"On February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and ceding California to the United States. Almost at the same time, on January 24, 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, in the Sierra foothills. The gold rush that followed brought some 300,000 people to California, both from the East Coast of the United States and from abroad. While the prospectors fanned out into the foothills, many of the newcomers settled in the boomtown of San Francisco. The city required much more food and housing, and local ranchers and settlers looked for new lands to graze their animals. Round Valley served as a perfect destination for the herdsmen, causing immediate conflicts with the Yuki, Round Valley’s inhabitants. The settlers and their herds of cows and horses trampled the traditional products of Yuki foraging. Indians were attacked and beaten by the settlers, who thought of them as “savages” at best and little more than animals at worse. The Yuki began to retaliate by killing the settlers’ cattle for food and driving off their horses. California was admitted to the Union as a state in 1850, and its new government decided to set aside a reservation in 1856 for the Yuki in the northern part of the valley as a way to avoid confrontation between the settlers and the Indians. Some 3,000 Indians moved to the reservation, while others scattered around the valley and into the woods to the north and east, merging, in some cases, with other tribes that lived in the region. For their sustenance, the Indians would return to the valley to hunt game or gather roots and acorns, only to be driven off by the settlers, who were increasingly aggressive in shooting the Yuki and kidnapping their women for sexual exploitation. As the settlers claimed property and fenced off their ranches, they also set out in posses to punish the Yuki for rustling. In response, the Yuki sometimes killed whites, though in much smaller numbers than their own losses."