But hey, at least my great-grandparents weren't born in California:
"Towns offered bounty hunters cash for every Indian head or scalp they obtained. Rewards ranged from $5 for every severed head in Shasta City in 1855 to 25 cents for a scalp in Honey Lake in 1863. One resident of Shasta City wrote about how he remembers seeing men bringing mules to town, each laden with eight to twelve Indian heads. Other regions passed laws that called for collective punishment for the whole village for crimes committed by Indians, up to the destruction of the entire village and all of its inhabitants. These policies led to the destruction of as many as 150 Native communities.
In both 1851 and 1852 California paid out $1 million--revenue from the gold fields--to militias that hunted down and slaughtered Indians. In 1857, the state issued $400,000 in bonds to pay for anti-Indian militias.
http://rwor.org/a/v21/1030-039/1039/gold1.htm
When California was admitted to the Union in 1850, the estimated Indian population of this state numbered some 150,000.
One of the first statutory acts of this legislature was to offer a bounty on Indian scalps.
From 1850 to 1863, state law provided for the indenture of California Indians.
Indian property was free for the taking because Indians weren’t permitted to testify in court. It was impossible to prosecute any crimes against them.
In this very body, State Senator J.J. Warner spoke for many at the time when he said: “... there is no place within the territory of the United States in which to locate them ... better, far better, to drive them at once into the ocean, or bury them in the land of their birth."
And by the mid-1870’s, the Indian population had fallen to less than 30,000.
http://republican.sen.ca.gov/web/mcclintock/article_print.asp?PID=270
White merchants, miners, and others impatient for the new state to further their interests created citizen militias to rid the state of Indians who resisted their demands for their land, their labor, or anything else. The Pit River Rangers, the Oregon Militia and others carried out their deadly work with support from the new State of California that provided a bounty for Indian scalps. By 1859 less than a third of the Indian population in California was able to escape the bloodbath. During this period the federal government negotiated eighteen treaties with Indians that promised reservations where Indians could live in peace and economic aid and vocational training g in compensation for the lands taken from them. The California Legislature prevailed on the Senate not to ratify the treaties and the genocide proceeded. By 1900, California Indians had nearly been annihilated and the population was only 15% of what it had been in 1850. The surviving Indians had to learn to live with an alien set of beliefs and life philosophy. Indians were forced to adapt to changes in their standards of living, their ability to travel, their ability to use their own language, the way they practiced conservation, their diet, and their art forms. In other words, their way of life was forcibly taken away from them and those who rebelled were destroyed.
http://www.cahro.org/html/aprilmay97-3.html