San Francisco’s expert football group, the 49 ers, was called in honor of the males who pertained to California throughout the Gold Rush. The old 49 er has actually long been a beloved figure in the state’s lore. He’s often depicted as a grizzled prospector sporting a bushy beard, a floppy felt hat, a carefree smile, and a pickax on his shoulder. This variation of the legend, Sourdough Sam, will be on complete display screen in this year’s Super Bowl, when the San Francisco 49 ers play the Kansas City Chiefs.

The team, of course, is not alone in casting the old gold miners in a friendly light. Yet the reality of the males behind the legend is not quite so adorable and comic. The original 49 ers performed among the most dreadful campaigns of genocide in the history of The United States and Canada.

In January 1848, a group of Maidu Indians were assisting James W. Marshall build a sawmill on the home of the Swiss inhabitant John Sutter. They were working along the American River near what is now Coloma, California, when they cracked open a vein of gold.

California, at this time, was still a part of Mexico, but in simply a couple of days, the United States and Mexico would sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending their two-year war and moving a big swath of area– including contemporary California– to the Americans. The area consisted of a number of hundred Americans; about 6,500 Californios (individuals of Spanish or Mexican descent); and roughly 150,00 0 Native Americans.

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Sutter and others attempted to keep the discovery a trick, but word spread quickly, and soon the population of California swelled. “Thousands of Americans, French, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Chileans, Englishmen, Australians, and Mexicans assembled on the mines wanting to acquire wealth beyond their wildest dreams,” wrote the historians Clifford Trafzer and Joel Hyer In 1849, more than 100,00 0 people, mostly men, traveled to the region. These prospectors were called “the 49 ers.”

The conditions in the mining camp were rough and unrefined. Alcohol and weapons were all over, and violence frequently erupted. No laws governed the growing population in the new territory.

In among the earliest disputes, a group of white miners from Oregon barged into the neighboring Maidu hamlet, beat and shot the guys, and savagely assaulted a number of the females. A celebration of Maidu guys struck back by eliminating 5 of the miners, who then recruited a posse of 20 armed white men and invaded another close-by village. The sleeping Indians weren’t even members of the same Maidu tribe, however to the miners, it didn’t matter: Indian was Indian. They killed 12 tribe members and took 8 hostages. A couple of days later, they killed the captives too.

With each passing day, more and more miners concerned the goldfields. Typically, $50 million worth of gold was uncovered every year in between 1849 and1857 Yet as the gold became harder to find, the early prospectors searched for other means of support, and California provided a wealth of prime property. All the home acquisition required was a little terrorism practiced on the nation’s original inhabitants.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the Mexican-American War hero Zachary Taylor swept into the White House with fresh vitality. Having invested many of his military career fighting Indians, “Old Rough and Ready” Taylor stated himself keen to move the country into a period of peace and prosperity. Congress developed a brand-new omnibus federal agency– the Department of the Interior– and transferred Indian affairs to its care from the War Department.

Taylor and his Indian affairs advisors were excited to test an idea that had been bring in growing interest. Stephen A. Douglas, the Illinois senator whose seat would later on be challenged by Abraham Lincoln, proposed snuffing out Indian land ownership in the far West by developing extensive plots of land where “ Indians may be permanently situated and protected” (This proposal was the beginning of today’s reservation system.) However initially, Taylor needed to bring civil order to California, which suggested statehood.

While local white inhabitants awaited the territory’s entry into the union, they pressed ahead with the formation of a state federal government. After a freshly constituted legislature produced the governor’s workplace, a judicial system, and penalties for livestock rustling, the 49 er lawmakers turned to the organisation of setting up the state-fortified structures of white supremacy.

They initially embraced statutes that forced people designated as “foreigners”– that is, anybody who was not an American of northern European ancestry– to pay a regular monthly $20 tax for the right to work in the goldfields. That levy produced its desired result: an exodus of nonwhites from the mining region.

The 49 ers then enacted the Act for the Government and Security of Indians, also called Chapter 133, which, contrary to its name, stripped California’s Indians of almost all legal securities.

Under Chapter 133, a white guy desirous of Indian land needed only to present his demand to the local justice of the peace, who would figure out the minimum amount of land he reckoned a local people required. After keeping a small part for the Indians, the justice held the power to sell or give the excess property to any picked white male, who could, with the very same magistrate’s permission, kidnap Indian children and “adopt” them– or keep the youths as unsettled houseworkers and field hands up until they reached the age of bulk.

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Chapter 133’s most abhorrent clause specified, “In no case will a white male be founded guilty of any offence upon the statement of an Indian, or Indians.” With those 20 words, California successfully legislated the rape, burglary, and murder of any Native American within the limits of the state.

The white males of the Golden State exercised their homicidal liberty. The list below year, The Sacramento Union published this news item:

An Indian was killed in Santa Barbara recently under scenarios which call loudly for the facility of a Caution Committee. He was called from his home by a [local white man], whose name we did not find out, and who without any provocation whatever, plunged a knife into his heart, killing him quickly.

Some 4 or 5 Indians were present, witnesses to the transaction, and they pursued the murderer, captured him and brought him prior to a magistrate. Will it be thought that he was practically instantly released from custody, because our laws will not allow an Indian to testify against a white male?

The Indians in this part of the State, in the primary a harmless race, are left entirely at the grace of every ruffian in the country, and if something is not done for their security, the race will soon end up being extinct.

Nov. 14, 1851

The law’s last area established a form of state-sponsored slavery. Any able-bodied Indian “who will be discovered loitering and strolling about,” the law decreed, “will be accountable to be detained on the grievance of any resident citizen of the county.” As soon as apprehended, the Indian would be brought before a mayor, magistrate, or county clerk and put up for auction. “Such vagrant,” as the law described the Indian, would be hired for four months “for the greatest rate that can be had.”

The concept of the Indian reservation continued to evolve in the nation’s capital. Zachary Taylor’s Indian affairs commissioner accepted reservations as the response to the Indian issue in the West. “There should be assigned to each people, for a long-term home, a nation adjusted to agriculture, of minimal level and distinct boundaries,” Commissioner of Indian Affairs Luke Lea composed in his annual report of1850 The federal government, Lea included, must provide Indians there with farming tools, fabric, and animals; assist them with real estate; and secure for them intellectual, ethical, and religious education.

Over a duration of 10 months in 1851, three representatives of the Indian Affairs Workplace worked out 18 treaties “ of peace and relationship” with the Native Americans of California. Under the agreements, the Indians would maintain about one-seventh of the state– about the size of West Virginia– in the kind of discrete reservations.

When the white Californians heard the terms, they were outraged: Why reserve even a single acre for the Indians?

The treaty documents gotten here in D.C. in early1852 Lea kept in mind, with some irritation, that “there was violent opposition to [the California treaties] in the legislature of that State,” however he however requested their adoption by the U.S. Senate. Turning down the treaties, Lea composed, “would be hazardous and ill-advised.”

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The protests of California’s white guys, nevertheless, drowned out Lea’s lukewarm advocacy. What took place next would end up being one of the most affordable moments of outrageous treachery in the history of the U.S. Senate.

Satisfying in a closed-door executive session on July 8, 1852, a majority of senators voted to reject all 18 treaties. They then took the amazing step of buying the treaties submitted under an injunction of secrecy and moved to an obscure federal archive, which held them for more than 50 years. The voided arrangements would not see the light of day once again until 1905.

Regardless of the Senate’s official rejection, federal and state officials in California brought on as if the treaties were in force– and apparently no one bothered to inform the tribes of their true status under the law.

President Millard Fillmore, Taylor’s follower, appointed a superintendent of Indian affairs for California, a male named Edward Beale, and charged him with moving the state’s residue Native American population onto bookings that included approximately one-one-hundredth of the state– not the one-seventh promised.

Only weeks into the task, a heartsick Beale composed to Lea, his boss, explaining the desperate scenario. “The wretched remnant which escapes hunger on the one hand, and the unrelenting whites on the other, just do so to rot and die of a pesky disease, the penalty of Indian association with frontier civilization,” Beale wrote. “I have seen it, and seeing all this, I can not help them. I understand they starve; I know they die by hundreds … It is a weeping sin that our federal government, so wealthy and so powerful, should shut its eyes to the miserable fate of these rightful owners of the soil.”

Through the indiscriminate usage of terrorism and murder, California’s 49 ers performed one of the most effective– and, until recently, mostly unacknowledged– projects of ethnic cleaning the world has actually ever seen.

Land losses were near overall. Illness, malnutrition, and starvation– driven by unique white pathogens and extensive environmental damage– accounted for a substantial decrease in the indigenous population. Murder did the rest.

The census of 1880 taped just 16,277 Indians in California, a 90 percent decline from pre– Gold Rush days.

To his credit, present California Governor Gavin Newsom recently took among the primary steps to acknowledge the truths of history by providing a formal apology to the state’s Native American tribes.

” It’s called a genocide,” Newsom said. “That’s what it was: a genocide. No other way to describe it. And that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.”

Newsom will no doubt be donning San Francisco 49 ers equipment and posing with Sourdough Sam, the team’s mascot, at the many Super Bowl festivities this weekend. Political reality demands it. He is, after all, not just the governor however the city’s former mayor. And the 49 ers are certainly not the only expert team to use a traditionally problematic or controversial figure as a mascot. (The Kansas City Chiefs might have altered their mascot from an Indian to a Wolf decades back, however the name, chants, and meaning are still offending to many Native Americans.)

Come video game time, an anticipated global audience of 100 million people will tune in to see the 49 ers take on the Chiefs. Half of them will be rooting for a group represented by a genocidal land burglar referred to as Sourdough Sam. You’ll see the vibrant old coot prowling the sidelines, striking presents for the tv electronic cameras and exhorting the fans to cheer.