Massacres and Removals

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. Every event below is named, dated, and sourced. Where death figures vary between sources, the range is given; no figure is silently rounded up.

1. Gnadenhutten — 8 March 1782

At the Moravian mission village of Gnadenhutten, Ohio Country, Pennsylvania militiamen under David Williamson killed 96 pacifist Moravian Christian Indians — primarily Lenape (Delaware) and Mohican — who had returned from forced exile at Sandusky to harvest their crops. The victims were unarmed noncombatants, bound after being promised relocation to safety, voted on for execution by their captors the night before (18 militiamen dissented and took no part), and killed with mallets and tomahawks, then scalped; the buildings were burned with the bodies. The Moravian mission records (David Zeisberger's diaries) are the primary source. No militiaman was ever tried. Figure: 96 — consistently documented; the village monument's "ninety" inscription is a rounding on the monument itself.

2. Bear River — 29 January 1863

Colonel Patrick Edward Connor's California Volunteers attacked the winter village of the Northwestern Band of Shoshone under Bear Hunter at Bear River (present-day Idaho). Shoshone deaths: estimates range from about 250 to over 400; historian Brigham D. Madsen, The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre (1985), supported a figure of at least ~280; a first-person account by Sgt. William Beach asserts at least 280; contemporary and later counts run higher (a settler count of 493 exists in Hans Jasperson's 1911 autobiography and is not treated as reliable). About 24 US soldiers were killed. Even at its low end, Bear River is among the deadliest single US Army attacks on Indigenous people in US history, exceeding Wounded Knee and Sand Creek in most modern estimates. Range for this record: ~250–400+, with ~280–350 the commonly cited scholarly band.

3. Sand Creek — 29 November 1864, and Congress's own condemnation

Colonel John Chivington's ~675–700 Colorado Volunteers attacked the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment of Black Kettle, White Antelope, and Left Hand on Sand Creek, Colorado Territory. Black Kettle raised a US flag and a white flag, as he had been instructed to do. Chivington ordered no prisoners taken. Deaths: about 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho in the Colorado legislature's modern findings; other reputable summaries give ~150–160 ("perhaps as many as 160") — the honest range for this record is ~150–230, the great majority women, children, and elderly. Bodies were mutilated and trophies paraded in Denver. Captain Silas Soule, who refused to fire, wrote the letter that helped trigger three federal investigations; he was murdered in Denver in 1865 after testifying.

Congress's own words: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Report (1865), "Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians": Chivington, "wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity… deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre." A military commission and the Joint Committee on Indian Affairs likewise condemned it. Chivington was never punished — he had resigned from the Army, placing himself beyond military jurisdiction.

4. Wounded Knee — 29 December 1890

The US 7th Cavalry, ~500 troops with four Hotchkiss guns, attempted to disarm the Miniconjou Lakota band of Spotted Elk (Big Foot) at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, after the band had surrendered and camped under guard. After a shot during the disarmament (accounts differ on its origin), soldiers fired into the camp and pursued fleeing people for miles. Lakota deaths: more than 250 killed and 51 wounded in the standard encyclopaedic summary, "some estimates… as high as 300"; the National Park Service-circulated range in modern summaries is ~250–300, with some accounts 200–350. The dead were mostly women, children, and elderly; Spotted Elk was among them. Twenty-five soldiers died, some by friendly fire; twenty Medals of Honor were awarded — awards the National Congress of American Indians resolved in 2001 to call on the government to rescind. In 1990 Congress passed a resolution formally expressing "deep regret" on the centennial.

5. The Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears

• Indian Removal Act, signed 28 May 1830 by President Andrew Jackson: authorised the President to grant lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indigenous lands within existing states. The Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Cherokee were all removed from the Southeast in the 1830s; in total roughly 100,000 Indigenous people were forced from their southeastern homelands in the removal era (Scholastic/NPS-consistent summary figure).
• Cherokee removal, 1838–39: after the contested Treaty of New Echota (1835, signed by a minority faction, repudiated by the Cherokee government), US Army troops and militia under General Winfield Scott forcibly evicted more than 16,000 Cherokee from Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia into stockades, then on forced marches of ~800–1,200 miles (routes vary) to Indian Territory (present Oklahoma). National Park Service: "An estimated 4,000 Cherokee, especially the old, the young, and the infirm, died during the journey" — from disease, exposure, and poor supplies, in the stockades and on the routes. The 4,000 figure is an estimate carried by the NPS and Cherokee Nation; it is the standard cited figure and is presented here as an estimate, not a count.
• Worcester v. Georgia (1832) had held Georgia law had no force in Cherokee territory; removal proceeded regardless. (The famous "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" line attributed to Jackson is likely apocryphal and is not used in this record as a quotation.)

6. The Navajo Long Walk — 1864–1866, and Bosque Redondo to 1868

After Brigadier General James Carleton ordered Colonel Kit Carson's scorched-earth campaign against the Diné (Navajo) — destroying crops, orchards, and livestock to force surrender — the US Army conducted some 53 separate forced marches between August 1864 and late 1866, deporting about 10,000 Navajo and ~500 Mescalero Apache roughly 300–450 miles to the Bosque Redondo internment camp at Fort Sumner, New Mexico (Hwéeldi). Deaths during the marches and the four-year internment: up to ~3,500 from starvation, disease, and exposure (range in the literature ~2,500–3,500 for march + internment combined; at least ~200 died on the marches themselves in the lowest accounts). Bosque Redondo's alkaline water, crop failures, cutworms, floods, inadequate rations, and disease made the camp itself the larger killer. The Treaty of Bosque Redondo (1868) allowed the Navajo to return to a reservation within their homeland — unique among the major removals.

7. Dakota 1862 and the Mankato hangings

After the US–Dakota War of 1862 (in which 358 settlers, 77 soldiers, and 36 militia were killed per the standard tallies, and ~150 Dakota died in battle), a five-officer military commission tried Dakota men in proceedings sometimes lasting minutes, without defence counsel, and sentenced 303 (307 in some counts) to death. President Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed the transcripts, commuted 264 sentences, and approved 39. One man was reprieved. On 26 December 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged simultaneously at Mankato, Minnesota — the largest mass execution in US history (Minnesota Historical Society; Smithsonian National Museum of American History). Some 1,600–2,000 Dakota, mostly noncombatants, were interned for the winter at Fort Snelling/Pike Island, where hundreds died of disease; in 1863 Congress abrogated the Dakota treaties, exiled the Dakota from Minnesota by law, and Minnesota offered bounties for Dakota scalps. Two more Dakota leaders, Shakopee (Little Six) and Medicine Bottle, were kidnapped from Canada, tried, and hanged at Fort Snelling in 1865.

8. California, 1846–1873 — Madley's documented range

Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide (2016): between 1846 and 1873, vigilantes, state militiamen, and federal troops killed between 9,492 and 16,092 California Indians (rounded in his summaries to 9,000–16,000), of whom 1,680–3,741 were killed by the US Army, in more than 370 massacres, while California Indians killed fewer than 1,400–1,500 non-Indians in the same period. Madley states he used conservative estimates. The demographic frame (from Sherburne Cook's estimates): California's Indigenous population, already halved in the Spanish/Mexican periods, fell by a further ~80% between 1846 and 1873, to a nadir of ~30,000 — about 65,000 deaths in the 1850s alone from violence, enslavement, starvation, and disease combined; the 9,492–16,092 figure is only the direct killing subset and must not be confused with the total decline.

The dispute, recorded: historian Gary Clayton Anderson has estimated no more than ~2,000 Native Americans killed in California; Jeffrey Ostler has criticised Anderson's estimate as "unsubstantiated" and "at least five times too low." Earlier: Sherburne Cook (1943) counted 4,556 killings for 1847–1865 alone. Ed Castillo's statement (written for California's Native American Heritage Commission) that death squads and random killing caused "the death of 100,000 Indians in [1848 and 1849]" is not supported by Madley's or Cook's documentary counts and is not used in this record as a figure. State sponsorship is documentary regardless of the count dispute: California authorised up to ~$1.51 million for militia expeditions against Native Californians, much of it later reimbursed by the federal government, and the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians legalised Indigenous child indenture and convict leasing (see also the framing file on Governor Burnett's 1851 "war of extermination" address).

Sources for this file

Moravian mission records / Zeisberger diaries (Gnadenhutten) • Madsen (1985) and Beach account (Bear River) • Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (1865) and Colorado legislative findings (Sand Creek) • NPS and standard reference summaries (Wounded Knee) • National Park Service, Trail of Tears; Indian Removal Act (1830) • Long Walk/Bosque Redondo standard histories and treaty record (1868) • Minnesota Historical Society, US–Dakota War of 1862; Smithsonian NMAH (Mankato) • Madley (2016); Cook (1943); Ostler on Anderson (California).