High Country News · Savannah, GA
What California owes for Native land
The day after California was admitted to the Union in September 1850, John C. Frémont, a U.S. senator who had settled in California from Savannah, Georgia, submitted 10 bills to the U.S. Senate seeking to transfer millions of acres of Indian Land to the newly admitted state. One of the bills that passed sought to dispossess California Indians by “providing for the extinction of their territorial claims in the gold mining districts.” According to research done by historian Benjamin Madley, who wrote the award-winning book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, the bill opened the door to an all-out assault on California Indians. California Indians held title to these lands under the laws of Spain, the first country to colonize California.