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to kill 175? Is it not rather odd that Thomas Martin could count the victims of the first volley when thousands of Indians were still ranged against them? A mere twenty-four killed would not have made much of a dent.
    Of course if Breckenridge was right and there were only four hundred Indians there, twenty-four would have made a significant dent.
    That the men immediately waded in with sabers seems odd too. If the first volley was so effective, why not keep shooting? Hand-to-hand combat would have seemed far more dangerous. Were the attackers in the grip of such a blood frenzy that theycouldn’t stop, producing the “perfect butchery” that Kit Carson talks about?
    The aloof John Charles Frémont, once the operation was seen to be a success, as usual makes it appear that he had been the prime mover, while getting no actual blood on his hands. The lesson administered, he says, “was rude but necessary, and had the desired effect.”
    David Roberts deserves much credit for addressing the Sacramento River Massacre in
A Newer World
. His own suspicion, backed up by what anthropological studies there are, was that the Indians had gathered to celebrate a spring ritual, possibly the Bear Dance, which the whites, unfamiliar with this ritual, mistook for a war dance.
    The Maidu and Wintu were fairly settled, sedentary tribes, acorn-gatherers, salmon-fishers. Their numbers shrank so precipitously during the second half of the nineteenth century that by the time the anthropologists got there there were few left to study.

    Ishi
    The much publicized Ishi, last of the Yana tribe,
was
studied, by the anthropologist Theodora Kroeber, but she knew nothing of this massacre and did not try to determine if some trace of it survived in Yana lore or memory.
    In a sense the Sacramento River Massacre illustrates a problem that was to bedevil white-Indian relations from first to last: the inability, on the part of whites, to distinguish between Indians who were friendly and Indians who were hostile. Any big gathering of Indians, however well intentioned, made whites nervous—to a degree it still does.
    One of the continuing sources of disagreement about the Sand Creek Massacre is that John Chivington led his troopers into the camp of Black Kettle, probably the single best known peace Indian of that day. Black Kettle was so sure that he enjoyed protection that he desperately waved an American flag even as the Coloradans were mowing down his people.

    Black Kettle

    Back row:
Bosse, a Cheyenne; Left Hand, an Arapaho; White Wolf, a Kiowa.
    Front row:
White Antelope, brother of Black Kettle; Black Kettle, Cheyenne chief; Bull Bear, a Cheyenne; Neva, an Arapaho
    From the first there were plenty of people in the West—indeed, in the country—who were frankly exterminationists. They wanted all the Indians gone. It may be that a disproportionate number of these genocidally minded settlers made their way to California. The deaths at the Sacramento River were merely a prelude to the rapid elimination of the California Indians.
    For a good account of this grim slaughter the reader is directed to the “Far West” chapter of James Wilson’s
The Earth ShallWeep
. During the conflict with the Plains Indians, there were at least a few equal fights. In California, with the exception of the Modoc War, there were
no
equal fights. Men who believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian overwhelmingly prevailed. During the Gold Rush particularly, exterminationists were thick on the ground. Indians were killed as casually as rabbits. I have reported elsewhere about a young vigilante who came to have qualms about killing Indian children with his rifle: the big bullets tore the small bodies so! The man was soon able to square his conscience by killing only adults with his rifle; the children he dispatched with his pistol.
    It is only fair to say, though, that if one puts oneself in the position of an ill-trained and perhaps