Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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Because the violence ebbed and flowed throughout 1862 and the spring of 1863, volunteer troops were sent from California to the Valley. Colonel James Henry Carleton, commander of the District of Southern California, in March 1862 ordered a calvary unit of volunteers under the command of Lt. Colonel George S. Evans to the “Owen’s Lake Valley,” acknowledging that the recent violence may be due to the action of the settlers and that “It is very possible … that the whites are to blame.”⁴⁶ A month later Carleton was promoted to Brigadier General of volunteers during a march to Arizona to face Confederates and Indians (see ssss1).

The conflict did not end until the arrival of Captain Moses McLaughlin at Camp Independence who came from Fort Tejon in April 1863. Following the trail of the Davidson expedition of 1859, the not-so-biblical Moses stopped first at an Indian camp upon the Kern River about 10 miles from Keysville.

There he lined up 35 male Indians and had them either shot or sabered. While ordinarily this kind of wholesale slaughter would not have been approved by the officers of the Department of the Army of the Pacific, as one writer has noted, “no doubt, they were tired of the continual petitions from settlers and the constant rumors of Indian outbreaks and depredations. The problems of the war between the North and the South weighed too heavily upon them to worry about the cold-blooded murder of 35 Indians.”⁴⁷ With the Indian wars of the West siphoning off too many soldiers who were needed by the Union Army, perhaps the commanders believed the harsh measures were necessary.