The Bloody Island Massacre occurred on May 15, 1850, as a response to the killing of two settlers by enslaved Pomo people. A number of Pomo had been enslaved by settlers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, confined to one village, and subjected to starvation and abuse. When the Pomo rebelled and murdered their captors, the U.S. Cavalry launched a retaliatory operation against the indigenous people at what was then an island in Clear Lake, California. This massacre is part of the wider California genocide that affected indigenous populations throughout the state.
The engagement took place at an island called Bo-no-po-ti or Badon-napo-ti (Island Village) at the north end of Clear Lake in Lake County, California, where the Pomo had traditionally gathered. The U.S. Cavalry killed at least 60 of the local Pomo during the massacre. Following the engagement, Major Edwin Allen Sherman filed a report in July 1850 that presented a significantly higher casualty estimate, contending 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."
The massacre resulted in the death of numerous Pomo people and stands as a documented instance of violence against indigenous Californians during the period of American expansion. The event represents the broader pattern of conflict and violence that characterized indigenous-settler relations in California during this era, contributing to the historical record of the California genocide.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
At least 60 Pomo killed confirmed; Major Sherman's July 1850 report claimed approximately 800 Native Americans (400 warriors and 400 women and children) killed and drowned at Clear Lake
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