Beginning with the California Gold Rush, a rapid influx of white settlers into Northern California brought settlers into conflict with Native populations. In 1850, California's legislature passed a law permitting the kidnapping and forced servitude of Indians, and Governor Peter Hardeman Burnett publicly anticipated a "war of extermination" against California's Indigenous peoples. When the first six white settlers arrived in Round Valley in 1854, they immediately killed 40 Yuki people in what became known as the Asbill Massacre, beginning years of violence against a Yuki population estimated at 6,000–20,000.
Between 1855 and 1860, kidnapping of Yuki women and children for sale, combined with settler competition for land and game, fueled escalating violence. A band of 20–30 armed white settlers carried out repeated attacks on Yuki communities from 1856 through the summer of 1859. Witnesses and government agents documented specific atrocities, including the killing of unarmed women, children, and infants. Special Treasury Agent J. Ross Browne described the winter of 1858–59 as a period in which "more than a hundred and fifty peaceable Indians" were killed by settlers acting "under official authority." Contemporary estimates compiled from government agents and newspapers suggest well over 1,000 Yuki people were killed across the period, with additional deaths from enslavement and starvation. By 1861, an editor of the Mendocino Herald reported only five to six hundred Yuki remained; by 1864, the population had fallen to roughly 300.
Requests for federal military intervention were initially refused by U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. A small detachment of 17 soldiers was deployed to Round Valley in January 1859 under Major Edward Johnson, who reported to the California governor in May 1859 that "the whites have waged a relentless war of extermination against the Yukas," and that the Yuki, not the settlers, needed protection. Despite this, the soldiers were ordered not to confront or arrest settlers and were reassigned by January 1860. In July 1859, settler Walter S. Jarboe organized a paid militia of 40 men, authorized and funded by the state government, which killed hundreds of additional Yuki in a campaign known as "Jarboe's War" or the "Mendocino War."
A 1860 California legislative committee investigated the killings; its majority report condemned the violence as unjustified slaughter, but the report was never read to the full legislature, which instead expanded laws permitting Indian enslavement and appropriated funds to cover the costs of the anti-Yuki campaign. A company of federal soldiers finally ended the violence in 1862, and California repealed its Indian servitude law in 1863.
Serranus Clinton Hastings, a former California Supreme Court judge and Round Valley landowner, was implicated by contemporaries in funding and organizing the campaign against the Yuki. In 2021, public attention to this history led to the renaming of Hastings College of the Law to the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.
Credit: Mendocino County Police DepartmentPublic domainSourceUNSOLVEDListen
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