The Enslaved Native Americans Who Made The Gold Rush Possible - History in the Headlines - 1 views
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the Anglo settlers who flocked to California declared war on the Native Californians who had come before them. But Forty-Niners weren’t the first white people to oppress or even enslave Native Americans in California. The very land on which Marshall spotted the gold was part of a vast empire built on the slave labor of native peoples
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In order to acquire the land, he converted to Catholicism and became a Mexican citizen, and within a few years he had more than doubled his land holdings.
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it was home to Native Americans who “found their homelands now the property of outsiders who viewed them as potential laborers
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local Nisenan people, and turned them into a militia, outfitting them with uniforms and weapons and training them to defend his land
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Native Americans weren’t just an economic powerhouse—they were currency. He traded native labor among local rancheros and to new settlers
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Sutter’s Mill became ground zero for the Gold Rush of 1849. But even the discovery of gold was facilitated by Sutter’s enslavement and coercion of native peoples
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the dirt there was dug by a group of Sutter-controlled Native Americans who knew about the gold, but did not value it
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After the presence of gold became known, squatters and thieves overran Sutter’s ranch, destroyed his building, looted his wealth and stole his livestock