Sacramento River Massacre is Site of Proposed Casino, California Tribes Claim

Posted on: February 6, 2025, 12:46h. 

Last updated on: February 6, 2025, 02:04h.

Philip Conneller @casinoorgphilc Read More
Expertise: Gaming Business, Regulation, Tribal Gaming.

A California tribal casino project signed off by the outgoing Biden administration would be built on the site of the Sacramento River Massacre, a new lawsuit claims. Up to 1,000 unarmed indigenous people were slaughtered by an expeditionary force of the US Army in the 1846 atrocity.

Sacramento River Massacre, Wintu Tribe of Northern California, Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians, Redding Rancheria
A drawing titled “protecting the settlers” that accompanied a Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article on the massacre of California’s Yuki people 15 years after the Sacramento River atrocity. (Image: JR Browne)

The suit was filed by the Wintu Tribe of Northern California and the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians in a federal court in Washington DC on Tuesday.

The complaint argues the US Interior Department should not have placed a plot of land into trust for the Redding Rancheria for its casino. That’s because the land has an “important historic, cultural and ceremonial relationship” to the Wintu and Nomlaki, whose ancestors were likely the victims of the massacre.

The Redding Rancheria, whose members are drawn from three traditional tribes, including the Wintu, has long planned to replace its existing Win-River Resort & Casino with a bigger venue on land acquired near Redding, known locally as Strawberry Fields.

The project, if allowed to go forward, will place facilities, roads, and utilities directly on and abutting the Six Wintu Villages and the massacre site, while requiring extensive and deep excavation, grading, and ground moving work directly where the Wintu’s (and likely the Nomlaki’s) ancestors lived and were gunned down,” reads the complaint.

Women and Children Killed

The Sacramento River Massacre was the first atrocity committed by the US government against Indigenous people in California, which was then part of Mexico. On April 8, 1846, forces led by Captain John Fremont, stumbled on around 1,000 Indigenous people on the banks of the Sacramento.

The group was largely composed of women and children, who were there to process the salmon harvest. The Wintu and friendly neighboring tribes would gather along the river each year in early April for the spring salmon run.

The events of the massacre were recorded by its perpetrators and remembered in Wintu oral histories, but these records did not explicitly pinpoint the location of the bloodshed. Nor is there a historical marker in Strawberry Fields commemorating the event.

“It is likely that every family in the six Wintu villages transecting the Project Area and lands adjacent to it would have had some direct involvement with this historic massacre,” the plaintiffs claimed in their lawsuit.

“The Indians killed was [sic] somewhere between six and seven hundred,” one of Fremont’s party wrote. “[B]y actual count I am speaking of those killed on land, as we could not count those killed in the river but I have no doubt there was fully two or three hundred more. We camped there all night and ate up all their salmon.”

Location Uncertain?

Fremont’s contemporaneous diary entries describe his party marching north along the river from Cottonwood Creek for 16 miles before encountering their victims, which would be consistent with the Strawberry Fields site.

A study by retired anthropologist Dorothea Theodoratus that drew on 19th century research by Smithsonian Linguist Jeremiah Curtin concluded that six Wintu villages did indeed transect the Strawberry Fields site, but she placed the “center” of the massacre two miles south.

Curtin, an expert in Indigenous American languages, conversed with Wintu elder Norel-putis, who had survived the massacre, in the latew 1800s.

But Theodoratus also noted that Fremont’s soldiers chased down victims who attempted to escape the initial attack and so the range of the killing was unknown.

She concluded it was almost certain that people from the six intersecting villages, including two that were actually on the Strawberry Fields site, would have been victims of the massacre.

The Redding Rancheria has countered that its project has been years in the making and the tribes have only mentioned the massacre relatively recently.

In a January statement it highlighted the “nearly two decades of comprehensive expert analysis into the environmental, economic, and social impacts of our proposed casino relocation project” that went into the Interior Department’s decision.