In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement exterminated more than one hundred thousand California Native people in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870—quite possibly the most extreme demographic disaster of all time.23 Here too, against impossible odds, the Indigenous resisted and survived to tell the story. Had they not done so, there would be no Indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California, because the objective was to eradicate them. From the onset of the California gold rush, crazed “gold bugs” invaded Indigenous territories, terrorizing and brutally killing those who were in their path. These settlers seemed to require no military assistance in running roughshod over unarmed Indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains. The role left for the US Army was to round up the starving Indigenous refugees to transport them to established reservations in Oregon and Oklahoma.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' Hist…, loc. 290196