Baumgardner begins by describing the Yuki and by suggesting that Round Valley violence was part of a larger “genocidal struggle between two peoples of vastly different cultures over control of the entire northern half of California” (p. 18). He next describes the establishment of what later became the Round Valley Reservation, the escalated killing of Indians, and settlers’, soldiers’, and Indian Office officials’ “conflicting views” p. 50) over local Indian policy. After narrating “Gen. Kibbe’s ‘Expedition’” against other Indians north of the Yuki, Baumgardner describes the zenith of Round Valley violence. In September 1859, after vigilantes led by Walter Jarboe had killed many Indians earlier in the year, the Governor of California hired these men to hunt down Indians beyond the reservation. In total, Jarboe’s men “killed ... well over four hundred” (p. 179) Indians and in 1860 California legislators “paid the company over $9,000 for its many deadly raids” (pp. 97-8). Baumgardner next discusses why many settlers supported and participated in Indian killing. He then devotes five chapters to analyzing specific primary sources and four chapters to chronicling the continuing violence and death on and around Round Valley between 1861 and 1864. Finally, he offers an eight-page Conclusion.

Baumgardner contributes to our understanding of Round Valley history by bringing previously unutilized primary sources to bear and by adding new context and insights. However, like most scholars of the cataclysm, Baumgardner grapples superficially with the central issue of genocide. In his Preface, he notes that California “immigrants . . . with long-range weapons . . . had the power to annihilate entire Native American tribes” (p. 2). He also writes of “the genocidal and vigilante type of violence” (p. 258) in “Northern and Northwestern California,” the “genocide process” (p. 116) as it applied to one series of killings near Round Valley, and Jarboe’s having “committed genocide” (p. 122). Yet, in the end, Baumgardner frames the Round Valley catastrophe as “conflict,” not genocide.

It was both. Using the definition in the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, it is difficult not to interpret Baumgardner’s narrative as a history of genocide. According to the Convention, genocide is evidenced by “intent to destroy [a group], in whole or in part” coupled with specific genocidal acts such as “killing members of the “group” (United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, p. 280). Baumgardner documents evidence suggesting whites’ genocidal intent as well as the killing of many hundreds of Indians, by “death squads” (p. 57), paid state militiamen, soldiers, and individual whites in multiple homicides and massacres. By contrast, there is no credible documentation of any Indian articulating “intent to destroy” the white community, and Baumgardner quotes whites describing local Indians’ generally peaceful intentions. What happened in and around Round Valley was not merely a “bloody conflict.” As Baumgardner points out, many Yuki were “exterminated” (p. 262), while “Euro-Americans lost fewer than ten settlers during the seven-year period in the Mendocino War” (pp. 7-8).

Baumgardner’s chapter on the California Legislature’s 1860 Majority Report of the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War might have specifically cited these legislators when they proclaimed: “We are unwilling to attempt to dignify, by the term “war,” a slaughter” (California Legislature, Majority and Minority Reports of the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino Mar, p. 6). As these men suggested, Round Valley was a site of genocide, not merely a “conflict.”

Benjamin L. Madley

Yale University

New Haven, Connecticut

While basing his historical account on the documentary record, the author emphasizes that this record is incomplete and essentially flawed, since whatever Native American depositions existed at one time were either lost or destroyed. So, in a very concrete sense, the other side of the story must be read between the lines of the documentary record that does exist. Although before reading this book, I understood that the indigenous peoples of California died in large numbers due to the appropriation of their land by first the Spaniards and then, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Americans, I had not fully realized how suddenly and thoroughly this conquest came about. Killing for Land in Early California clearly documents how this ‘land grab’ transpired in Round Valley.

One variable that makes this local history perhaps more broadly significant then some others is that Round Valley is a location that had been designated as the ideal place for a large reservation for up to 25,000 Northern Californian Native Americans. However, contradictory goals of extermination or at least isolation of the Indians and the appropriation of their ancestral lands, on the one hand, versus official demands that the Indians be protected, provided for, and ‘taught’ to be peaceful, obedient farmers, on the other, insured that whatever the ultimate configuration of land ownership in the Valley, the consequences for its original inhabitants would be dire. Killing for Land in Early California tells the story of this ‘frontier war in the late 1850s that gave rise to a stable and permanent ranch economy for the Euro-Americans and a reservation system for the few surviving Native Americans.’ Baumgardner concludes that ‘What remained of peace following this ugly race war, both for Native Americans and Euro-American settlers alike, were strong antipathies, memories of terrible events of shootings and killings, and a cold almost complete lack of mutual understanding.’