Sacramento River Massacre

During the peak years of American westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny, a term coined by journalist John O’Sullivan, in 1845, the War Department sent U.S. Army Captain John C. Fremont, on an expedition to survey the Great Basin and the Mexican possession of Alta California, drawing heightened concern from Mexican authorities, Native Americans and American settlers concerned about their possible eviction from Mexican land.

Fremont Heads West

In response, on March 30th, 1846, Fremont and his band of 65 white men and eleven Native Americans followed the banks of the Sacramento River in search of hostile Indians, reaching present-day Redding California on April 5th, where they stumbled upon some 1,000 Wintu people camped along the banks of the river. Considered one of the first acts of violence in the California Genocide of Native Americans from

Ask No Quarter And Give None

1846 to 1873, Fremont ordered his men, as one eyewitness recounts, “to ask no quarter and to give none,” and after Fremont’s men flanked the encampment from three sides, pinning the Wintu along the river, they opened fire on a line of Wintu men who formed a defensive line in front of their women and children. Eyewitness Thomas E. Breckenridge later wrote that “the settlers charged into the village taking the warriors by surprise and then commenced a scene of slaughter which is unequalled in the West.

Slaughtered Like Sheep

The bucks, squaws and paposes were shot down like sheep and those men never stopped as long as they could find one alive.” Estimates on the slaughter vary by account, from 175 to more than 700, with an additional 200 dying in the river as they attempted to flee the one-sided slaughter. Kit Carson, one of the mounted attackers later stated that the affair “was a perfect butchery.”

The Killing Goes On

Fremont and his group continued their killing spree up the Sacramento River, attacking the Klamath people in the Oregon Territory, resulting in the Klamath Lake Massacre of May 12th, 1846, and the Sutter Buttes Massacre in early June. Despite his homicidal acts against Native Americans, Fremont would go on to become the Military Governor of California in 1847, followed by the first U.S. Senator from California in 1850.

Fremont Runs For President

Six years later, Fremont ran for president, losing to Democrat James Buchanan in the election of 1856, making the Sacramento River Massacre, a little-known stain on one of the most legendary figures of the American West.