As I lead tours of the History Gallery of the Oakland Museum of California, I inwardly debate whether to draw attention to one particular framed artifact from early California statehood. Seeing it there on the wall leaves me speechless.
That historical period unfolded with bewildering speed and astonishing turns. On Jan. 24, 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Fort. The very next week the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, ceding lands including what would become California. On Dec. 5, 1848, President Polk confirmed the rumored gold find to Congress. The world rushed in: by the end of 1849, what had been fewer than 8,000 non-Indian residents in all of California had grown to some 100,000; by mid-1852, net arrivals were larger than the entire combined Allied D-Day invasion force.
With Congress unresolved on slavery, California was initially left for two years without even a territorial government. In the fall of 1849, our seventh military governor, General Bennett Riley, tired of the chaos and indecision, and without any legal authority to do so, called a constitutional convention in Monterey. It was a remarkably productive gathering. The 48 delegates drafted a (bilingual) constitution, decided against slavery, designed a state seal (still in use), and set the eastern border. A year later, on Oct. 18, 1850, the mail steamer Oregon entered San Francisco Bay with news that Congress had admitted California as the 31st state.
Of the gold-seekers, perhaps one in 50 “made it.” In the course of 1852, even those odds dwindled to effectively zero for an individual miner. The new state found itself with a large population of disappointed, rootless men. Some returned home. Some joined the new hydraulic and hard rock mining companies. Many others turned to highly profitable farming, ranching, and lumbering efforts. Scores of thousands of Americans, and immigrants from around the world, spread across the state to seek new fortunes from land they considered theirs for the taking.
Besides the former Mexican land titles (constitutionally recognized but tied up in courts for decades), there was only one other major obstacle to this headlong American expansion. California had been home to a third of the entire indigenous population of what became the United States. Scholarly pre-contact population estimates run as high as 300,000 here, in some 100 major language groups. (California has always been vastly multicultural.) During the Mission and Rancho eras, that population fell by about half, mostly from infectious diseases. Into the American era and then by 1870, fewer than 30,000 California Indians remained.
That artifact on the History Gallery wall is from the late stages of this decimation. It’s an 1852 State of California $100 bond (c. $3,100 today) that paid 7 percent annual interest. The ornate fonts specify this was for “war indebtedness,” specifically for “the expenses of certain Expeditions against the Indians.” This last phrase is set in bold type with fancy outlines. A California state bond for “Expeditions against the Indians”—it takes my breath away.
In 1851, our second governor, John McDougall, promised that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.” From 1851 to 1860, California spent $1.5 million (about $44 million today) for militias, campaigns, and bounties involving Indians. In 1854, Congress reimbursed California for almost $1 million of this, after state representatives argued that these “Indian hostilities” were a federal responsibility.
This was not the inadvertent but devastating introduction of smallpox and measles by the Spanish soldiers and friars. This was not the early chance confrontations between miners and native peoples still in the gold country after the Mission and Rancho eras. This was overt, proactive, state-sponsored extermination. This was ethnic cleansing—genocide—by my state, my government.
From 1850 to 1873 there were perhaps a hundred named “wars,” conflicts, major incidents, and massacres involving California Indians, not including uncounted small skirmishes, local raiding parties, and individual actions. The taking of a horse or an attack on a settler who had kidnapped Indian children escalated into dreadful reprisals. (In early 1850, the state government legalized the indenturing of Indians, which quickly fostered widespread abduction and enslavement in all but name.) As an 1860 report to the state legislature described, “Accounts are daily coming in from the counties on the Coast Range, of sickening atrocities and wholesale slaughters of great numbers of defenseless Indians.” In his History of California, Hubert Howe Bancroft called it “one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”
In the front of History Gallery is a pristine Ohlone Indian ceremonial basket, featuring some 20,000 stitches, 170 willow shoots, 550 sedge rhizomes, 1,200 hand-shaped olivella shell beads, and thousands of feather tufts. It was completed in 2012 by Linda Yamane (Rumsien Ohlone) after three years of effort. It was the first such presentation basket made in perhaps 250 years, and so Yamane had to visit museums around the world to study the few surviving Ohlone baskets and learn their construction and design. It is breathtaking, not only in its beauty and craftsmanship, but simply for its sheer existence.
Despite so many depreda-tions, the Indian race did not become extinct here. I, a native Californian of a later kind, tell this basket’s story to Oakland schoolchildren. Today, our leading institutions aspire to learn and tell these stories of suffering and survival. Today, California is once again the state with the largest and most diverse population of Native Americans, now numbering well above pre-colonial levels. Here, today, on this land, I take a breath and tell these stories again.
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Russell Yee is a third-generation Oakland native who is grateful and humbled to live here with his wife, Lisa, on Chochenyo Ohlone land.
