The Pomo and the Precious Blood: California's Clear Lake Removals
By Margaret Ellsworth Cavanaugh
Length4h 16m
About this audiobook
Since May 15, 1850, the island at the north end of Clear Lake has been called Bloody Island. On that day U.S. Army troops under Nathaniel Lyon attacked the Pomo families sheltering there. Most of the dead were women, children and old people, and estimates run from dozens to several hundred. It was the Army's answer to the killing, the winter before, of two ranchers who had held Pomo men and women in near-slavery.
The world the soldiers broke into had fed several thousand Pomo people for centuries. Bread began in the fall with a long pole and a burden basket: acorns beaten down from the black oaks, carried home by tumpline, cracked one at a time between two stones, pounded in bedrock mortars worn two feet deep and leached with hot water until it ran clear. The lake gave fish, waterfowl and the tule that built houses, boats and baskets.
The story reaches back to Russian and Spanish contact on the coast and runs forward through removal over the mountains to Round Valley, the state law that let settlers indenture Native children, the removals of the 1870s, allotment, termination and the Land Back movement. Through all of it Pomo women wove baskets to keep their families fed, and museums around the world bought them as art.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 16 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: Xa-Ben-Na-Po: The Lake and the People
2Chapter 2: Strangers on the Coast: Russian and Spanish Contact
3Chapter 3: Gold, Squatters, and the Law of the Gun
4Chapter 4: Bloody Island, May 15, 1850
5Chapter 5: The Round Valley Experiment
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6Chapter 6: The 1870s Removals: Orders from Washington
7Chapter 7: The Children and the Indenture Law
8Chapter 8: Baskets as Evidence: Art, Survival, and the Market
9Chapter 9: Land, Allotment, and the Fight for Sovereignty
10Chapter 10: The Long Struggle: Termination, Relocation, and Red Power
11Chapter 11: The Lake Today: Land Back and the Precious Blood
12Chapter 12: What the Lake Remembers
13About the Author
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