California Legislature Begins Funding State Militia Expeditions for Indigenous Genocide

California achieves statehood on September 9, 1850, and the newly formed state legislature immediately begins authorizing and funding militia expeditions explicitly designed to kill Indigenous Californians and drive them from their ancestral lands. Between 1850 and 1861, California governors call out or authorize no fewer than 24 state militia expeditions that kill at least 1,340 California Indians—a number that represents only documented militia killings and excludes the far larger number of deaths from massacres by local vigilantes, starvation, disease, and displacement. The California legislature raises up to $1.51 million to pay for these state militia expeditions against California Native Americans, creating what is not an exaggeration to describe as a state-sponsored killing machine. The state pays these expenses nearly in full, and remarkably, the U.S. Congress later reimburses California for most of these genocide costs: of the $1.5 million California spends on 24 different Indian-killing militia campaigns, Congress pays the state back all but $200,000.

The genocide is facilitated by discriminatory California laws and the outright support of state officials and federal authorities who condone and support the attacks. On April 22, 1850, the California legislature passes the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which legalizes the enslavement of Native Americans and allows settlers to capture and force them into labor. The law’s name—“Government and Protection of Indians”—exemplifies the Orwellian corruption of language characteristic of institutional genocide: a law that enables enslavement and murder is marketed as protection. Governor Peter Burnett, who signs the bill into law, explains in his 1851 State of the State address that “[t]hat a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected”—a public declaration of genocidal intent by a sitting governor.

From 1851 to 1866, Shasta City and the communities of Marysville and Honey Lake pay bounties for the killing of Native Americans. Local settlers organize their own killing campaigns, with local governments putting bounties on Native American heads and paying settlers for stealing the horses of the people they murdered. Many communities throughout Gold Rush California offer bounties for Indian heads, Indian scalps, or Indian ears—raiders bring in evidence of their kills and receive direct local compensation. One example is Moses J. Conklin’s initiative in Humboldt County’s Mattole Valley during the late 1850s or early 1860s, where locals agree to raise funds to pay ten-dollar bounties for Indian scalps as “a most effective and most economic remedy to get rid of the hated savages.”

Most of the deaths occur during hundreds of massacres during which state and local militias encircle and murder Native peoples. The results are catastrophic: up to 16,000 Native Californians die in the genocide, which takes place from the 1840s through the 1870s. The indigenous population of California falls from approximately 100,000 in 1849 to just 35,000 by 1870—a population reduction of 65 percent in just over two decades. The California genocide demonstrates institutional corruption at its most murderous: state legislatures authorize and fund ethnic cleansing, governors publicly advocate extermination, local governments pay bounties for human body parts, and the federal government reimburses states for genocide expenses. The systematic nature of the violence, combined with explicit government authorization and funding, constitutes state-sponsored genocide designed to serve settler land interests by eliminating Indigenous inhabitants.