The massacre at Klamath Lake cannot be understood apart from the fever gripping America in the 1840s. "Manifest Destiny," a term coined by journalist John L. O'Sullivan, captured the belief that the young nation was ordained to rule the entire North American continent. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri championed this expansionist movement and recruited his son-in-law, John C. Fremont, to lead government-funded expeditions mapping western territories. In 1845, Captain Fremont was sent to survey the Great Basin and Alta California, then a possession of Mexico. But Fremont's activities in California went far beyond cartography - he provoked Mexican authorities, rallied American settlers, and just weeks before reaching Klamath Lake, led the Sacramento River massacre near present-day Redding.

As Fremont's expedition moved north through the Sacramento Valley and into Oregon Territory, it adopted a policy of indiscriminate violence against Native Americans. Expedition member Thomas E. Breckenridge later recalled: "We had orders while in camp or on the move to shoot Indians on sight. While on the march the crack of a rifle and the dying yell of a native was not an unusual occurrence." Martin's memoir corroborates this, noting the expedition killed "plenty of game, and an occasional Indian" while following the Sacramento River. On the night of May 9, 1846, a group of 15 to 20 Klamath warriors retaliated, attacking Fremont's camp under cover of darkness and killing two or three expedition members. Fremont was, in his own words, "determined to square accounts."

Fremont's scouts killed two Klamath warriors on May 11, but he considered this "inadequate." The following day, Kit Carson led an assault on the Klamath village of Dokdokwas on the shores of Klamath Lake. The attackers destroyed the village completely and killed at least fourteen inhabitants. They suffered no casualties in return. The action was swift, brutal, and one-sided - not a battle but an execution. The expedition then continued south toward California, resuming its policy of killing Native Americans on sight. Along the way, they committed another "preemptive" attack on a rancheria at Sutter Buttes. Within months, Fremont would become Military Governor of California, though he was forced to resign after less than two months in office.

The perpetrators of the Klamath Lake massacre faced no legal consequences. The U.S. government ordered Fremont back to California to participate in the war against Mexico, and he never returned to Oregon territory. In 1850, Fremont became California's first U.S. Senator. In 1856, he received the Republican nomination for president, losing to James Buchanan. He later served as a Union general during the Civil War. Kit Carson, too, became a celebrated figure of the American West, his name attached to cities, counties, and natural features across the region. The massacre at Dokdokwas became a footnote, one atrocity among many that accompanied American expansion across the continent.

The Klamath Lake massacre was only the beginning of decades of violence against the Klamath people. By 1855, newspapers reported that miners were "determined to commence an indiscriminate massacre of all the Indians" in the Klamath watershed, while accounts described settlers "hunting them down like deer." In 1864, the Klamath were forced to cede 20 million of their 22 million acres, confined to a 2-million-acre reservation. They made this land economically viable through timber milling, cattle ranching, and other enterprises - until 1954, when Congress terminated their tribal status, forcing them to surrender their remaining land for a monetary payment. Tribal status was restored in 1986, but the land was not returned. The shores of Klamath Lake, where Dokdokwas once stood, remain a place of memory and loss.