That's the planned genocide of California's American Indians from 1846 to 1873.
"The state of California paid $1 million to kill off American Indians," reports Benjamin Madley. Not surprisingly, he won the prize for best book of history written in 2016 at Friday night's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
His book is An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indiana Catastrophe 1846-1873, published by Yale University Press.
"Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000," reads the inside flap of the book cover.
"Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter. He reveals the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, and who did the killing and why the killing ended."
"He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and broad societal, judicial, and political support for the genocide."
I bought this book and plan to read it.
I heard him speak on a panel titled
Nonfiction: Tragedies of Our Past, Conversation 2014
The moderator and other authors, equally compelling, were:
Moderators
William Deverell
Deverell is a historian focusing on the American West. A co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to California History, he is | a professor of history at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.
Speakers
Sharla M. Fett
Fett is an Associate Professor of History at Occidental College. She is the author of "Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade,” and her previous book, "Working Cures,” won the Southern Historical Association's Frank L. and Harriet Owsley Prize and the Organization of American Historian's James A. Rawley Prize (co-winner). She lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Benjamin Madley
Madley is an historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history. Born in Redding, California, | Ben spent much of his childhood in Karuk Country near the Oregon border where he became interested in the relationship between colonizers and indigenous peoples. He writes about American Indians as well as colonial genocides in Africa, Australia, and Europe, often applying a transnational and comparative approach. His... Read More →
Christina Snyder
Snyder is an award-winning historian who teaches at Indiana University. Her first book, "Slavery in Indian Country," earned a wide range of accolades, including the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the James H. Broussard Prize, and the John C. Ewers Prize. Snyder's most recent book, published in early 2017, is "Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson."
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