Native American Population Rebounds?

Its to do with the 1849 Gold Rush. Some "towns" and villages created by the settlers were offering bounties for native american heads, bounties then reimbursed from the state treasury in many cases. It was a deliberate policy of driving off and, in many instances, outright extermination.

I am shocked. I had never even heard of this. Wow. And the old cowboy movies always presented the Indians as the bad guy!

What you described sounds uncomfortably similar to the actions of a certain well-known regime in Europe in the 1940s...
 

"Preconceptions about Native Americans as shaped by the popular press and by immigrants’ experiences on the Overland Trail to California were used to further justify the elimination of Native people in the newcomers’ quest for land.

The allegedly “violent nature” of Native people was often merely their reaction to the atrocities committed against them as they were driven from their ancestral lands and alienated from their traditional resources."

This reminds me of the way the media reports on the peoples of the Middle East, and especially anyone who follows a certain Abrahamic religion.

They are depicted as violent, when in reality much of the hostility is a reaction to the atrocities committed against them by outsiders, who seek to seize land and resources in the region for themselves.

Interesting how history repeats itself.
 
One of the interesting things I learned about the 49ers was how terrified they were of indian attack on the plains, whipped up by newspapers and fiction back east, and how they carried that attitude with them. I read one account where a child in the wagon train had died en-route, and they were so sure that Native Americans would disturb her grave and desecrate her body that they buried her unmarked and then ran their wagons over the site to disguise the digging. AFAIK native americans rarely disturbed the dead, but the pioneers were so convinced it would happen.

//Apologies OP. I'll stop pulling the thread off-topic!
 
One of the interesting things I learned about the 49ers was how terrified they were of indian attack on the plains
On the other hand, many nineteenth-century Americans did have a very twisted sort of "respect" for the Plains Indians as noble savages, which occasionally stopped the army or the settlers from going as far as they could have. The Northern Cheyenne Exodus didn't end with the Cheyennes all being killed or dragged back in chains to Oklahoma, for example, and Standing Bear actually won his case.

The California Indians weren't granted even that tiny bit of respect as the noble savage. They were literally thought of as vermin and gunned down with nary a battle, and were then quickly forgotten, the final stage of a successful genocide.
 
On the other hand, many nineteenth-century Americans did have a very twisted sort of "respect" for the Plains Indians as noble savages, which occasionally stopped the army or the settlers from going as far as they could have. The Northern Cheyenne Exodus didn't end with the Cheyennes all being killed or dragged back in chains to Oklahoma, for example, and Standing Bear actually won his case.

The California Indians weren't granted even that tiny bit of respect as the noble savage. They were literally thought of as vermin and gunned down with nary a battle, and were then quickly forgotten, the final stage of a successful genocide.
Why the difference in attitude? Aristotelian racism?
 
On the other hand, many nineteenth-century Americans did have a very twisted sort of "respect" for the Plains Indians as noble savages, which occasionally stopped the army or the settlers from going as far as they could have. The Northern Cheyenne Exodus didn't end with the Cheyennes all being killed or dragged back in chains to Oklahoma, for example, and Standing Bear actually won his case.

The California Indians weren't granted even that tiny bit of respect as the noble savage. They were literally thought of as vermin and gunned down with nary a battle, and were then quickly forgotten, the final stage of a successful genocide.

An interesting case. I suppose its yet another example of the messy complexity of history - that there was no one "model" of Native American-Settler interaction across the West.
 
An interesting case. I suppose its yet another example of the messy complexity of history - that there was no one "model" of Native American-Settler interaction across the West.

One wonders whether the relative military prowess of the Plains Indians might have something to do with that.
 
What a drastic decline. That's astonishing. So they lost 100,000 people, fully two-thirds of their population, between 1845 and 1855. Wow.

So even by 1855 they were essentially relegated to being a curiosity, a novelty, all but vanished from their former range.

A loss of 66% of the current California population would be equivalent to 26.1 million deaths today. That's a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

Thanks for sharing.

The California Genocide was probably the most heinous act committed on American soil. Not light reading I'm afraid.

On the other hand, many nineteenth-century Americans did have a very twisted sort of "respect" for the Plains Indians as noble savages, which occasionally stopped the army or the settlers from going as far as they could have. The Northern Cheyenne Exodus didn't end with the Cheyennes all being killed or dragged back in chains to Oklahoma, for example, and Standing Bear actually won his case.

The California Indians weren't granted even that tiny bit of respect as the noble savage. They were literally thought of as vermin and gunned down with nary a battle, and were then quickly forgotten, the final stage of a successful genocide.

The Plains Indians had plenty of horses and guns and were seen as worthy enemies for the cavalry but in California the Indians had few of those. There's nothing heroic about everyday people shooting up a village of acorn gatherers.

Ishi the last "wild Californian Indian" came out of hiding in 1908 after a group of men came across his hiding spot and killed his elderly mother. She was weak and was sleeping wrapped in some animal hides. The men found her and threw her off a cliff. Just unprovoked casual murder.

Or maybe the settler people involved, I imagine farmers and ranchers are going to be less violent than people going after gold.

A lot of the California killings were done by farmers and ranchers because after the natives were driven off their hunting and fishing grounds they resorted to stealing cattle and settlers saw them as vermin. Some people even worked fulltime killing Indians for bounty.
 
Ishi the last "wild Californian Indian" came out of hiding in 1908 after a group of men came across his hiding spot and killed his elderly mother. She was weak and was sleeping wrapped in some animal hides. The men found her and threw her off a cliff. Just unprovoked casual murder.
It's actually arguably worse. The settlers ran into Ishi's camp in November, which as I understand is pretty cold in the California mountains and about to get colder.

His mother was too weak to run away with her son. They literally met her in her blankets, unable to move, and she told them in broken Spanish that she was muy malo.

Then the settlers took away all their winter supplies, including the acorn, the dried salmons, the bow, the arrows, the fire drill, the deer trap, the spear, the baskets, the moccasins, and the fur robes. They took away everything Ishi's family had, as his mother was watching. Why? "Anthropological interest."

Ishi's mother died of exposure a few days later.

At least murder is... if not understandable, at least imaginable. The kind of mentality that makes you steal everything that an old and visibly ill woman has ever possessed for "anthropological interest" and leave her to die is simply unfathomable.
 
I am shocked. I had never even heard of this. Wow. And the old cowboy movies always presented the Indians as the bad guy!

What you described sounds uncomfortably similar to the actions of a certain well-known regime in Europe in the 1940s...
I recall reading how there were issues of how Americans were bringing in red hair from "Apaches". Instead of fighting people who might have been a geniune threat (Apaches were for both Mexico and the United States because, you now, both countries were trying to take their land from them) they took raids into Mexico, killing civilians.
 
The Californian genocide of the Natives was pretty horrendous to read about. Even after Native groups agreed to move off of land (they were often directed by the barrel of a gun or swindled), they still were killed on mass. There was literally a huge bounty competition out for Native scalps. By the time the Gold Rush had ended, the population had decreased from 300,000 to less than 30,000.
Recently, the population has hit over . 700,000, but I doubt more than 25% are actually full-blooded Native americans, while the majority are Americans who know about their distant Native ancestry.
 
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