On one bad word

Update: A version of this newsletter was submitted to The Atlantic on March 12.

On display at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles is a document from California's genocide.

It is a paid bond of $100, issued by the State of California, to raise funds for "Expeditions against the Indians." But the word "expeditions" obscures the truth.

"Expeditions against the Indians," as time has revealed, involved government-backed volunteer militia and settlers committing massacres across the state. They murdered more than 1,000 Yuki people in the Round Valley Settler Massacres, killed 450 Tolowa people in the Yontoket massacre—the settlers attacked during a prayer ceremony—and engaged in constant skirmishes that left American Indian families dead across the state. The "Eel River Rangers," as one group called themselves, killed at least 283 Indian men and an unrecorded number of women and children in a six-month campaign that was eventually reimbursed by the US government.

The truth is remarkably easy to tell so long as you care about it, but in the piece "How Progressives Froze the American Dream," writer Yoni Applebaum proved himself incapable.

"The nation's push westward in the 1800s created new opportunities, and Americans moved toward them—dispossessing Native peoples of their land—but westward migration was never the whole story, or even most of it."

What gutless writing "dispossessing" belongs to—the same cowardice that shapes Thanksgiving fables and directs California gradeschoolers to write a report on and even physically model one of the state's 21 Spanish Missions where forced labor, abuse, and detainment resulted in the death of at least 63,000 American Indians. This work wasn't strictly a deprivation of rights or lands. It was a physically violent, government-funded deprivation of life. It was, as believed by its perpetrators, an extermination for cause.

I write this not to emotionally browbeat (else I be labeled as one of Mr. Applebaum's incorrectly defined "progressives"—modern progressives support new housing, this is getting tiresome), but to call attention to a failure of fact-finding. In one word, a gruesome history was ignored. So, too then, was the magazine's service to the public.