Fremont Attack Set Stage for Native American Cleansing
On April 5, 1846, a small military expedition led by Captain John Fremont attacked a seasonal Native American village on the Sacramento River and killed hundreds of Wintu, mostly women and children. The estimates for the official number of dead vary from 120-900. This act of brutality on the part of the American government wasn’t the worst of America’s long and storied frontier violence. Rather, the butchery and callousness with which Fremont’s men undertook their mission is a sublime example of the closing of the American frontier and the settlers’ belief in manifest destiny.
It would be another month before the United States officially declared war on Mexico and seized California from the newly-independent country south of its border. Yet the writing was already on the wall, especially in northern California.
The butchery itself happened near what is present-day Redding, Calif., about 160 miles north of Sacramento. When Fremont and his men arrived in Sacramento, a group of American squatters claimed that a group of Indians, encouraged by Mexican authorities, was planning an attack on squatter settlements near the Sacramento River in Reading’s Ranch (present-day Redding). This may or may not have been true, as there are certainly plenty of historical examples from all parts of the republic to suggest that Indian attacks on squatter settlements were common. But it is equally illustrative of how the United States came to acquire so much Native American land in spite of the treaties Washington signed with various “tribes.”
Captain Fremont - who went on to be California’s first senator and the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate - continued his killing spree, marching his men up the Sacramento River into Oregon, murdering Native Americans on sight, and only turning back to California when word of the war with Mexico reached him.
There are a couple of ways to think about this killing spree. One, popular in Leftist circles, is to blame it on racism. I think this is shallow and, at its worst, dishonest. A more useful way of thinking about Fremont’s killing spree through southern Pacific Northwest is to consider that the Native population was more passive than the Plains Indians that the U.S. military cut through, and they were more organized politically in the manner of Europeans. The tribes also had stronger ties to American rivals in the region. The British and Russian Empires had trading companies in the region, and Mexico had official government outposts.
The familiar political organizations of the Pacific “tribes” may have also been a problem for Fremont, who was from Virginia, because the captain (who fought on the side of the North during the Civil War) feared another legal battle like the one white landowners faced in Worcester v. Georgia, when the Supreme Court ruled against the state of Georgia and in favor of the Cherokee nation. Fremont’s blatant ethnic cleansing campaign was about not wanting the native peoples to have the same liberties that the Five Civilized Tribes had (Andrew Jackson ignored Worcester v. Georgia and removed the Indians on behalf of Southern interests anyway).
The Sacramento River massacre laid the foundation for the removal of Native Americans from their land and the bondage of their children. Benjamin Madley, a historian at UCLA, wrote an excellent book in 2016 detailing the carnage that followed the Sacramento River massacre. Though Madley’s theoretical arguments are weak (he follows the common Leftist explanations - racism and “privatized” military action - conventionally and faithfully), his documentation of the massacres in California of its Native peoples make the book worth reading.
