Brendan Lindsay has written a significant historical account detailing white pioneers perpetrating genocide against California Indians. Most authors popularize the California Gold Rush, focussing on rip-roaring frontier towns and sourdough miners panning color along rapid rivers. Many historians ignore California Indian people during the Gold Rush and silence Native American accounts of pioneer attacks, murders, rapes, kidnappings, and slavery. Even the state department of education in California denies the genocide. Lindsay places the spotlight on democratically constituted militia groups that systematically committed genocide. Settlers cleared the landscape of original inhabitants, then “legally” stole Native American land and resources, including gold, wood, and water. Lindsay argues that pioneers “used the democratic process and the structures of republican government to call for and execute a massive genocide of ‘Indians’ during the second half of the nineteenth century” (2). He bases his cutting-edge research on primary documents, but he also acknowledges the work of scholars before him.

Sherburne Cook, Robert Heizer, Jack Forbes, James Rawls, Harwood Phillips, Clifford Trafzer, and others provided a framework for Lindsay's pathbreaking book. In 1977, William Coffer offered an essay using the term “genocide” in reference to California's gold rush and Indians. In 1979, Hupa historian Jack Norton published When Our Worlds Cried, the first book devoted to the California genocide. Lindsay greatly expands on past works, using original documents from the Bancroft and California state libraries, as well as the national and state archives. Like Norton, Lindsay uses the definition of genocide established in 1948 by the United Nations. Lindsay's deep research and poignant writing proves genocide in California through murder, bodily and mental harm, purposive conditions designed to destroy Indian people, the institution of measures preventing births, and the forcible transfer of children from Native families to non-Indian “guardians” who sometimes murdered parents and enslaved children. Unlike Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” when addressing the horrors of Nazis, the UN does not limit genocide to nation-states. Lindsay argues that miners and pioneers assembled in democratic meetings and, through majority rule, voted to hunt down and murder men, women, and children.

Lindsay explains that the “Holocaust is so monstrous … that it often overshadows all else in genocide studies” (ix). He does not compare genocides but uses primary sources to weave the grisly story of California's genocide. He offers his thesis, examining core racist values of American genocide, and stating that published emigrant guides encouraged pioneer fear of Indians and violence against “bloodthirsty savages” (59). Emigrant guides conditioned settlers to fear Indians and encouraged racist attitudes toward heathen barriers, standing in the way of Christianity, economic progress, and Manifest Destiny. Superior and racist attitudes of newcomers preconditioned them to support preemptive attacks on Indian people. Political leaders sanctioned genocide. In an address to the legislature in 1852, Governor Peter Burnett proclaimed that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct” (231). With state and federal support, pioneer militia forces fulfilled God's will and the nation's Manifest Destiny by killing, kidnapping, enslaving, and prostituting California Indians. After demonstrating causation of genocide in California, Lindsay details some of the attacks, including the unprovoked strike against Wiyot people on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay.

Lindsay documents selective violent encounters, including one recorded by newspaperman Francis Bret Harte. Writing for the Humboldt Times, Harte committed a sin against other white people by offering an honest, graphic report of American genocide. Harte's newspaper article portrayed white settlers butchering Wiyot women and children during an annual Indian ceremony that required men to leave the island to replenish food supplies. When Indian men left the island, pioneers pounced on unsuspecting women, children, and elders. “Little children and old women were mercilessly stabbed and their skulls crushed with axes” (327), Harte wrote. “Old women … lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out” (327). Harte noted infants “scarce a span long, with their faces cloven with hatchets” (327). Major Gabriel Raines confirmed Harte's report with his own eyewitness report, saying that volunteer soldiers murdered “all the women and children” (328), which proved “a spectacle of horror … babes, with brains oozing out of their skulls, cut and hacked with axes” (328). Perpetrators of genocide left a plethora of written evidence that Lindsay mines to provide a compelling account that highlights a ghastly legacy in California. Lindsay has laid open California's genocidal past, too long silenced, employing compelling evidence.