people in California in 1845, down from roughly 310,000 before Spanish colonisation, falling to about 30,000 by 1870; Benjamin Madley's more recent reconstruction uses the same order of magnitude, roughly 150,000 in 1846 and 30,000 in 1873.
The lower figure is the number of killings Madley was able to document individually from militia claims, newspaper reports, army correspondence and settler accounts, and is a floor rather than an estimate. The higher figure, about 16,000, is the number of Native people killed in organised massacres cited by the State of California in its 2019 apology. Both are far smaller than the total population decline of roughly 120,000, most of which is attributed to disease, starvation, forced labour and the destruction of food sources.
Madley's reconstruction, drawing on militia payment claims, army records, newspapers and settler testimony, documents massacres of villages, the killing of prisoners, the abduction of women and children, indenture under the 1850 Act and the burning of settlements and food stores.
United States of America