During the twenty-seven years bounded by the Mexican and Modoc wars, invading white Americans ruthlessly conquered the approximately fifty California Indian tribes that had eluded Spanish, Mexican, or Russian domination. Triggered by US annexation and the subsequent gold rush, the final subjugation of Native California resulted in a shocking demographic collapse that slashed the state’s Indian population from an estimated 150,000 in 1845 to a mere 30,000 by 1870. Although demographer Sherburne Cook carefully calculated that epidemic diseases caused fully 60 percent of this loss and that lethal violence accounted for less than 4 percent, historian Benjamin Madley argues that the “California Indian catastrophe” was no accidental tragedy but rather a clear-cut case of “genocide as defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention” (14).
To prove his case, Madley has produced a towering book that will long endure as a landmark text in California history. Among its many achievements, this...
