Growing up in the US,
you learn about the California gold rush --
the forty-niners and their hunt for gold.
But that's only part of the story.
The truth is the gold rush was the start
of one of the darkest periods in US history,
but this dark history remained covered up for years.
So, what actually happened?
Jayden Lim: There's many lies that were spread
about Native Americans
through, you know, government propaganda.
We were savages, we were Injuns,
we were basically lesser beings than dogs.
The post-gold-rush era
was the most dangerous time in our history
to be a California Indian.
Most people did not survive it.
Narrator: Nicole Myers-Lim and Jayden Lim
are mother and daughter.
They are also Pomo women
who grew up knowing their family survived violence
that was in part spurred on by some of the propaganda
that Jayden referred to earlier.
Greed for gold in California was pushed
through advertisements, articles,
and cartoons like these.
You can see here in this drawing
a forty-niner carrying several pistols and a rifle.
In this picture, a miner is strapped with a gun and a knife
while wielding two mining tools.
And the woman next to him?
She's also armed with a gun and a knife.
The subtext in pictures like these
wasn't lost on the forty-niners.
300,000 people poured into California during the gold rush.
A lot of them were heavily armed,
which led to dangerous and violent behavior.
An interesting part of the research
was to learn that so many crimes
were hidden in plain sight.
Narrator: Benjamin Madley, a professor at UCLA,
conducted research over 10 years to complete his book,
"An American Genocide."
The US Army played a role in the militia campaigns
by arming them.
So surplus US Army weapons
like guns, pistols, ammunition, sabers, cutlasses,
those were given to the state of California
by the United States Army.
Narrator: Between 1848 and 1852,
white settlers in California spent $6 million
on knives and pistols alone.
That's about $200 million today.
They were well-armed for the violence of genocide.
Narrator: Three mines were set up
in the first year of the gold rush,
the northern, central, and southern goldfields.
Large ranches would take hundreds of Native men
and send them up to the mines.
It was very common that Native people
were treated as disposable during that time.
They weren't given food or water.
They were just basically treated as disposable workers.
Narrator: Some of the white miners
wanted to eliminate competition
from Native Americans mining freely, but for others,
the period was just an excuse for brutal slaughter.
Two settlers, Charles Stone
and his business partner, Andrew Kelsey,
enslaved Pomo and Wappo people
on their cattle ranch in Clearlake.
Kelsey and Stone took 100 Pomo men from our tribe
to the gold rush, and only three returned.
They were also keeping young Pomo women
as sex slaves in their home.
The Native men of the tribe went
and murdered Kelsey and Stone, and as a result,
the US cavalry came and massacred our tribe.
Narrator: Today, this attack of retaliation
is known as the Bloody Island Massacre.
Nicole: It was often said that Bloody Island
was a fishing village,
and it was very likely
that nobody involved with the events
that took place in Stone and Kelsey was actually here.
It was just a community, a peaceful community.
Jayden: My great-great-great-great-grandmother
hid under her mother's dead body in order to survive.
The other children of the tribe
hid in the lake surrounding Bloody Island
and used tule reeds as a way to breathe while underwater.
A lot of academics and historians
and people who recount the events of what happened there
always say that the lake ran red
with the blood of the Native people that lived there.
They estimate in the mass grave at Bloody Island
that there's anywhere between 10 and 800 Pomo people.
Nobody counted.
Nobody cared to account for the atrocities that took place.
Narrator: What we know for certain
is that most of the people killed were women and children.
We also know that no one was held accountable
and that the atrocity didn't diminish the legacy
of Stone or Kelsey.
The town of Kelseyville, California,
is named in honor of Andrew Kelsey.
The men who committed these acts were not censured.
They weren't court-martialed.
They weren't kicked out of the army.
In fact, all of the men who participated
were eventually promoted.
Several of them became generals,
and one, later in life,
became governor of the state of California.
Narrator: A fact that isn't too surprising
when you look at the history of California governors.
Gov. Burnett was the first governor of California,
and in his opening speech,
his first speech to the citizens of California,
he waged "a war of extermination" on California Indians
and discussed in his speech
about it being a necessity and being inevitable.
That's very much a part of manifest destiny.
Narrator: In addition to violence
from independent white settlers
and militia supported by the army,
California's newly established government
passed an act that authorized the organization
of ranger militias.
These volunteer groups were made up of gold miners,
settlers, and various ranking members of the US Army.
I think it's not an exaggeration to say
that California legislators established
and then funded a state-sponsored killing machine
with the aim of capturing or killing
all California Indian people.
Narrator: From 1850 to 1861 --
just 11 years --
they were sent on 24 killing campaigns.
Benjamin: And these two dozen operations
killed an absolute minimum
of 1,340 California Indian people,
and that's a really low-end estimate.
That's a very conservative way
of thinking about these numbers.
Narrator: These 24 campaigns cost California
more than $1.5 million.
That's more than $50 million today.
And the US Congress reimbursed the territory
almost in full.
I think it is pretty shameful that the fact
that they can spend so much money on killing Native peoples
and not spend any money
on guaranteeing that our youth have a future.
Narrator: In 1850, California's first government
also passed the ironically named
Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,
which listed 20 restrictions on Native American life.
It stripped them of legal rights and protections.
One example of this:
Someone who was just loitering could be arrested
and, at worst, enslaved.
California Indians couldn't carry a firearm.
California Indians couldn't testify against a white person
in a court of law.
Any Indian child that was found without a guardian
could be taken into indenture with a white family
until their age of majority.
That age of majority was well into their 30s.
Narrator: A big goal of this act
was to separate Native Americans
during peak reproductive years
in order to separate at least one generation
of children and adults from their families and culture.
Ultimately, you know, the government wanted to kill
every last Native American person,
which means I shouldn't be here.
I should not have been born.
Nicole: There's a lot of silent graves in California.
There's a lot of places that don't have names
and stories of people attached to them,
where people can't go and say,
"I'm a survivor of this place."
Narrator: Many of the killings weren't recorded,
or they weren't given quantitative numbers.
Benjamin Madley shows an example of that in his book here,
where the death tolls are described
as an "Entire village 'except a few children'"
or something as simple as "several."
So, we know that somewhere between
roughly 9,000 and 16,000 people
suffered violent deaths
at the hands of militiamen,
vigilantes, US Army soldiers,
and their auxiliaries during these years.
But I still think that it's likely
that many of these killings were not recorded.
The state of California paid bounties
anywhere from 50 cents to $5,
and they found the receipts in the 1990s,
and they totaled over $1.6 million.
So if you just put a rough estimate of bounties
into that $1.6 million figure,
you're seeing, you know, easily 300,000 people died
during the gold rush itself.
Narrator: So many of these details
have remained hidden or ignored.
In fact, Holt McDougal,
the publisher of the grade-school social-studies textbook,
told Insider in a statement
that they're currently in the process
of reviewing these omissions.
They said, "Coverage of the state-sanctioned violence
against Native American communities
during the California Gold Rush
will be expanded in future editions."
Despite these dark truths,
the forty-niners are celebrated today
throughout popular culture and the history of California.
So, why aren't we taught about this?
I think we've had a kind of institutionalized amnesia
about the genocide of California Indians here in the state.
America does not want to acknowledge the atrocities
and the crimes that they have commit.
I see the hurt in my community
because of this history and because of the trauma
that this country has inflicted upon my people.
The last stage of genocide is denial,
and as we continue to deny this history
and not teach truth and authenticity,
we perpetuate that genocide.
This has been an episode of "Whitewashed."
If there's another story that you'd like us to cover,
please let us know.
And if you want to read more
about Native Americans in California,
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