The San Francisco Examiner reports
ROUND VALLEY RESERVATION — They said they were chasing down horse and cattle thieves, an armed pursuit through fertile valleys and evergreen forests north of San Francisco. But under questioning in 1860, a cattle rancher let slip a more gruesome picture, one of indiscriminate killings of Yuki Indians.
A 10-year-old girl killed for “stubbornness.”……Infants “put out of their misery.”
Documented in letters and depositions held in California’s state archives, the Gold Rush-era massacres are today at the heart of a dispute at one of the country’s most prominent law schools whose graduates include generations of California politicians and lawyers like Vice President Kamala Harris.
For the past four years, the University of California, Hastings College of the Law has been investigating the role of its founder, Serranus Hastings, in one of the darkest, yet least discussed, chapters of the state’s history. Hastings, one of the wealthiest men in California in that era and the state’s first chief justice, masterminded one set of massacres.
For those involved, including a descendant of Hastings who sits on the school’s board, the journey into the past has revealed a very different version of the early years of the state than the one taught in classrooms and etched into the popular imagination of intrepid pioneers trekking into the hills to strike it rich.
Across Northern California — north of Napa’s vineyards, along the banks of the Russian River and in numerous other places from deserts to redwood groves — as many as 5,617 Native people, and perhaps more whose deaths were not recorded, were massacred by officially sanctioned militias and U.S. troops from the 1840s to the 1870s, campaigns often initiated by white settlers like Hastings who wanted to use the land for their own purposes.
Thousands more Indians were killed by vigilantes during the same period. But what sets apart the organized campaigns is that the killers’ travel and ammunition expenses were reimbursed by the state of California and the federal government.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that California state legislators established a state-sponsored killing machine,” said Benjamin Madley, a history professor at UCLA.
By Madley’s calculation, expeditions carried out at Hastings’ behest killed at least 283 men, women and children, the most deadly of 24 known California state militia campaigns.
In 1878, Hastings donated $100,000 in gold coins to found the school that carries his name, California’s first law school. It was “to be forever known and designated as ‘Hastings’ College of the Law,” according to the school’s enactment.
Now both the law school and its critics agree that Hastings “bears significant responsibility” for the massacres, in the words of the Hastings inquiry, but they disagree on what to do about it, including the question of whether the school should retain its name.
Full article at https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/local-law-school-reckons-with-the-shame-of-native-american-massacres/
