The Bloody Island massacre at Clear Lake
15 May 1850Badon-napoti, Bloody Island, upper Clear Lake, Lake County, CA
US dragoons attacked a Pomo village on Clear Lake in reprisal for the killing of two ranchers who had enslaved and starved their workers. The people killed had nothing to do with it.
In 1847 Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone set up a ranching operation at Clear Lake and ran it on forced Pomo labour - people held, worked, starved and raped. Late in 1849, after the two men killed a young Pomo man who had taken a bullock to feed his family, Pomo workers killed Kelsey and Stone.
The reprisal came the following May, and it did not fall on the people responsible. On 15 May 1850 Lieutenant Nathaniel Lyon took a detachment of the 1st Dragoons to Badon-napoti, an island village in the upper lake, and attacked at dawn with boats and cannon. Those killed were overwhelmingly elders, women and children; survivors described people cut down in the tule as they tried to swim. Lyon reported about sixty dead. Pomo accounts and the California Native American Heritage Commission put the number far higher, up to eight hundred.
It was one episode in what the State of California has since acknowledged as genocide: between 1846 and 1873 state militias, federal troops and settler parties killed thousands of California Indians, with the state paying bounties for the work. Governor Gavin Newsom issued a formal apology in 2019. The state's own historical marker at the site, registered in 1942, still calls it the "Battle of Bloody Island".
Lieutenant Lyon reported about 60 dead; Pomo accounts and the California Native American Heritage Commission put the toll at up to 800. No count was ever made.
Sources
- Timeline of Genocide Incidents in the Clear Lake RegionCalifornia Native American Heritage Commissionnahc.ca.govThe state body for tribal cultural heritage, documenting the Clear Lake killings as genocide.
- Battle of Bloody Island, California Historical Landmark No. 427California Office of Historic Preservation, California State Parksohp.parks.ca.govThe state's landmark record, which still uses the word “battle”.