An 1851 legislative measure not only gave settlers the right to organize lynch mobs to kill Indians, but allowed them to submit their expenses to the government.
[7] In 1856, a San Francisco Bulletin editorial stated, "Extermination is the quickest and cheapest remedy, and effectually prevents all other difficulties when an outbreak [of Indian violence] occurs.
[17][18] William Brewer, a member of the California Geological Survey in the early 1860s, directly blamed child-stealing of Indian children for the rise in Indian/settler conflict and the atrocities that followed.
The new settlers killed deer in large numbers and cut off Yuki access to fields where they had gathered plants and hunted small game.
Hall in a plot to build hatred towards the Indians by holding town-hall style public gatherings where settlers aired their grievances against them, real or imagined.
A band of 20–30 men, a significant portion of the several dozen white settlers occupying the valley at that time, committed a series of attacks against the Yuki Indians between 1856 and the summer of 1859.
One Round Valley settler, Dryden Lacock, testified to the California State Legislature that he regularly took part in expeditions that would kill 50–60 Indians in a trip, as often as two to three a week at times, from 1856 to 1860.
[31] Special Treasury Agent J. Ross Browne's account of the attacks is vivid: "At [Round Valley], during the winter of 1858–59, more than a hundred and fifty peaceable Indians, including women and children, were cruelly slaughtered by the whites who had settled there under official authority.
[33] Special Treasury agent J. Ross Browne in September 1858 called it a "war of extermination" against the Yuki with 20–30 armed white men engaging in months of constant attacks.
[34] By August 1859, after three years of a sustained campaign of atrocities, the Sacramento Union wrote that the local Indians appeared doomed to extirpation.
[54] In October 1857, Superintendent Henley requested a federal detachment of troops,[33][55] but Secretary of War Jefferson Davis refused to provide them and said it was not the military's responsibility.
[57] In January 1859, 17 soldiers were finally deployed to Round Valley by the 6th Infantry Regiment under command of Major Edward Johnson, where they witnessed serious abuses and killings.
"[41][65][66] In July 1859, a white settler named Walter S. Jarboe, already known for his brutal killings, formed an organized army of 40 mercenaries to destroy the Round Valley Indians.
In the middle of his campaign, Jarboe declared to the governor, "However cruel it may be ... nothing short of extermination will suffice to rid the Country of them [the Yuki].
"[68] Within six months, Jarboe's mercenaries had killed 283 "warriors" in 23 attacks, along with hundreds of women and children as well, and captured nearly 300 Yuki Indians to be relocated to reservations.
[71] The minority report, authored by dissenting California House member Joseph B. Lamar (Mendocino, Sonoma), suggested instead that the settlers had acted appropriately and that the only solution was to round up the Indians as slaves and have the government provide land for their upkeep to their white masters.
A Sacramento Daily Union article of the time accused high-pressure lobbyists interested in profiting off enslaved Indians of pushing the law through, gave examples of how wealthy individuals had abused the law to acquire Indian slaves from the reservations, and stated, "The Act authorizes as complete a system of slavery, without any of the checks and wholesome restraints of slavery, as ever was devised.
"[77] In 1861, the editor of the Mendocino Herald visited Round Valley and declared that there were no more than five or six hundred Yuki Indians left, out of an original population that had been more than ten times larger only five years earlier.