American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  From the 1850s to 1871, a “series of massacres” left the Yana, who had long inhabited a Delaware-sized swath of northern California, “virtually exterminated.” In a familiar pattern, settlers first undermined traditional land patterns and access to food and water, then responded to episodic Yana stock raids with “retaliatory massacres” that “escalated to state-sanctioned killing and removal.” The settlers sought “total extermination,” the creation of an “Indian-free environment.”46

  Settlers carried out massacres—a series of Sand Creeks—in US-occupied California, as the Americans “surpassed Spaniards and Mexicans in their brutal treatment of Native Americans.” Colonial ambivalence was in short supply in California as land-hungry settlers and their militias “murdered thousands of Native Americans, and enslaved thousands more.” The Army occupied California but “did nothing” to stop the slaughter and sometimes joined in. In 1849, the Army slaughtered an estimated 135–250 Pomo Indians in the Clear Lake area of northern California. The soldiers, making no distinctions of age or gender, speared babies with their bayonets and hurled them into a creek.47

  In the early 1850s, the Tolowa Indians of northwestern California and southwestern Oregon “were nearly obliterated following the arrival of Anglo-Americans.” The Tolowa population plummeted from perhaps 5,000 to fewer than 1,000 Indians in just a few years. Diseases took their toll but so did a campaign of slaughter that began with isolated killings, proceeded to organized massacres, and ended with state-supported campaigns of extermination. Federal officials drove the surviving Tolowa onto dismal reservations for “a destructive new cycle of incarceration, escape, recapture, and re-incarceration,” Madley notes. The Army acknowledged that reservation Indians “are continually exposed to the brutal assault of drunken and lawless white men; their squaws are forced and, if resisted, the Indians are beaten and shot.”48

  Genocide permeated the golden state. A militia captain reported killing 283 Indians and forcing 292 others onto a reservation at Mendocino. The Yuci Indians suffered the most extensive assault as their population came down from 12,000 to some 600 in a decade beginning in 1854. “There were so many of these expeditions,” a settler recalled. “We would kill on average fifty or so Indians on a trip.” An Army major acknowledged that the settlers had carried out a “relentless war of extermination … They have ruthlessly massacred men, women, and children.” Unapologetic settlers inundated the California legislature with demands for honoring the scalp bounties that had been offered as an incentive for Indian extermination.49

  Most of the killing was unprovoked and indiscriminate. The California Indians had carried out some raids against the settlers but rarely attacked them violently. Even the extermination-minded San Francisco-based newspaper Alta California acknowledged in 1851, “Their depredations, wherever and whenever committed, were not aimed at human life but leveled at the property of their white neighbors … Instances of Indian cruelty were rarely heard.” That same year, the San Luis Rey Indian leader Antonio Garra attempted an armed revolt against settlers in southern California but it generated little response before Garra was captured and hanged.50

  Despite the overall lack of provocation, the settlers showed little ambivalence over the indiscriminate killing. In 1850, Alta California rationalized that the destruction of the inferior Indian “race” was “unavoidable.” Another San Francisco newspaper chimed in, “Extermination is the cheapest and quickest remedy.”51

  On several occasions treaties had been negotiated with the Indians, but with the California delegation opposed, Congress repeatedly failed to ratify them. A few reservations aside, by 1860 “the government had more or less abandoned the uphill struggle to protect Indian land in California.” The remaining indigenous Californians were left devoid of civil rights and subject to the whims of the settlers. Many Indian women suffered sexual assault or went into prostitution. Between 1850 and 1863, some 10,000 Indians were sold into servitude. American slave traders often killed the parents of Indian children so that they might be seized and trafficked.52

  Displaying an ambivalence that distinguished him from the militant army triumvirate, General George Crook forthrightly declared that the California settler colonials were the sources of the violence and he even lamented having to protect them “when our sympathies were with the Indians.” The Shasta Indians of California had been “forced to take the warpath or sink all self respect, out of the outrages of the whites perpetrated upon them,” Crook explained. The settlers obeyed “little or no law” with respect to Indians, hence “It was of no infrequent occurrence for an Indian to be shot down, in cold blood or a squaw to be raped by some brute. Such a thing as a white man being punished for outraging an Indian was unheard of.”

  Yet Crook served as a general in an army whose ultimate mission was to clear the land for settler colonial expansion by white people. Like many ambivalent Americans over the longue dureé, Crook expressed empathy for Indians but had no hesitation about the ultimate project of driving them off the land and onto reservations to make way for the more advanced civilization.53 “To those [Indians] who were willing to learn and do the right, he was an uncompromising friend,” an Army contemporary recalled, but to those “who persisted in wrongdoing,” Crook was”a scourge and a terror, a veritable gray wolf.”54

  Settler colonials in the Far West conducted ethnic cleansing campaigns against Chinese immigrants as well as the indigenes. The gold rush had lured thousands of Chinese into northern California but most of them would be deprived of their mining or land claims and driven out. Americans carried out some 200 roundups between 1850 and 1906, reflecting a systematic campaign to rid the United States of Chinese. “Surely the term expulsion doesn’t fully represent the rage and violence of these purges,” Jean Pfaelzer argues. “What occurred along the Pacific coast, from the gold rush through the turn of the century, was ethnic cleansing.”

  The Chinese “fiercely and tenaciously fought” to live and work in the United States and to exercise full rights of citizenship, but the Californians demonized the “rat-eating Chinaman” and responded with violent aggression. “As with Indians, to whom whites often compared the Chinese, the way such killings were carried out revealed a deep, almost feral hatred,” David Courtwright notes. “Chinese men were scalped, mutilated, burned, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and hanged from gutter spouts.” In 1882, the cleansing campaign became national policy, as the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act terminating all Chinese immigration.55

  Ethnic Cleansing from the Great Basin to the Western Slope

  When the Spanish arrived in the Great Basin, a vast terrain of colonial space between the Sierra and Rocky Mountains, indigenous tribes of the region competed for the metals and horses they brought with them. The Spanish and the Mexicans clashed with the powerful Ute Indians but as both the Hispanics and the Ute found that they could not conquer one another, they began trading in captives taken from other Indian tribes. “Using Indian women for sexual and domestic labor and trading Indian children for horses and other goods, Ute, New Mexican, and American slavers further displaced Paiute and non-equestrian Shoshone groups from their accustomed lands and waterways,” Ned Blackhawk explains. “Slavery, rape, and horse-raiding remained colonialism’s most visible legacies.”56

  Often victimized were the Shoshone, the people who in 1805 with Sacagawea acting as an intermediary had provided Lewis and Clark with the directions and fresh horses they had needed to cross the Continental Divide. Though like Pocahontas, Sacagawea became a mythic figure in American history; in fact, she was a slave and did not marry the legendary frontiersman Toussaint Charbonneau, rather he purchased her. Sacagawea was one example of the “multiple coercive traffics in women [that] became essential to European-Indian interaction” on the borderlands.57

  For a time the Shoshone and other tribes benefited from the fur trade with the British and then the American trappers, who at the same time “exploited their material and later military advantages o
ver Indian groups for sexual service.” In the 1820s, conflict erupted between the Bannocks, a Shoshone band, and large communities of American traders and fur trappers. In response, the legendary trapper James Beckwourth—who had fought in the Seminole War and would later serve as a scout at Sand Creek—led a massacre against the Bannocks on the Green River in which hundreds of scalps were taken. Although some question the reliability of Beckwourth’s account, enough evidence exists to show that “the rendezvous trapping system accelerated the violent deterioration of many indigenous communities.”58

  As American settler colonialism flowed across the Rockies in the ensuing decades, traffic on the overland trails disrupted indigenous life. The settlers’ stock drained and polluted water sources. The establishment of mining districts in Montana and Nevada brought more hordes and herds. Anxious emigrants, in fear of “wild” Indians, attacked any indigene that approached them. Indians raided and fought back as the colonial encounter descended into “degenerative cycles of violence and reprisal between Shoshone and emigrant groups” as well as “renegades, deserters, and thieves.” In 1854, in the “Ward massacre,” Shoshone killed and mutilated 19 emigrants from Missouri, 25 miles east of Fort Boise.

  By 1863, with Americans demanding a final solution to the problem of Indian depredations on the Oregon Trail, the army perpetrated one of the most egregious Indian massacres in US history on the Bear River near the Utah–Idaho border. A “combination of a militarized Indian policy and aggressive volunteer forces” best explains “this moment of overwhelming state violence against unsuspecting Indian families,” as Blackhawk describes the massacre. On January 29, 1863, Army Colonel Patrick E. Connor issued orders to “destroy every male Indian whom you encounter” and to “immediately hang them, and leave their bodies thus exposed as an example of what evil-doers may expect.” The attackers went out of control, killed hundreds of Shoshone, raped women, and slaughtered babies. Some 160 surviving women and children were left “standing alone on a corpse-littered field” in the winter snow with no food or shelter. Settlers heaped praise on the soldiers and volunteers while Connor received promotion to brevet major general. Like Evans in Colorado, Utah Governor James Doty declared the massacre was salutary because “it struck terror into the heart” of the Shoshone, who “now acknowledge the Americans are the masters of this country.” The Bear Creek massacre long went unacknowledged—the battleground in Idaho served for years as a trash dump— but has since been reconstructed as a historic site.59

  The Cayuse and Nez Perce had joined the army in a federal campaign to hunt down Shoshone. Indigenous “scouts” and laborers, often refugees, comprised a “second-class racialized work force.” Marginalized and dispossessed by settler colonialism, Indians across the borderlands collaborated with the Americans. Often “reservation captivity or war with the U.S. regime” were the only other options available to these men, though others joined to manifest their warrior manhood and to strike back at the traditional enemies of their tribe, as was the case with the Cayuse and Nez Perce against the Shoshone.60

  The powerful Ute displayed colonial ambivalence by allying with the Americans against other tribes, but much like the Iroquois Confederation in the previous century collaboration could not prevent their own eventual dispossession. The Ute sought to preserve their autonomy by aiding first the Hispanics and then the Americans at the expense of the Shoshone, Paiutes, and other weaker tribes. The US takeover of New Mexico and California undermined the Ute by shutting down markets for their aggressive slave raids and trade. The Ute tried to revive the slave trade with Mormon emigrants, who sometimes purchased slaves under duress when Utes appeared with their captives, usually Paiute women and children, and threatened to kill them on the spot if the Mormons would not buy them.61

  The Utes clashed with the Mormons whose settler colonialism dramatically impacted lands, streams, and hunting grounds undermining indigenous subsistence patterns. Some Mormons viewed Indians as among the lost tribes of Israel hence their leader Brigham Young—like William Penn back east in a previous era—strove for accommodation. Like Penn, however, Young also wanted to control the land and commerce of the region. Thus once again settler colonialism overshadowed humanitarian impulses.62

  Violent clashes erupted among the Mormons and various Indian communities throughout the 1850s. In 1853–1854, Ute and Mormon militias clashed and captive Indians were summarily executed during the so-called Walkara War, named for a Ute chieftain known for horse thievery and slave trading. In 1853 Paiute warriors were the apparent perpetrators of the killing of eight Americans on a scientific expedition led by John Gunnison, an advocate of violent Indian removal. Settlers subsequently murdered the lawyer for the alleged perpetrators demonstrating that efforts to mount a legal defense for crimes committed by Indians were tantamount to treason punishable by death. From 1865–1867, scores of Mormons and Ute died in the so-called Black Hawk War, a last gasp Ute guerrilla campaign named for a Ute leader whose actual name was Antogna.63

  The dividing line between the Utah and Colorado territories cut squarely across Ute lands. In 1855, following Ute depredations against cattlemen in Colorado’s San Luis valley, settlers responded by slaughtering 40 Ute near Salida. The clashes with cattlemen “played into the hands of Colorado’s promoters and politicians” who, as they would demonstrate again at Sand Creek, “believed the presence of any Indians, good or bad, was an obstacle to progress.” In 1855, Indian agents negotiated a treaty and land cession, which the Ute signed but in a familiar pattern Congress declined to ratify.64

  As Americans continued to flood into Colorado after the gold rush and the Homestead Act, Coloradans strove to clear the western slope of the Rockies. The Ute leader Ouray personified ambivalence and deft diplomacy, as he held off the Americans for as long as possible. Ouray and many of his Ute followers had adapted to the Americans and settled into successful lives as ranchers and sheepherders. Ouray was feted in New York, Boston, and Washington but the treaties he signed ultimately proved ineffectual. “The bulldozer of American removal hit the Rockies hard,” Blackhawk explains, “and it kept moving, scaling the nation’s tallest peaks and descending into mountain valleys in search of the next Native community to uproot.”65

  Following the Civil War, Sherman urged the Ute to confine themselves to a reservation or risk removal but Ouray refused. “They will have to freeze and starve a little more, I reckon, before they listen to common sense,” Sherman responded. The army thus reversed its ambivalence toward the Ute, which it had previously recruited for an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Navaho in the Arizona territory. “Such mercenary activities,” Virginia Simmons points out, “endorsed by the federal government, ran counter to its goal of getting the Indians to settle peacefully on reservations and to become farmers.” In 1879, following the Battle of Mill Creek in which Ute killed the Indian agent Nathan Meeker and ten others, Coloradoans would settle for nothing less than removal or extermination. Two years later the Ute were rounded up in a camp north of Montrose and moved to an area of Utah beyond the bounds of what had been their homeland for 500 years. Settler colonials rushed in to stake their claims on former Ute land in western Colorado.66

  Genocidal Violence in the Southwest

  The Civil War famously brought an end to slavery in the American South and less famously brought an end to it in the Southwest. Prevalent throughout the borderlands but especially well entrenched in the Southwest, slave trading, mostly in women and children, anchored economic and often diplomatic relations through exchanges of captives. The slave trade encompassed brutally violent seizures, but these captives typically acculturated to their new communities creating the multiethnic society characteristic of the region. As James Brooks found, “Captured women and children served as objects of men’s contestations for power while simultaneously they enriched the cultures in which they found themselves lodged through their own social and biological reproductive potential.”67

  The Americans appreciated neither
the ethnic mixing nor the enslavement, which the Civil War had permanently discredited. By the 1860s the United States was wiping out the human trafficking and replacing it with a modernist capitalist economy rooted in the cattle industry, mining, and consumption. Regionally integrated indigenous exchange systems were displaced by a modern nation-centered economy fueled by industrialization and linked by the railroad. Indian removal followed logically from the destruction of the Indian economies and exchange systems.

  Among the indigenous tribes to have been heavily victimized by slave raids were the Navaho, but the Diné also conducted raids of their own for captives as well as cattle, horses, mules, and sheep. At the same time, like the “five civilized tribes,” the Navaho had long done what Americans said they wanted of Indians, as they had become effective agrarians and herders. They would be violently dispossessed nonetheless.

  From 1864–1868, the United States, assisted by the Ute, Hopi, and Zuni, launched an “onslaught on the Navahos and their way of life.” In 1858, war had broken out with settlers over a Navaho killing of a white man’s slave. At least 200 Navaho died in eight battles over a four-month period. Following the Mexican cession, the Americans had constructed Fort Defiance in 1851 in the Arizona Territory, which the Navaho unsuccessfully assaulted in 1860.