Bloody Island Massacre | |
---|---|
Location | Clear Lake, Lake County, California |
Coordinates | 39°08′56″N122°53′17″W / 39.149°N 122.888°W |
Date | May 15, 1850 |
Target | Pomo under Chief Augustine |
Deaths | 60–800 Pomo Native American old men, women and children. [1] |
Perpetrators | Elements of 1st Dragoons Regiment of the U.S. Army, under the command of Lieutenants Nathaniel Lyon and John Wynn Davidson |
Motive | Revenge for the deaths of slave owners Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, who were killed in a slave rebellion |
Reference no. | 427 |
The Bloody Island Massacre was a mass killing of indigenous Californians by the U.S. Military that occurred on what was then an island in Clear Lake, California, on May 15, 1850. It is part of the wider California genocide.
A number of the Pomo, an indigenous people of California, had been enslaved by two settlers, Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, and confined to one village, where they were starved and abused until they rebelled and murdered their captors. In response, the U.S. Cavalry killed at least 60 of the local Pomo. In July 1850, a report by Major Edwin Allen Sherman contended that “There were not less than four hundred warriors killed and drowned at Clear Lake and as many more of squaws and children who plunged into the lake and drowned, through fear, committing suicide. So in all, about eight hundred Native Americans found a watery grave in Clear Lake.” [2]
The Bloody Island Massacre (also called the Clear Lake Massacre) occurred on what was then an island called in the Pomo language, Bo-no-po-ti or Badon-napo-ti (Island Village), at the north end of Clear Lake, Lake County, California, on May 15, 1850. [3] [4] It was a place where the Pomo had traditionally gathered for the spring fish spawn. After this event, it became known as Bloody Island. The lake has since receded so it is now north of the body of water.[ citation needed ]
A number of Wappo and Pomo, primarily living in the Big Valley area, had been enslaved, interned, and severely abused by settlers Andrew Kelsey (namesake of Kelsey Creek and Kelseyville, California) and Charles Stone. [5] Kelsey and Stone purchased cattle running free and grazing rights in Big Valley from Salvador Vallejo in 1847. They captured and impressed local Indians to work as vaqueros. They also forced them to build them a permanent shelter with promises for rations that were not kept. Because they made a residence there, their treatment of the Pomo was more brutal than had been Vallejo's, though the massacred Pomos at Anderson Island might have argued that point. The people were eventually confined to a village surrounded by a stockade and were not allowed weapons or fishing implements. Families starved on the meager rations they provided only four cups of wheat a day for a family. When one young man asked for more wheat for his sick mother, Stone reportedly killed him. [6] In the fall of 1849, Kelsey forced 50 Pomo men to work as laborers on a second gold-seeking expedition to the Placer gold fields. Kelsey became ill with malaria and sold the rations to other miners. The Pomo starved, and only one or two men returned alive. [7]
Stone and Kelsey regularly forced the Pomo parents to bring their daughters to them to be sexually abused. If they refused they were whipped mercilessly. A number of them died from that abuse. Both men indentured and abused the Pomo women. The starving Pomo became so desperate that
'Suk' and 'Xasis' took Stone's horse to kill a cow but the weather was bad and the horse ran off. Knowing they would be punished, (Chief) Augustine's wife poured water onto the two men's gunpowder, rendering it useless; Pomo warriors attacked the house at dawn, immediately killing Kelsey with an arrow. Stone jumped out a window and tried to hide in a stand of willow trees, but Augustine found him and killed him with a rock. The Pomo men took food back to their families and everyone left to join other relatives around the Lake. Some went to Badon-napoti where the spring fish spawn was underway. [7]
On May 15, 1850, a contingent from the 1st Dragoons Regiment of the United States Cavalry under Nathaniel Lyon, then still a lieutenant, and Lieutenant J. W. Davidson [4] tried to locate Augustine's band to punish them. When they instead came upon a group of Pomo on Badon-napoti (later called Bloody Island), they killed [4] old men, women and children.
The soldiers under Davidson's command arrived "with orders to proceed against the Clear Lake Indians, and exterminate if possible the tribe." [8] The National Park Service has estimated the army killed 60 of 400 Pomo; other accounts say 200 were killed. Most of the younger men were off in the mountains to the north, hunting. [6] Some of the dead were relatives of the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake [3] and the Robinson Rancheria of Pomo Indians of California. The army killed 75 more of the Pomo along the Russian River. [6]
One of the Pomo survivors of the massacre was a 6-year-old girl named Ni'ka, or Lucy Moore. She hid underwater and breathed through a tule reed. Her descendants formed the Lucy Moore Foundation to work for better relations between the Pomo and other residents of California. [6]
Later, the Pomo were forced to live in small rancherias set aside by the federal government. For most of the 20th century, the Pomo, reduced in number, survived on such tiny reservations in poverty. Few textbooks on California history mentioned the Bloody Island incident or abuse of the native Californians.[ citation needed ]
Two separate historical markers record the site. The one placed by the Native Sons of the Golden West on 20 May 1942 on Reclamation Road 0.3 miles off Highway 20, describes the location as the scene of a battle between U.S. soldiers under "Captain" Lyons and Indians under Chief Augustine. [9] California Historical Landmark No. 427, describing the location as the scene of a massacre mostly of women and children, was placed on Highway 20 at the Reclamation Road intersection on 15 May 2005 by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the Lucy Moore Foundation, [4] a non-profit organization founded to educate the California public about the massacre. [10] A 2015 article in Genocide Studies and Prevention analyzed how this plaque reflects on the massacre and its remembrance by both Native and colonial people. [11]
Lake County is a county located in the north central portion of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 68,163. The county seat is Lakeport. The county takes its name from Clear Lake, the dominant geographic feature in the county and the largest non-extinct natural lake wholly within California.
Kelseyville is a census-designated place (CDP) in Lake County, California, located six miles southeast of Lakeport, at an elevation of 1,384 feet. Its population was 3,382 according to the 2020 United States census.
Lakeport is an incorporated city and the county seat of Lake County, California. This city is 125 miles (201 km) northwest of Sacramento. Lakeport is on the western shore of Clear Lake, at an elevation of 1,355 feet (413 m). The population was 5,026 at the 2020 census, up from 4,753 at the 2010 census.
The Pomo are a Native American people of California. Historical Pomo territory in Northern California was large, bordered by the Pacific Coast to the west, extending inland to Clear Lake, mainly between Cleone and Duncans Point. One small group, the Tceefoka, lived in the vicinity of present-day Stonyford, Colusa County, were they were separated from the majority of Pomo lands by Yuki and Wintuan speakers.
Clear Lake is a natural freshwater lake in Lake County in the U.S. state of California, north of Napa County and San Francisco. It is the largest natural freshwater lake wholly within the state, with 68 square miles (180 km2) of surface area. At an age of 0.5 million years, it is the oldest lake in North America. It is the latest lake to occupy a site with a history of lakes stretching back at least 2,500,000 years.
Nathaniel Lyon was a United States Army officer who was the first Union general to be killed in the American Civil War. He is noted for his actions in Missouri in 1861, at the beginning of the conflict, to forestall secret secessionist plans of the governor Claiborne Jackson.
Nancy Kelsey was a member of the Bartleson–Bidwell Party. She was the first white woman to travel overland from Missouri, seeing Utah and Nevada before crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains into California on November 25, 1841. Wife of Benjamin Kelsey, and the mother of eight surviving children, she is sometimes referred to as the "Betsy Ross of California" for her role in creation of the original Bear Flag from which Bear Flag Rebellion got its name.
Schoenoplectus acutus, called tule, common tule, hardstem tule, tule rush, hardstem bulrush, or viscid bulrush, is a giant species of sedge in the plant family Cyperaceae, native to freshwater marshes all over North America. The common name derives from the Nāhuatl word tōllin, and it was first applied by the early settlers from New Spain who recognized the marsh plants in the Central Valley of California as similar to those in the marshes around Mexico City.
The Wiyot are an indigenous people of California living near Humboldt Bay, California and a small surrounding area. They are culturally similar to the Yurok people. They called themselves simply Ku'wil, meaning "the People". Today, there are approximately 450 Wiyot people. They are enrolled in several federally recognized tribes, such as the Wiyot Tribe, Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria, Blue Lake Rancheria, and the Cher-Ae Heights Indian Community of the Trinidad Rancheria.
The Round Valley Indian Reservation is a federally recognized Indian reservation lying primarily in northern Mendocino County, California, United States. A small part of it extends northward into southern Trinity County. The total land area, including off-reservation trust land, is 93.939 km2. More than two-thirds of this area is off-reservation trust land, including about 405 acres (1.64 km2) in the community of Covelo. The total resident population as of the 2000 census was 300 persons, of whom 99 lived in Covelo.
Bloody Island may refer to:
The Wiyot massacre refers to the incidents on February 26, 1860, at Tuluwat, near Eureka in Humboldt County, California. In coordinated attacks beginning at about 6 am, White settlers murdered 80 to 250 Wiyot people with axes, knives, and guns. The February 26 attacks were followed by similar bloody attacks on other Wiyot villages later that week in what were part of the broader California Genocide.
The Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake is a federally recognized tribe of Pomo Indians in Lake County, California. The tribe's reservation, the Upper Lake Rancheria, is 119 acres (0.48 km2) large and located near the town of Upper Lake in northwestern California.
Benjamin or Ben Kelsey was an early American pioneer of California with his brothers Andrew and Sam Kelsey. He was a founder, often with one or more of his brothers, of several settlements in California.
Andrew Kelsey, or Andy Kelsey, was an early American pioneer of California with his brothers Samuel and Benjamin Kelsey. His name is attached to the town of Kelseyville in Lake County, California, in the area where he settled in 1847 after acquiring livestock from Californio Salvador Vallejo. He was killed in 1849 during an Indian uprising triggered by his mistreatment of the indigenous population.
The California Indian Wars were a series of wars, battles, and massacres between the United States Army, and the Indigenous peoples of California. The wars lasted from 1850, immediately after Alta California, acquired during the Mexican–American War, became the state of California, to 1880 when the last minor military operation on the Colorado River ended the Calloway Affair of 1880.
The California genocide was a series of systematized killings of thousands of Indigenous people of California by United States government agents and private citizens in the 19th century. It began following the American Conquest of California from Mexico, and the influx of settlers due to the California Gold Rush, which accelerated the decline of the Indigenous population of California. Between 1846 and 1873, it is estimated that non-Natives killed between 9,492 and 16,094 California Natives. In addition, between several hundred and several thousand California Natives were starved or worked to death. Acts of enslavement, kidnapping, rape, child separation and forced displacement were widespread. These acts were encouraged, tolerated, and carried out by state authorities and private militias.
Kelsey Creek is a watercourse in Lake County, California, United States, that feeds Clear Lake from the south. Originally forest-covered, the watershed has been converted in the lower parts to farmland and for urban use. Higher up, the forests have been cleared, regrown, and cleared again. The northern part of the creek flows through a geothermal field that feeds power plants and hot springs. The wooded Cobb area in the higher part of the watershed was once home to resorts as early as the 1850s.
Rodman Slough is a wetland that drains into Clear Lake in Lake County, California. It provides an important habitat for fish, amphibians, birds and other wildlife. It is fed by Scotts Creek and Middle Creek, which contribute about 70% of the sediment and nutrients that cause algae problems in Clear Lake. The slough is the remnant of a much larger area of wetlands and open water that extended from Tule Lake to the northeast through a wide area of land north and east of the present slough that was drained for farmland. Since 1978 there have been proposals to restore large parts of the former wetlands, and much of the funding has been approved, but progress has been slow.
Site of First Adobe Home, Lake County is a historical landmark in Kelseyville, in Lake County, California.