Did people during the gold rush kill Indians in California? Absolutely. In his masterful 2016 book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, UCLA history professor Benjamin Madley documented how vigilantes, soldiers and regular citizens slaughtered California’s native population to the point that it went from about 150,000 people to just 30,000. (To see how those same Yankees also savaged the Mexicans during that era, read The Decline of the Californios by the late Cal State Northridge professor Leonard Pitt.)
The Eagle
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