By H.L. Delaney

The Sacramento River Massacre of 1846

Some of what the conquest destroyed was gone before anyone thought to write it down, and some of it was written down in language built to keep it from being seen. In early April 1846, on the upper Sacramento River, John C. Frémont's expedition rode down on a gathering of Wintu and neighboring people and killed them by the water, then folded the morning into the record of a survey and called it a matter of security.

By the spring of 1846, Frémont's third expedition had worn out whatever welcome it had in Mexican California. Ordered to leave, the party had started north up the Sacramento Valley, armed far past anything a survey could account for, with Kit Carson among its guides. The company's stated business was exploration. Its conduct on the way north was the conduct of a fighting outfit looking for a reason, and in the upper valley it found one in a rumor. What The Renegade Enos holds up to the light is the short distance between that rumor and what armed men chose to do with it.

The people by the river

The Wintu lived along the upper Sacramento River and the streams that feed it, in the country that runs up toward Mount Shasta and out along the McCloud and the Trinity. They were a people of river villages, of salmon runs worked with nets and weirs, of acorns gathered from the oak country and ground and leached and stored. Their year moved with the water and the seasons of the food, and they had been doing that work in that country for a very long time before any expedition came up the valley with rifles.

In early spring the river drew people to it. A gathering along that stretch of the Sacramento would have held families, elders, and children, camped where the fishing and the season brought them together. That is the plain fact the later accounts pass over quickly. The people Frémont's men found by the water were doing ordinary work in an ordinary season, in a place that was theirs.

The rumor and the order

The reason the expedition gave itself came from the settlers. In the tense weeks of 1846, a story was moving through the American ranches of the valley that local Indians, said to be stirred up by the Mexican authorities, were preparing to attack the newcomers and their stock. The story fit what the settlers already feared and what Frémont already wanted, which was a cause. Whether any such plan existed was never established. It did not have to be. The rumor was enough to move a column.

Frémont chose to strike first. The decision to attack people who had done nothing yet, on the strength of what someone said they might do, is the whole shape of the event. It is the logic that would run through the California years that followed, the assumption that a Native gathering within reach was a threat by its nature and could be destroyed on suspicion. The men rode toward the river carrying rifles, pistols, and knives, and they came to fall on the people there without pausing to speak to them or to test the rumor first.

What happened on the water

The attack was planned and carried out as one. The expedition came at the gathering from more than one side, closing on people who were pinned against the river with the water at their backs and little room to run. Many of those present were women and children. The men gave no quarter and asked for none, and what followed was a slaughter of people who had no way to answer it and mostly no way to flee.

The number of Wintu killed that morning is contested, and the estimates vary widely across the accounts, from figures in the hundreds to counts a good deal higher. No reliable total was ever fixed, and the people who did the killing had every reason to keep the figure vague. What the sources do agree on is stark in its own way. No one in Frémont's party was killed. A one-sided morning against people caught at the water leaves that kind of ledger, and the ledger tells you what sort of event it was.

Then the expedition turned north

After the river, the column kept moving. Frémont's party continued north out of the Sacramento Valley and up toward Klamath Lake, carrying the same men and the same habits into the next stretch of country. Within weeks the expedition would be camped near the lake when three of its men were killed in the night, and it would answer that night with a reprisal against a Klamath fishing village. The killings on the Sacramento and the burning at the lake are two beads on one string, and the string is a single company that had learned it could strike a Native community and simply ride on.

That continuity matters more than any single day. The killings on the Sacramento River were the practice the expedition carried with it, worked out in the valley and repeated at Klamath Lake a few weeks later. The same men carried the same habit from one place to the next, and it set a pattern that later hands in California would follow with grim consistency.

Tidied in the report

What makes the Sacramento River so useful to a novel is what happened to it on paper. In the telling the men and their friends carried forward, the attack softened into a defensive necessity, a blow struck to protect the settlements from a danger that was coming anyway. The rumor became the justification, and the justification did its work whether or not the danger was ever real. Frémont's own later writing had the habit of turning hard field work into the language of duty and adventure, and his reputation was built by others who knew how to keep the prose clean.

Carson, for his part, remembered the morning on the river without much softening, and his blunt recollection of it as butchery is one of the few places the plain shape of the thing survives in a participant's own words. That candor is the exception. The wider record reaches for words like security and protection, because a well-planned attack on families at a river is hard to defend in ordinary language, and easy to carry once it has been renamed. The distance between what Carson allowed himself to remember and what the official story preferred is the distance this whole book lives in.

Reading a record like that one honestly means reading it against its own grain. The document was built to record a necessity and to leave the rest unsaid, so the work is to restore the words it declined to use. A gathering of families. A spring morning. People pinned at the water. A column that lost no one. Set those plain facts back down beside the word security, and the report cannot hold the shape it was given.

The chapter called Wintu

In The Renegade Enos, the Sacramento River stands behind the chapter called Wintu, and the book takes its title character into that country at the eye level of a man who was paid to be present and expected to keep quiet. Enos is close enough to see the camp by the water and to understand what the column has come to do, and close enough to know that the reason given for it will not survive an honest look. He is a working man inside a machine that used people like him and discarded them, and he watches that machine close over a gathering of Wintu on the strength of a story told at a rancher's table.

The point of putting him there is to keep the people at the river from vanishing into the report the way the record wanted them to. A dispatch has room for a figure and a justification. A witness has room for the thing itself, the specific place and the specific morning and the specific work that armed men interrupted. The novel does its reading in the presence of that witness, standing where the report would rather no one had been standing, and seeing exactly what the report was built to lose.

To keep the Wintu of the upper Sacramento in the sentence, as people at a river in their own country rather than a danger cleared away, is a small refusal of the work the record was designed to do. It is the same refusal the book makes again and again, from the valley to the lake to the coast, one place at a time.

The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press, the conquest of the West at the eye level of the man it used and discarded. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel, and the violence the expedition carried north from this valley is covered in Frémont at Klamath Lake. Get launch news →

Sources & further reading

Sacramento River massacre — Wikipedia (overview of the April 1846 attack, the expedition's composition, and the disputed casualty estimates).
Wintu — Wikipedia (homeland along the upper Sacramento, McCloud, and Trinity rivers; salmon and acorn subsistence; the impact of American invasion).
Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (Yale University Press, 2016).
Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (Hill and Wang, 2002).
Kit Carson's Autobiography, edited by Milo Milton Quaife (Bison Books / University of Nebraska Press).