Benjamin Madley

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Benjamin Madley | California's Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.3 | The History Cooperative

California's Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History

This article summarizes the heretofore incomplete and disputed assessment of the Yuki genocide, narrates the cataclysm, reevaluates state and federal culpability, and explains how this catastrophe constituted genocide under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. Finally, the article explores how other case studies and the convention may inform future research on genocide in California and the United States in general.

"Accounts are daily coming in from the counties on the Coast Range, of sickening atrocities and wholesale slaughters of great numbers of defenseless Indians ... For an evil of this magnitude, someone is responsible. Either our government, or our citizens, or both, are to blame."¹

California Legislature, 1860

ON 14 MAY 1854, SIX MISSOURIAN EXPLORERS crested a steep ridge, some 150 miles north of San Francisco. After days of hard travel through mountainous, broken terrain, they encountered a stunning sight. Spread below them was 25,000 acres of lush, flat land. The next day, the six horsemen descended to the floor of what is now known as Round Valley, in northern Mendocino County. According to Frank Asbill, son of one of the six, "they had not gone far when the tall, waving, wild oats began to wiggle in a thousand different places all at the same time." The group's leader, Pierce Asbill, then called out: "We've come a long way from Missouri to locate this place ... an' be danmed if wigglin' grass 'ull keep us away! Git a–hold of yer weapons—we'uns are goin' in!"

Reaching a creek bed, the six horsemen reportedly encountered three thousand Yuki Indians. "A war hoop went up from the Missourians [who] just lay over the horse[s'] neck[s] and shot ... They just rode them down ... It was not difficult to get an Indian with every shot ... When the shootin' was over, thirty-two dead and dying [Yuki] lay scattered." By the end of the day perhaps forty Indians were dead.² The massacre was a prelude to an American genocide.

Like many California Indians, the Yuki suffered a cataclysmic population decline under United States rule. Between 1854 and 1864, settlement policies, murders, abductions, massacres, rape-induced venereal diseases, and willful neglect at Round Valley Reservation reduced them from perhaps 20,000 to several hundred. Despite decades of discussion over who or what was responsible, no consensus exists on state and federal decision-makers' roles or whether or not the catastrophe constituted genocide. This article summarizes the heretofore incomplete and disputed assessment of the Yuki genocide, narrates the cataclysm, reevaluates state and federal culpability, and explains how this catastrophe constituted genocide under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. Finally, the article explores how other case studies and the convention may inform future research on genocide in California and in the United States in general.

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