Buried in Hubert Howe Bancroft’s History of California is a 6 1/2 Page Footnote that directly contradicts the text to which it refers. This “account” stands on its own as a valuable hidden history of the so-called Squatter Riots of August 1850 – a little-known but serious conflict that led to the deaths of Sacramento’s sheriff and assessor as well as six other citizens (the mayor was shot off his horse and left office to convalesce in San Francisco). Following this clash, the city was subjected to martial law and suffered from a collapse in both its economy and population, with up to 80 percent of its residents departing as real estate prices crashed and one bank after another failed. Dr. Charles Robinson, the leader of the Settler’s Association was elected to the first California legislature while in prison and went on to serve as the first governor of Kansas.
It’s odd that most residents are unaware that the city almost died at the hands of speculators, and those who led a local revolution are nearly unknown and all-but-absent from card catalogs in our libraries. I’ll soon be presenting information to support my suspicion that there was a large-scale revision of history to suppress the true story of California’s theft. Stay tuned!
Confluence 
[…] At its peak Settlers’ Association had over 1000 members, and they very nearly overthrew the speculator-dominated first government of Sacramento City (for better or worse). Their consensus-based organizing, and their leaders including Dr. Charles Robinson, have been largely suppressed in our history. […]
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[…] The problem is less obvious now; we are all confused by deep layers of historical misinformation. I’ve found several anomalies that all point toward a concerted effort to revise history during the decades after 1850. These anomalies start to explain how Sacramento’s canonical history could be so badly at odds with what actually happened here, and I’ll explore them in other posts (like this one). […]
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[…] The problem is less obvious now; we are all confused by deep layers of historical misinformation. I’ve found several anomalies that all point toward a concerted effort to revise history during the decades after 1850. These anomalies start to explain how Sacramento’s canonical history could be so badly at odds with what actually happened here, and I’ll explore them in other posts (like this one). […]
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[…] be so badly at odds with what actually happened here, and I’ll explore them in other posts (like this one and this […]
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[…] However, Sacramento’s amnesia is not a case of simple selective memory warping the truth over generations. The official story of Sacramento – and California – is based on an intentional deception, whose perpetrators include famed historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. […]
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[…] primarily during the 1880s, by Royce as well as in H.H. Bancroft’s History of California, (which contains a bizarre 6 ½ page footnote that proves that at least some historians understood the falsehood of the story they were telling). […]
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[…] Bancroft, that historic giant who appears in footnotes of most historic writing, dropped his own doozy of a citation in his encyclopedic 1886 History of California, vol. 6. Bancroft’s writers produced a dismissive […]
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