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Article Excerpt
The mouth of the Klamath River has been a source of stories for a long time. The town of Requa on the north bank above the estuary may be the only indigenous village site in California continuously inhabited by members of the same tribe for centuries. Yurok Indians, whose ancestors lived there long before Europeans first came to the Americas, remain in Requa today. They no longer inhabit plank houses made of redwood with oval doorways leading to underground chambers. A scattering of frame houses, a network of trails, a large hotel beside Requa Road, and boa landings below it are the existing incarnation of the ancient village of Rekwoi. (1)
The continuity of the Yurok tribe along the Klamath River is an anomaly in California history. Indian settlements that survived the era of Spanish missions in almost every case were overrun during the Gold Rush. Some tribes were removed to reservations, including one on the Lower Klamath. But the status of Yurok country as reservation land was ignored if not forgotten for most of the twentieth century.
The story of the reestablishment of the Yurok reservation and the renewal of Yurok culture is inseparable from the saga of Klamath River salmon, whose decline, dating back to the Gold Rush, has accelerated toward the point of no return in the early twenty-first century. Although Indian fishing has been blamed for causing this decline, a review of Yurok history suggests that the survival of Klamath River wild salmon stocks may depend upon the efforts of a people who, unlike other California tribes, managed to remain in at least one of their ancestral villages against all odds.
THE VILLAGE THAT SURVIVED
Contemporary knowledge of the precontact history of California's largest tribe (2) is due in part to the contributions of two Yurok men, Captain Spott (Haaganors) and his adoptive son, Robert. In 1900, when anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber first came to the Klamath River, Captain Spott, then an old man, became his informant. Decades later, Kroeber learned stories that Captain Spott told Robert during long sessions in the family sweathouse. Among these oral traditions is an account of a first encounter between Yuroks and European Americans.
According to Robert Spott, Requa Fanny, a contemporary of his father, told the captain "that she saw the first white people come to Welkwau"--a village on the south bank of the estuary, across from Rekwoi. They arrived in "a large boat ... with trees on it. She meant the masts of course. They landed in small boats." These non-Indians camped by Oregos, a giant rock on the north bank at the mouth of the river. "The people of Rekwoi went into hiding." But their curiosity was irresistible. "In the morning the people began to peep over the edge of the slope, and some of the children ventured down."
Fanny, who was "a good-sized girl then," was among them, wearing a basket cap. "A white man who was cooking took a potato from the ashes and gave her half of it. She did not know what it was and put it in her cap. Then he gave her something with holes in it and gestured that she should eat it. It was hardtack. She tried it and it tasted like wood, she said. The other children called to her, 'You will die if you eat it.'" (3)
This episode, which took place in the 1840s, not long before the Gold Rush, was not the Yuroks' first exposure to non-Indians. In 1775, when a Spanish expedition commanded by Don Bruno de Hezeta y Dudagoitia landed in Trinidad Bay, four canoes carrying twenty-four members from the Yuroks' southernmost village, Tsurai, met his ships. (4) In 1827 fur traders with the Hudson's Bay Company entered Yurok country. The following year the explorer Jedediah Smith met Yuroks after traveling to the confluence of the Trinity and the Klamath rivers. They had iron arrow points and wanted to purchase knives. Yet Requa Fanny's encounter was the earliest known arrival of non-Indians into the estuary of the Klamath River. This meeting, more than three centuries after the conquest of Peru that gave Europeans the potato, was one of the last "first contacts" in North America.
In 1851 federal agents signed treaties with Indians throughout California, papering over the invasion of indigenous lands by gold seekers and pioneers. Headmen of five of the villages known today as Yurok put their marks on a document written in a language that they did not understand. In this manner they represented, without authorization, a group of people who did not recognize their shared membership in a "tribe" or any common entity other than what they called "the human world." (5)
Yet there were ties of language, culture, and family among these people, and despite the radical changes of the last century and a half, some of these ties have persisted. A number of pre-contact Yurok village sites located on or near the Klamath River are Yurok villages today. At least one, Rekwoi, has been inhabited by members of families that lived there since before the days of gold. In 1877 Stephen Powers published a description of "the village of Rikwa," which, he said, "tinkles with the happy cackle of brown babies tumbling on their heads with the puppies: and the tires within the cabins gleam through the round door holes like so many full-orbed moons heaving out of the breast of the mountains." (6) Alfred Kroeber's wife, Theodora, was referring to Yuroks of Rekwoi and other villages in 1900 when she wrote that "some, unlike most western Indians, were still living on their own ancestral land when Kroeber first reached them, their life physically much as it had been before the Gold Rush." (7)
As mid-nineteenth-century gold seekers from around the world rushed into the hills, mountains, and valleys of northern California, how could an indigenous village have survived? In the case of Rekwoi, its location west of the major gold-mining areas in the Klamath Basin contributed to its survival. To get to the gold fields in the Trinity River Basin and along the Klamath upstream from its confluence with the Trinity, miners sailed to Humboldt Bay, then set off cross-country from the optimistically named city of Eureka, or they traveled farther north to Trinidad Bay where the southernmost Yurok village then existed.
Although the Yuroks were less directly affected by the miners' incursions than the other Klamath River tribes, the effects of the Gold Rush were devastating all the same. In 1865 a surgeon reported to the federal government, "Those who saw the Klamath and Trinity rivers in early days say that during the summer months they ran as clear as crystal, and thronged with salmon from the sea; now they are muddy...
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