The Modoc War: A People Pushed to the Edge

On a rainy afternoon in January 1848, John Sutter's project manager James Marshall burst into his office, dripping wet, and requested an urgent private conference. After locking the door, Marshall unfolded a rag containing several pieces of what Sutter later called "yellow metal." They conducted basic tests, consulted the Encyclopedia Americana, and concluded it was gold of at least 23 carats. Within two weeks, Sutter's workers had quit to pan for gold. Within a year, news had circled the globe, and nothing could hold back the flood of people rushing into California.

Four months after California joined the Union in 1850, its first governor, Peter Burnett, delivered a darkly prophetic speech to the legislature. He acknowledged that Native Americans "have not only seen their country taken from them, but they see their ranks rapidly thinning from the effects of our diseases." Then he stated bluntly: "That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected." Burnett's vision proved accurate. Over the next two decades, the Modoc people—a small group living 200 miles north of the gold rush heartland—suffered terribly until they made one of the most dramatic last stands in the American West.

The Land and the People