Andrew Kelsey
He and his business partner Charles Stone effectively enslaved local Pomo and Wappo bands and, along with Benjamin Kelsey, subjected them to starvation, torture, rapes and murders.
The "Kelso" family were "the first settlers of the Hoffman Bend section" in St. Clair County, Missouri, "considered pretty shrewd" and "inclined to make the most of their opportunities".
Along with his father and his brothers Samuel and Isaiah, Andrew appears in the 1840 U.S. Census in Deerfield, Missouri, where he is enumerated as a farmer and head of a family with two girls aged between 5 and 9.
Ben and Andrew spent time at Sutter's Fort and trapping north of the San Francisco Bay before deciding to drive cattle to Oregon and meet up with their other brothers.
[5] In 1844, along with his brothers Ben and Sam and his father David, Andrew Kelsey was part of a party leading emigrants from Oregon on the Siskiyou Trail to Sutter's Fort.
They eventually abandoned them at Donner Lake to head back west to avoid harsh weather conditions, "their packs stuffed with booty".
Vallejo had hoped to sell the Clear Lake area grant to former Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs, who had befriended his general brother.
Tensions rose further between the settlers and the Indians over Vallejo's remaining cattle, which he had allegedly left to the indigenous tribe, as Kelsey and Stone ordered the vaqueros to round it up.
The Indians, belonging to different tribes, Lil'eek Wappo and Eastern Pomo, were forced to live in two enclosed camps they couldn't leave, on each side of the creek.
[13] They were provided "very short rations", and were prohibited from fishing or hunting on the ranch – Stone and Kelsey had collected their weapons and stored them in the adobe house's loft.
[12] Napa Valley pioneer George C. Yount is quoted mentioning Stone and Kelsey's "unbridled lusts among the youthful females", ordering fathers to bring them their daughters under the threat of corporal punishment.
[14] In the morning, the Kelseys and their party ordered a local chief to provide twelve dozen men to accompany the settlers to Scotts Valley, where they believed lived a tribe that had been "marauding the cattle".
William Boggs later recollected the punishment and telling Richard Maupin "some white person would have to suffer for that whipping", foreboding Stone and Kelsey's deaths.
Augustine also mentions to Palmer that a hundred and seventy two men were taken to Sonoma to build adobe houses on Ben Kelsey's ranch, including himself.
Common themes involve the theft or sabotage of the men's guns by the indigenous women they were keeping, letting tribe members overrun the building and killing them the next morning.
On Christmas Day, he informed First Dragoons lieutenant John Wynn Davidson in Sonoma he was heading to Clear Lake to avenge his brother, and assembled a posse of fifteen men.
[5][12] Ben Kelsey, furious sooner revenge couldn't be exacted, returned south and organized posses to terrorize indigenous populations in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, killing individuals from different tribes and burning rancherias.
Both Lyon and Davidson's detachments committed more mass murders in the days following the Bloody Island Massacre in search of Stone and Kelsey's attackers, notably in Cokadjal and Shanel.
Shirland, a Mexican-American War veteran who was partner with the Kelseys and Stone in the Clear Lake operation, and who had reportedly lived in the area for several months, served as an interpreter in August 1851 in the expedition Indian agent Redick McKee led to sign a treaty with the tribes of Clear Lake,[24][25] one of many the U.S. Army forced California tribes to sign to relinquish their rights in exchange for reservations.
"We have since learned that the death of the whites was caused by their own imprudence and cruelty to the Indians working for them, and that many innocent persons have suffered in consequence", McKee wrote on August 20, 1851.
[31][32] The Bloody Island Massacre, which was led as a retaliatory action following the two men's murders, is considered a significant episode of the larger California genocide.
)[36] The Kelseyville name first appears in records in the 1860s,[37] the result of lobbying on the part of William and Barthena Kelsay, who arrived with the Harriman Party in Lake County in 1861, "in honor of their Kelsey cousins".
[49][50] The initiative has triggered opposition from another group, which has been campaigning under the "Save Kelseyville" slogan, arguing that renaming the town could be costly and cause confusion.
