Massacre on Bloody Island: Cavalry Slaughter Pomo People

U.S. Army cavalry under Captain Nathaniel Lyon attacked a Pomo encampment on an island in Clear Lake, California, on May 15, 1850, slaughtering an estimated sixty to two hundred men, women, and children. The Pomo had killed two ranchers, Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, who had been holding them in conditions of forced labor, rape, and starvation on their ranch near the lake. The killings were an act of desperation by people who had been worked to death, beaten, and denied food. Lyon's punitive expedition was not directed at the individuals responsible for the killings but at the nearest Pomo settlement, which included families with no connection to the event. The soldiers surrounded the island encampment at dawn and opened fire on people who had no weapons capable of resisting a military force armed with rifles and bayonets. The massacre went largely unreported for decades and was one of dozens of similar attacks on California's Indigenous peoples during the Gold Rush era. The discovery of gold in 1848 had triggered a mass migration that overwhelmed California's Native population, which fell from an estimated 150,000 to 30,000 within two decades through violence, disease, and displacement. The state government subsidized militia campaigns against Native communities, paying bounties for scalps and authorizing the kidnapping of Native children as indentured servants. The Bloody Island Massacre exemplified the systematic violence that accompanied American settlement of California. Lyon himself went on to serve in the Civil War and became the first Union general killed in action. A historical marker at the site was placed in 2005.