Sacramento River Massacre, Eighteen Forty-Six

On the fifth of April, eighteen forty-six, one of the largest and least-known massacres in United States history took place on the banks of the Sacramento River near what is now Redding, California. The perpetrator was Captain John Charles Frémont of the United States Army, then on his third western expedition. His force numbered roughly sixty white soldiers and scouts, nine Delaware Indian allies, and several California Indian guides. The victims were the Wintu people, whose villages occupied hundreds of square miles of the upper Sacramento Valley and whose total population numbered more than five thousand.

Frémont's party had reached Reading's Ranch, a trading post near the present city, when Americans there reported that a large native encampment was preparing to attack white settlers. There was no credible evidence for this claim, but Frémont ordered an immediate assault. His men advanced on the Wintu camp from three sides, trapping the inhabitants, most of them women and children, against the river. Those who ran were pursued on horseback. Kit Carson, who served as Frémont's guide, described in his memoirs how the Delaware scouts tomahawked those who fled into the open ground. Those who tried to cross the Sacramento were shot in the water.

Death toll estimates vary widely across historical sources. Eyewitness accounts suggest anywhere from one hundred twenty-five to more than nine hundred killed. Historian Benjamin Madley, who compiled the most systematic analysis of California's genocide-era violence, speculates the total could have exceeded one thousand. No charges were ever filed. Frémont was celebrated on his return east and ran for president in eighteen fifty-six on the new Republican Party ticket.

The massacre is now understood as a trigger event in the broader California genocide, a decade-long campaign of state-sponsored and vigilante killing that reduced California's Indigenous population from roughly one hundred fifty thousand in eighteen forty-six to fewer than thirty thousand by eighteen seventy. A marker near this site commemorates the Wintu and the violence that began their destruction.