on the cover / By Jerry Rohde

The Sonoma Gang

Remembering the genocidal scum who built Arcata

(Sept. 11, 2008)  In March 1850, the brand-new California Supreme Court, Chief Justice Serranus C. Hastings presiding, issued its first-ever decision. The ruling freed seven men who had recently been charged with arson and murder and instead placed them under a $10,000 bond.

The men were released from the USS Savannah, a naval vessel anchored in San Francisco Bay. They’d been imprisoned there after a ride of death and destruction through the Sonoma and Napa valleys during which they killed numerous Indians and burned their rancherias. The raiders were led by brothers Sam and Ben Kelsey, who were bent on avenging the death of another brother, Andy, and his partner, Charles Stone.

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Five of the seven didn’t make it to their next court date. They jumped bail and traveled north on important business: They were headed to Humboldt Bay to help found the town that became Arcata.

The Kelseys were already well known in northern California. Ben and his wife, Nancy, arrived there with the Bidwell-Bartleson Party in 1841, and Nancy was reputedly “the first white woman to cross the plains to California.” Ben and his brothers subsequently participated in the Bear Flag revolt of 1846, which ended Mexican control of California and established the short-lived “California Republic.” It was Nancy who sewed together the new country’s first flag, which was supposed to show the republic’s emblem, a grizzly bear. To some observers, however, the animal looked more like a pig.

In the fall of 1847, Andy Kelsey and Charles Stone started a ranch at Clear Lake, where they reportedly “employed” several hundred of the local Pomo Indians. The partners mistreated their workers and paid them almost nothing. The next year, Ben Kelsey, ever anxious to find his fortune, established a mining camp called Kelsey’s Diggings in the Sierra foothills. With Sam Kelsey and some other whites as assistants, Ben collected between 50 and 100 Pomos to work at the mine site. Once back at the diggings, Ben had a better idea. He sold all the company’s supplies at a profit and then, ill with malaria, headed back to his home at Sonoma. The Pomos, forced to camp near a hostile group of local Indians and suffering from malaria themselves, were left on their own. According to one report, only three of them survived.

Back at Clear Lake, Stone and Andy Kelsey continued abusing the Indians, who finally attacked the ranchers. Word reached Ben and Sam Kelsey, who recruited several supporters and arrived in time to drive the Indians off.

Nothing changed at the ranch. One Indian worker, who’d let a raccoon ruin some the ranch’s watermelons, was killed for his negligence. Whites who visited Stone and Kelsey’s place reported “that it was no uncommon thing for them to shoot an Indian just for the fun of seeing him jump.”

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