Pestilence and Genocide - 2

IV

Meanwhile, there was California to the west, the last stop before the holocaust that had begun on Hispaniola in 1492 would move out across the Pacific, in the wake of eighteenth-century voyages to Australia, Polynesia, and beyond by Captains Cook, Wallis, Bougainville, and others. Spanish troops had entered California overland early in the sixteenth century, while Cortes and Pizarro were still alive and basking in the glory of their conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas. Indeed, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who heard stories of Spanish troops and violence in California while he was sailing off the coast in 1542, probably had been with Cortes at the fall of Tenochtitlan and with the infamous Alvarado further south.¹³¹ In any case, wherever there was Spanish violence there was bound to be disease. In raping native women and merely breathing on native men, the marching Spanish soldiers spread syphilis and gonorrhea, smallpox and influenza, everywhere they went. And Cabrillo was not likely innocent himself: his crews were mostly conscripts, the dregs of the Spanish settlements in Mexico; there can be little doubt that diseases festered in those men that became explosive epidemics when spread among the natives.

It once was thought that syphilis did not arrive in California until Don Juan Bautista de Anza's introduction of the "putrid and contagious" plague in 1777, but there is no longer any doubt that the disease was present throughout the region well before de Anza's visit.¹³² As for smallpox, influenza, and other lethal infections, they spread early and they spread far. Martin de Aguilar explored the northern California and Oregon coasts for Spain in 1603, following by twenty-four years Sir Francis Drake who had sailed up the Pacific coast and landed with his crews on the Oregon shore in 1579. And Drake may not have been the first European to venture that far north. But whoever was the first among the sixteenth-century adventurers, eighteenth-century explorers found old smallpox scars on the bodies of the native people there.¹³³

In 1602 and 1603 Sebastian Vizcaino led an expedition of three ships up and down the California coast, with frequent stops on shore where his men spent time with various Indian peoples. There was sickness on Vizcaino's ships from the moment they set sail, and before the voyage was complete it combined with scurvy to literally shut the voyage down. Scores of men were incapacitated. At one point Vizcaino wrote: "All the men had fallen sick, so that there were only two sailors who could climb to the maintopsail." The ship that he was on, Vizcaino later added, "seemed more like a hospital than a ship of an armada." Fray Antonio de Ia Ascension, one of three clergymen who made the voyage with Vizcaino, feared the whole crew was close to death. But fortunately for the Spanish-and unfortunately for the natives-the Indians helped the crippled sailors, offering them "fish, game, hazel nuts, chestnuts, acorns, and other things. . . . for though but six of our men remained in the said frigate, the rest having died of cold and sickness, the Indians were so friendly and so desirous of our friendship . . . that they not only did them no harm, but showed them all the kindness possible."¹³⁴ There can be no doubt that for their kindness the Indians were repaid by plagues the likes of which nothing in their history had prepared them.

The earliest European mariners and explorers in California, as noted in a previous chapter's discussion of Cabrillo, repeatedly referred to the great numbers of Indians living there. In places where Vizcaino's ships could approach the coast or his men could go ashore, the Captain recorded, again and again, that the land was thickly filled with people. And where he couldn't approach or go ashore "because the coast was wild," the Indians signaled greetings by building fires-fires that "made so many columns of smoke on the mainland that at night it looked like a procession and in the daytime the sky was overcast." In sum, as Father Ascension put it, "this realm of California is very large and embraces much territory, nearly all inhabited by numberless people."¹³⁵

But not for very long. Throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish disease and Spanish cruelty took a large but mostly uncalculated toll. Few detailed records of what happened during that time exist, but a wealth of research in other locales has shown the early decades following Western contact to be almost invariably the worst for native people, because that is when the fires of epidemic disease burn most freely. Whatever the population of California was before the Spanish came, however, and whatever happened during the first few centuries following Spanish entry into the region, by 1845 the Indian population of California had been slashed to 150,000 (down from many times that number prior to European contact) by swarming epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia, whooping cough, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, syphilis, and gonorrhea-along with everyday settler and explorer violence.136 As late as 1833 a malaria epidemic brought in by some Hudson's Bay Company trappers killed 20,000 Indians by itself, wiping out entire parts of the great central valleys. "A decade later," writes one historian, "there still remained macabre reminders of the malaria epidemic: collapsed houses filled with skulls and bones, the ground littered with skeletal remains."¹³⁷

Terrible as such deaths must have been, if the lives that preceded them were lived outside the Spanish missions that were founded in the eighteenth century, the victims might have counted themselves lucky. Two centuries earlier the Puritan minister John Robinson had complained to Plymouth's William Bradford that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt "deserved" to be killed, "Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had killed any!"¹³⁸ That was probably the only thing the New England Puritans and California's Spanish Catholics would have agreed upon. So, using armed Spanish troops to capture Indians and herd them into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did their best to convert the natives before they killed them.

And kill they did. First there were the Jesuit missions, founded early in the eighteenth century, and from which few vital statistics are available. Then the Franciscans took the Jesuits' place. At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Loreto, reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco Palou, during the first three years of Franciscan rule 76 children and adults were baptized, while 131 were buried. At the mission of San Jose Cumundu during the same time period 94 were baptized, while 241 died. At the mission of Purisima de Cadegom6, meanwhile, 39 were baptized-120 died. At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe the figures were similar: 53 baptisms, 130 deaths. The same held true at others, from the mission of Santa Rosalia de Mulege, with 48 baptisms and 113 deaths, to the mission of San Ignacio, with 115 baptisms and 293 deaths-all within the same initial three-year period.¹³⁹

For some missions, such as those of San Jose del Cabo and Santiago de las Coras, no baptism or death statistics were reported, because there were so few survivors ("nearly all are ill with syphilis," Father Pal6u wrote) that there was no reason to do any counting. Overall, however, during those three years alone, between a quarter and a third of the California Indians died who were under Franciscan control. We will never know how many died during the earlier decades when the Jesuits were in charge. However, "if it goes on at this rate," lamented Father Palou, "in a short time Old California will come to an end."¹⁴⁰

Old California, perhaps, but not the missions. Not if anything within the padres' power could be done. And what was done was that they simply brought more natives in, under military force of arms. Although the number of Indians within the Franciscan missions increased steadily from the close of those first three disastrous years until the opening decade or so of the nineteenth century, this increase was entirely attributable to the masses of native people who were being captured and force-marched into the mission compounds. Once thus confined, the Indians' annual death rate regularly exceeded the birth rate by more than two to one. This is an overall death-to-birth ratio that, in less than half a century, would completely exterminate a population of any size that was not being replenished by new conscripts. The death rate for children in the missions was even worse. Commonly, the child death rate in these institutions of mandatory conversion ranged from 140 to 170 per thousand-that is, three to four times the birth rate.:...._and in some years it climbed to 220 and 265 and even 335 per thousand. Year in and year out, then, from one of every six to one of every three Indian children who were locked up in the missions perished.¹⁴¹

In fact, it may have been even worse than that. The figures above were generated from available resources in the late 1930s. Recently, an analysis has been conducted on data from more than 11,000 Chumash Indians who passed through the missions of Santa Barbara, La Purfsima, and Santa Ines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Perhaps the most complete data set and detailed study ever done on a single mission Indian group's vital statistics, this analysis shows that 36 percent of those Chumash children who were not yet two years old when they entered the mission died in less than twelve months. Two-thirds died before reaching the age of five. Three of four died before attaining puberty. At the same time, adolescent and ):Oung adult female deaths exceeded those of males by almost two to one, while female fertility rates steadily spiraled downward. Similar patterns-slightly better in some categories, slightly worse in others-have been uncovered in another study of 14,000 mission Indians in eight different Franciscan missions.¹⁴²

In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained their Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more natives into their confines to compensate for the huge numbers who were being killed once they got there. This was a pattern that held throughout California and on out across the southwest. Thus, for example, one survey of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics showing that at one time an astonishing 93 percent of the children born within its walls died before reaching the age of ten-and yet the mission's total population did not drastically decline.¹⁴³

There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. The most common causes were the European-introduced diseases-which spread like wildfire in such cramped quarters-and malnutrition. The personal living space for Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregated common rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit more space than was allotted a captive African in the hold of a slave ship sailing the Middle Passage. Married Indians and their children, on the other hand, were permitted to sleep together-in what Russian visitor V.M. Golovnin described in 1818 as "specially constructed 'cattle-pens.' " He explained:

I cannot think of a better term for these dwellings that consist of a long row of structures not more than one sagene [seven feet) high and 1¹⁄₂—2 sagenes wide, without floor or ceiling, each divided into sections by partitions, also not longer than two sagenes, with a correspondingly small door and a tiny window in each — can one possibly call it anything but a barnyard for domestic cattle and fowl? Each of these small sections is occupied by an entire family; cleanliness and tidiness are out of the question: a thrifty peasant usually has a better-kept catde-pen.¹⁴⁴

Under such conditions Spanish-introduced diseases ran wild: measles, smallpox, typhoid, and influenza epidemics occurred and re-occurred, while syphilis and tuberculosis became, as Sherburne F. Cook once said, "totalitarian" diseases: virtually all the Indians were afflicted by them.¹⁴⁵

As for malnutrition, despite agricultural crop yields on the Indian-tended mission plantations that Golovnin termed "extraordinary" and "unheard of in Europe," along with large herds of cattle and the easily accessible bounty of sea food, the food given the Indians, according to him, was "a kind of gruel made from barley meal, boiled in water with maize, beans, and peas; occasionally they are given some beef, while some of the more diligent [Indians] catch fish for themselves."¹⁴⁶ On average, according to Cook's analyses of the data, the caloric intake of a field-laboring mission Indian was about 1400 calories per day, falling as low as 715 or 865 calories per day in such missions as San Antonio and San Miguel. To put this in context, the best estimate of the caloric intake of nineteenth-century African American slaves is in excess of 4000 calories per day, and almost 5400 calories per day for adult male field hands. This seems high by modern Western standards, but is not excessive in terms of the caloric expenditure required of agricultural laborers. As the author of the estimate puts it: "a diet with 4206 calories per slave per day, while an upper limit [is] neither excessive nor generous, but merely adequate to provide sufficient energy to enable one to work like a slave." Of course, the mission Indians also worked like slaves in the padres' agricultural fields, but they did so with far less than half the caloric intake, on average, commonly provided a black slave in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia.¹⁴⁷

Even the military commanders at the missions acknowledged that the food provided the Indians was grossly insufficient, especially, said one, given "the arduous strain of the labors in which they are employed"; labors, said another, which last "from morning to night"; and labors, noted a third, which are added to the other "hardships to which they are subjected."¹⁴⁸ Caloric intake, of course, is but one part of the requirement for a sufficient diet. The other part is nutritional value. And the most thorough study of the composition of the mission Indians' diets reveals them to have been seriously deficient in high-quality protein, and in Vitamins A and C, and riboflavin.¹⁴⁹ The resulting severe malnutrition, of course, made the natives all the more susceptible to the bacterial and viral infections that festered in the filthy and cramped living conditions they were forced to endure — just as it made them more likely to behave lethargically, something that would bring more corporal punishment down upon them. Not surprisingly, osteological analyses of California mission Indian skeletal remains, compared with those of Indians who lived in the same regions prior to European contact, show the long bones of the mission Indians to be "significantly smaller than those of their prehistoric and protohistoric predecessors," leading to the conclusion that such differences "reflect retarded growth, possibly attributable to the nutritional deficiency of the mission diet or the combined effects of poor nutrition and infectious disease."¹⁵⁰

When not working directly under the mission fathers' charge, the captive natives were subject to forced labor through hiring-out arrangements the missions had with Spanish military encampments. The only compensation the natives received for this, as for all their heavy daily labors, was the usual inadequate allotment of food. As one French visitor commented in the early nineteenth century, after inspecting life in the missions, the relationship between the priest and his flock "would . . . be different only in name if a slaveholder kept them for labor and rented them out at will; he too would feed them." But, we now know, he would have fed them better.¹⁵¹

In short, the Franciscans simultaneously starved and worked their wouldbe converts to death, while the diseases they and others had imported killed off thousands more. The similarity of this outcome to what had obtained in the slave labor camps of Central and South America should not be surprising, since California's Spanish missions, established by Father Junfpero Serra (aptly dubbed "the last conquistador" by one admiring biographer and currently a candidate for Catholic sainthood), were directly modeled on the genocidal encomienda system that had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths.¹⁵²

Others died even more quickly, not only from disease, but from grotesque forms of punishment. To be certain that the Indians were spiritually prepared to die when their appointed and rapidly approaching time came, they were required to attend mass in chapels where, according to one missian visitor, they were guarded by men "with whips and goads to enforce order and silence" and were surrounded by "soldiers with fixed bayonets" who were on hand in case any unruliness broke out. These were the same soldiers, complained the officially celibate priests, who routinely raped young Indian women. If any neophytes (as the Spanish called Indians who had been baptized) were late for mass, they would have "a large leathern thong, at the end of a heavy whip-staff, applied to their naked backs."¹⁵³ More serious infractions brought more serious torture.

And if ever some natives dared attempt an escape from the padres' efforts to lead them to salvation-as, according to the Franciscans' own accounts, the Indians constantly did-there would be little mercy shown. From the time of the missions' founding days, Junfpero Serra traveled from pulpit to pulpit preaching fire and brimstone, scourging himself before his incarcerated flock, pounding his chest with heavy rocks until it was feared he would fall down dead, burning his breast with candles and live coals in imitation of San Juan Capistrano.¹⁵⁴ After this sort of self-flagellating exertion, Father Serra had no patience for Indians who still preferred not to accept his holy demands of them. Thus, on at least one occasion when some of his Indian captives not only escaped, but stole some mission supplies to support them on their journey home, "his Lordship was so angered," recalled Father Palau, "that it was necessary for the fathers who were there to restrain him in order to prevent him from hanging some of them. . . . He shouted that such a race of people deserved to be put to the knife."¹⁵⁵

It was not necessary for starving and desperate Indians to steal food or supplies, however, to suffer the perverse punishments of the mission fathers. The padres also were concerned about the continuing catastrophic decline in the number of babies born to their neophyte charges. At some missions the priests decided the Indians intentionally were refraining from sex, as the natives of the Caribbean supposedly had done, in an effort to spare their would-be offspring the tortures of life as a slave. Some of the Indians may indeed have been purposely avoiding sex, although by themselves the starvation-level diets, along with the disease and enormous stress of the Indians' mission existence, were more than sufficient to cause a collapse in the birth rate.¹⁵⁶ In either case, here is a first-hand account of what happened at mission Santa Cruz when a holy and ascetic padre named Ramon Olbes came to the conclusion that one particular married couple was behaving with excessive sexual inhibition, thereby depriving him of another child to enslave and another soul to offer up to Christ:

He [Father Olbes] sent for the husband and he asked him why his wife hadn't borne children. The Indian pointed to the sky (he didn't know how to speak Spanish) to signify that only God knew the cause. They brought an interpreter. This [one] repeated the question of the father to the Indian, who answered that he should ask God. The Fr. asked through the interpreter if he slept with his wife, to which the Indian said yes. Then the father had them placed in a room together so that they would perform coitus in his presence. The Indian refused, but they forced him to show them his penis in order to affirm that he had it in good order. The father next brought the wife and placed her in the room. The husband he sent to the guardhouse with a pair of shackles. . . . Fr. Olbes asked her if her husband slept with her, and she answered that, yes. The Fr. repeated his question "why don't you bear children?" "Who knows !" answered the Indian woman. He had her enter another room in order to examine her reproductive parts.

At this point the woman resisted the padre's attempted forced inspection; for that impertinence she received fifty lashes, was "shackled, and locked in the nunnery." He then gave her a wooden doll and ordered her to carry it with her, "like a recently born child," wherever she went. Meanwhile, her husband remained in jail, only leaving once each day to attend massand during all the time he was outside the guardhouse he was required to undergo the public humiliation of wearing on his head "cattle horns affixed with leather."¹⁵⁷

From time to time some missions permitted certain of their captives to return home for brief visits, under armed guard. "This short time is the happiest period of their existence," wrote one foreign observer, "and I myself have seen them going home in crowds, with loud rejoicings." He continues:

The sick, who can not undenake the journey, at least accompany their happy countrymen to the shore where they embark and sit there for days together mournfully gazing on the distant summits of the mountains which surround their homes; they often sit in this situation for several days, without taking any food, so much does the sight of their lost home affect these new Christians. Every time some of those who have the permission run away, and they would probably all do it, were they not deterred by their fears of the soldiers.¹⁵⁸

There was, of course, good reason for the Indians to fear the consequences of running away and being caught. Since even the most minor offenses in the missions carried a punishment of fifteen lashes, while middling infractions, including fighting, "brought one hundred lashes and a set of shackles at the guard house," those who were captured while trying to break free of mission captivity might count themselves lucky to be whipped 100 times and clapped in irons affixed to a heavy log. For as one traveler described the condition of some attempted escapees he had seen: "They were all bound with rawhide ropes and some were bleeding from wounds and some children were tied to their mothers." He went on:

Some of the run-away men were tied on sticks and beaten with straps. One chief was taken out to the open field and a young calf which had just died was skinned and the chief was sewed into the skin while it was yet warm. He was kept tied to a stake all day, but he died soon and they kept his corpse tied up.¹⁵⁹

If this was early California's version of what Spanish defenders later would disingenuously dismiss as merely another Black Legend, it did not last as long as did its counterpart on the continent to the south. In 1846 the United States militarily occupied California, and two years later, at Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded the land over to American control. In addition to the two centuries of previous evidence adducing the genocidal practices of Britain and the United States toward America's native peoples across the length and breadth of the continent, we therefore have in California a unique opportunity to test informally one part of the Spaniards' Black Legend defense, the part alleging that other whites treated Indians just as badly as did the Spanish. And what we find is that, on this point at least-difficult though it may be to believe-the Spanish are correct.

By 1845 the Indian population of California was down to no more than a quarter of what it had been when the Franciscan missions were established in 1769. That is, it had declined by at least 75 percent during seventy-five years of Spanish rule. In the course of just the next twentyfive years, under American rule, it would fall by another 80 percent. The gold rush brought to California a flood of American miners and ranchers who seemed to delight in killing Indians, miners and ranchers who rose to political power and prominence-and from those platforms not only legalized the enslavement of California Indians, but, as in Colorado and elsewhere, launched public campaigns of genocide with the explicitly stated goal of all-out Indian extermination.

Governmentally unsanctioned enslavement of the Indians began as soon as California became an American possession and continued for many years. It seemed an excellent idea in a land where free labor was in short supply and white wages were high. Moreover, as whites who had lived in the southern United States repeatedly asserted, California's Indians-who already had suffered a savage population loss at the hands of the Spanish — "make as obedient and humble slaves as the negroes in the south," wrote one former New Orleans cotton broker. In fact, they were even better than blacks, claimed a ranch owner in 1846, because they accepted "flagellation with more humility than negroes."¹⁶⁰

Indian docility was believed to be particularly assured "when caught young." So a thriving business in hunting and capturing Indian children developed. Newspapers frequently reported sightings of men driving Indian children before them on back-country roads to the slave markets in Sacramento and San Francisco. As with black slaves in the South, prices varied "according to quality," said the Ukiah Herald, but they sometimes climbed as high as two-hundred dollars each. Bargains could be had in some areas, however, as "in Colusa County in 1861 [where] Indian boys and girls aged three and four years were sold at fifty dollars apiece." Especially "good little" Indians-or, as the Sacramento Daily Union described them, "bright little specimens"-might even fetch a straight trade for a horse. Given the shortage of women in California during these early years of white settlement, "a likely young girl" might cost almost double that of a boy, because, as the Marysville Appeal phrased it, girls served the double duty "of labor and of lust."¹⁶¹

Not surprisingly, the parents of these valuable children could be a problem. The prospect of losing their beloved offspring to slave traders, said the Humboldt Times, "has the effect of making Indians very shy of coming into the Reservations, as they think it is a trick to deprive them of their children."¹⁶² And, indeed, it often was. Thus inconvenienced, the slave traders had to pursue their prey into the hills. There, when they cornered the objects of their desire, reported the California Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1854, they frequently murdered the troublesome parents as they were gathering up the children, a tactic that allowed the slavers to sell their little charges as "orphans" without possibility of contradiction.¹⁶³

Should Indian adults attempt to use the California courts to bring such killers to justice, they invariably were frustrated because the law of the land prohibited Indians from testifying against whites. Even some otherwise unsympathetic settler newspapers observed and protested this situation (to no avail), since in consequence it encouraged and legalized the open-season hunting of Indians. As one San Francisco newspaper put it in 1858, following the unprovoked public murder of an Indian, and the release of the known killer because the only eyewitnesses to the event were native people: the Indians "are left entirely at the mercy of every ruffian in the country, and if something is not done for their protection, the race will shortly become extinct."¹⁶⁴

Nothing was done, however, and so enslavement and murder, carried out by entrepreneurial and genocide-minded whites, continued on for many years. One of the more well-known incidents, described in Theodora Kroeber's popular Ishi in Two Worlds, occurred in 1868. Part of a series of massacres of Yahi Indians, in which ultimately all but one member of this tiny fragment of a tribe were scalped and murdered, this particular assault is distinguished by the perverse concern shown by one of the attackers for the bodies of his victims: "as he explained afterwards, [he] changed guns during the slaughter, exchanging his .56-caliber Spencer rifle for a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, because the rifle 'tore them up so bad,' particularly the babies."¹⁶⁵

It would be a mistake, however, to think of the destruction of California's Indians most of the Indians of the Americas — as the work of renegades. As early as 1850 the first session of the California legislature passed a law entitled "Act for the Government and Protection of Indians" that in fact did little more than give the imprimatur of legality to the kidnapping and enslavement of native people-. Among other provisions, the law provided for the forced. indenture of any Indian child to any white person who could convince a justice of the peace that the child in his possession had not been obtained by force. Justices of the peace were easily convinced, especially if the abducted child's parents had been murdered or terrorized into silence and were therefore not on hand to provide contradictory testimony. In 1860 the legislature expanded the law, extending the duration of terms of forced service and permitting the law's use to cover adult Indians as well as children.

The problem the whites were facing by this time, and that the new legislation was intended to address, was a shortage of Indian labor. About ten thousand of the rapidly dwindling numbers of Indians had been put to forced labor legally, under the provisions of the 1850 and 1860 laws (many more, of course, were enslaved without going through the niceties of a justice of the peace's approval), but this was nothing compared with the thousands who had been killed.¹⁶⁶ The shortage of menial workers, despite large numbers of Mexican, Hawaiian, and Asian contract laborers in California, led the Humboldt Times to champion the 1860 enslavement law while exclaiming in an editorial: "What a pity the provisions of the law are not extended to greasers, Kanakas, and Asiatics. It would be so convenient to carry on a farm or mine, when all the hard and dirty work is performed by apprentices !"¹⁶⁷

Considering the California legislature's concern for cheap-indeed, slave--labor in the 1850s, it would in retrospect seem mindless for the lawmakers simultaneously to encourage the destruction of that same Indian labor force. But that is precisely what happened. Because some Indians, who in the late 1840s had been driven into the mountains by marauding slave catchers, were thereby forced to poach on white-owned livestock for their existence, the governor of California in his 1851 message to the legislature announced the necessity for a total eradication of the natives: "the white man, to whom time is money, and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property," Governor Peter Burnett said; "after being robbed a few times he becomes desperate, and resolves upon a war of extermination." Such a war to annihilate the Indians had already begun by then, Burnett recognized, but, he added, it must "continue to be waged between the races until the Indian becomes extinct." A year later the governor's successor to that office, John McDougal, renewed the charge: if the Indians did not submit to white demands to relinquish their land, he said, the state would "make war upon the [Indians] which must of necessity be one of extermination to many of the tribes."¹⁶⁸

This straightforward advocacy of genocide by the highest American officials in the land emerged in a cultural milieu that habitually described the California Indians as ugly, filthy, and inhuman "beasts," "swine," "dogs," "wolves," "snakes," "pigs," "baboons," "gorillas," and "orangutans," to cite only a few of the press's more commonly published characterizations. Some whites gave the Indians the benefit of the doubt and declared them to be not quite animals, but merely "the nearest link, of the sort, to the quadrupeds" in North America, while others not inclined to such lofty speculations said that simply touching an Indian created "a feeling of repulsion just as if I had put my hand on a toad, tortoise, or huge lizard."¹⁶⁹ The eradication of such abominable creatures could cause little trouble to most consciences.

Between 1852 and 1860, under American supervision, the indigenous population of California plunged from 85,000 to 35,000, a collapse of about 60 percent within eight years of the first gubernatorial demands for the Indians' destruction. By 1890 that number was halved again: now 80 percent of the natives who had been alive when California became a state had been wiped out by an official policy of genocide. Fewer than 18,000 California Indians were still living, and the number was continuing to drop. In the late 1840s and 1850s one observer of the California scene had watched his fellow American whites begin their furious assault "upon [the Indians], shooting them down like wolves, men, women, and children, wherever they could find them," and had warned that this "war of extermination against the aborigines, commenced in effect at the landing of Columbus, and continued to this day, [is] gradually and surely tending to the final and utter extinction of the race." While to most white Californians such a conclusion was hardly lamentable, to this commentator it was a major concern-but only because the extermination "policy [has] proved so injurious to the interests of the whites." That was because the Indians' "labor, once very useful, and, in fact, indispensable in a country where no other species of laborers were to be obtained at any price, and which might now be rendered of immense value by pursuing a judicious policy, has been utterly sacrificed by this extensive system of indiscriminate revenge."¹⁷⁰

Three hundred years earlier, writing from Peru, the Dominican priest Santo Tomas had expressed exactly the same concern. The ongoing slaughter of the Incas and other Andean peoples was so intense, he warned his sovereign, that unless orders were given to reduce the genocide "the natives will come to an end; and once they are finished, your Majesty's rule over [this land] will cease." Explained Diego de Robles Cornejo, from the same region a few years later: "If the natives cease, the land is finished. I mean its wealth: for all the gold and silver that comes to Spain is extracted by means of these Indians."¹⁷¹

Like the sixteenth-century Spanish in Peru, then, to some critics the genocidal Californians were simply bad businessmen, liquidating their own best draft animals in an unceasing pique of racist passion. In time, however, these critics turned out to be wrong. Other labor was found. And by the end of the nineteenth century California's population was surging past one and a half million persons, of whom only 15,000--or one percentwere Indians, most of them stored safely away on remote and impoverished reservations, suffering from disease, malnutrition, and despair.

As had happened in Virginia two hundred years earlier-and as happened across the entire continent during the intervening years-between 95 and 98 percent of California's Indians had been exterminated in little more than a century. And even this ghastly numerical calculation is inadequate, not only because it reveals nothing of the hideous suffering endured by those hundreds of thousands of California native peoples, but because it is based on decline only from the estimated population for the year 1769-a population that already had been reduced savagely by earlier invasions of European plague and violence. Nationwide by this time only about one-third of one percent of America's population-250,000 out of 76,000,000 people-were natives. The worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people, finally had leveled off. There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.