WHEREVER THE SWORD MIGHT FALL
The California Gold Rush attracted money-mad people from all over the world, many of whom ruthlessly exploited the resources of the new state to extract wealth. History records instances in which courts, politicians, miners, military officers, soldiers, settlers and Indian agents engaged in economic exploitation, displacement or even wholesale slaughter of the region’s Indians, who were often viewed as an impediment to the interlopers’ material and cultural aspirations. To many settlers the forcible removal or killing of Indians was little different from culling wild animals or felling trees to clear land for buildings, agriculture and farming. The newcomers seldom bothered to distinguish one tribe from another, while officials saw nothing to correct and at times encouraged such “necessary” predation.
For more than a century such attitudes persisted, as reflected in the narrated introduction to the 1962 epic Western How the West Was Won: “This land has a name today and is marked on maps. But the names and the marks and the maps all had to be won, won from nature and from primitive man.” In real life that winning entailed a great deal of human suffering. Among the primitive men caught up in that suffering were Pomos. In the eyes of those struck with gold fever, the Pomos and other California Indians were uncivilized “diggers” who posed an obstacle to civilization and making the most of the land—i.e., finding and removing gold.
The Pomos lived mostly in the inland valleys of northwest California, in the backyard of today’s renowned wine-growing Sonoma and
