What was the leading causes of death among the First Californians during the Gold Rush?

The short duration of the gold rush is the only reason we were not exterminated. The tribes whose homes were in "gold country" suffered huge losses thru miners and militia hunting us. The Americans were far worse than the Spanish, who were here for 200 yrs, or the Mexicans who replaced them. The Americans wanted to kill us off. They killed and scalped, and beheaded for profit men women and children, because the American govt paid $5.00 each one. Land of the free? Home of the brave? How about fort Jones, where they invited the people to a big BBQ. everybody knows how NDNs head for the meat, at a buffet, so they laced the beef with strychnine, and hundreds of Indians died writhing in pain. Poisoned us like animals, because that is how they thought of us. We were just "diggers" and deserved to die for having a prior claim to the land they wanted. They sent treaty commissioners to "negotiate" with us for our lands. Our ancestors ceded property in good faith to save land for ourselves. The commissioners took the treaties back to Washington, and congress rejected them. Then they offered our property for homesteaders, and what was left belonged to the govt, leaving us homeless in our own country. Ranchers and farmers then began to fence off the land, and the water sources, leaving us to starve. They would shoot you for gathering acorns on "their property" Their hogs came first you know. The forest service and army ran us out of govt property where ever they found us. The govt granted small plots of land later that became rancherias. And this is the bulk of what we have left. The missionaries did come with the Americans. They were protestant missionaries. They had to come to "correct the errors of Catholicism". More religious confusion to follow. Starvation, bullets, sickness, exposure and homelessness was responsible, along with outright murder by the Americans. Don't it make you want to sing my country tis of thee?

Extermination,

Scalp hunters, lynchings, or just plain outright massacres. Its amazing that there are still Indians out there in Cali.

Same thing out here in the Southwest. Most of the time during the 1860's a lot of Indians didn't bother even surrendering they just hid. Why didn't they surrender? because if they did then the half-drunken Volunteer militias would have just shot at them anyways.

missionaries

http://www.pbs.org/indiancountry/history/calif.htm...

genocide and greed

“The California valley cannot grace her annals with a single Indian war bordering on respectability. It can, however, boast a hundred or two of as brutal butchering, on the part of our honest miners and brave pioneers, as any area of equal extent in our republic……”

The handiwork of these well armed death squads combined with the widespread random killing of Indians by individual miners resulted in the death of 100,000 Indians in the first two years of the gold rush. A staggering loss of two thirds of the population. Nothing in American Indian history is even remotely comparable to this massive orgy of theft and mass murder. Stunned survivors now perhaps numbering fewer than 70,000 teetered near the brink of total annihilation.

The local authorities not only ignored the genocide in their midst, they encouraged it.

Rewards ranged from $5 for every severed head in Shasta City in 1855 to 25 cents for a scalp in Honey Lake in 1863. One resident of Shasta City wrote about how he remembers seeing men bringing mules to town, each laden with eight to twelve Indian heads. Other regions passed laws that called for collective punishment for the whole village for crimes committed by Indians, up to the destruction of the entire village and all of its inhabitants. These policies led to the destruction of as many as 150 Native communities.

To give an idea of how the authorities treated the law, consider this letter written by Indian Commissioner G.M. Hanson in 1861.

In the month of October last I apprehended three kidnappers, about 14 miles from the city of Marysville, who had nine Indian children, from three to ten years of age, which they had taken from Eel River in Humboldt County. One of the three was discharged on a writ of habeas corpus, upon the testimony of the other two, who stated that “he was not interested in the matter of taking the children:” after his discharge the two made an effort to get clear by introducing the third one as a witness, who testified that “it was an act of charity on the part of thr two to hunt up the children and then provide homes for them, because their parents had been killed, and the children would have perished with hunger.” My counsel inquired how he knew the parents had been kill? “Because,” he said, “I killed some of them myself.”

http://obrag.org/?p=1412