By 1820, more than 20,000 of the remaining Native Americans lived in slavery at California missions. Over 90 percent of the largely coastal native populations were gone by 1848. After California became a state in 1850, the abuses continued. One of the first laws was the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which removed Native Americans from traditional lands and broke up families. With this law, California legally turned native people, including children, into slaves through apprenticing or indenturing them to the white population. Homeless people were arrested. If they couldn’t pay their bail, they were punished by being placed at a public auction and sold to the highest bidder.
The California Constitution allowed the governor to order sheriffs on “expeditions against the Indians.” White men were appointed as Indian agents to take charge of the remaining Native Americans, and many allowed more people to die. Not all Indian agents were deceitful; some, such as Superintendent of the California Indian Agency E. G. Beale, spoke out against how Native Americans were treated. Fearful of the planned extinction of California’s natives, he made a plea in 1852.
Driven from their fishing and hunting grounds, hunted themselves like wild beasts, lassoed, and torn from homes made miserable by want, and forced into slavery, the wretched remnant which escapes starvation on the one hand, and the relentless whites on the other, only do so to rot and die of a loathsome disease, the penalty of Indian association with frontier civilization It is a crying
Sin that our government, so wealthy and so powerful, should shut its eyes to the miserable fate of these rightful owners of the soil.
When they addressed Congress in 1904, the Northern California Indian Association said, “[I]t is doubtful if there is any people in America, even on the East Side of New York City, whose presence is so miserable or whose future is so appalling as some of the Indian bands in Northern California; for we have here not only the squalor of the present, but a hopelessness of despair unknown even in the slums of darkest New York.”
World History
