Bloody Island massacre

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The Bloody Island Massacre was a mass killing of indigenous Californians by U.S. Dragoons that occurred on what was then an island in Clear Lake, California, on May 15, 1850. It is part of the wider California genocide. A number of the Pomo, an indigenous people of California, had been enslaved by two settlers, Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, and confined to one village, where they were starved and abused until they rebelled and murdered their captors. In response, the U.S. Dragoons killed at least 60 of the local Pomo. In July 1850, a report by Major Edwin Allen Sherman contended that "There were not less than four hundred warriors killed and drowned at Clear Lake and as many more of squaws and children who plunged into the lake and drowned, through fear, committing suicide. So in all, about eight hundred Native Americans found a watery grave in Clear Lake."

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