In Martin Luther King Jr.'s book "Why We Can't Wait", he wrote, "Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race." In 1861, residents of Mankato, Minnesota, formed the Knights of the Forest, with the goal of 'eliminating all Indians from Minnesota.' An egregious attempt occurred with the California gold rush, the first two years of which saw the death of thousands of Native Americans. Under Mexican rule in California, Indians were subjected to "de facto" enslavement under a system of peonage by the white elite. While in 1850, California formally entered the Union as a free state, with respect to the issue of slavery, the practice of Indian indentured servitude was not outlawed by the California Legislature until 1863. The 1864 deportation of the Navajos by the U.S. government occurred when 8,000 Navajos were forcibly relocated to an internment camp in Bosque Redondo, where, under armed guards, more than 3,500 Navajo and Mescalero Apache men, women, and children died from starvation and disease.