Introduction
I decided to take Native American Studies because I married into a Yurok family. I am a poor college student, though, so if it had been a traditional marriage, it would have been a half marriage. I have been interested in the Yurok language for a few years now, and I’m impressed by the work that has been done by many dedicated persons to bring the language back from its moribund state. I have always been curious as to how it came to be that there are only a few elders left who can speak the language with any fluency. When I found out that I was going to be doing a research paper, I wanted to find the single biggest factor that led to the near extinction of the Yurok language.
My first thought was that the boarding schools were responsible. I have heard terrible stories about how the children would be beaten for speaking their native tongues. I thought that boarding schools were strictly an invention of the twentieth century, but when I started doing some research I discovered that the tradition of removing Indian children from their homes and forbidding them to speak their language had been established centuries before. Further study proved that the boarding schools themselves were a creation of an official policy towards the Indian, so it became my job to discover what prompted that policy.
My research has indicated that the states and the federal government were already inclined to oppress the American Indian and take his land when California became a state in 1850. Until then, the Yuroks had remained relatively undisturbed compared to the Indians in the southern parts of California, and boarding schools hadn’t yet become fashionable. I traced the official policy of boarding schools back to some events that had occurred in Northern California in the mid nineteenth century. This is what I found:
A Fateful Discovery
In the thousands of years before the Gold Rush, Northwest California Indians lived in a land that was rich with natural resources. They had everything they needed to thrive and build a complex civilization, though it may not have seemed that way to the White men who came looking for gold. While there were several distinct languages spoken in the thousands of small villages of the Northwest, for the most part they led a very similar way of life. With that in mind, this research will focus primarily upon the Yurok, Tolowa and Karuk Tribes.
In To the American Indian, Lucy Thompson, a Yurok woman and the first California Indian woman ever published, gives a firsthand account of life in the small village of Pec-Wan on the lower Klamath River around the time that the Gold Rush began. The first thing one must come to understand about the Yurok way of life before the arrival of the Whites is that there was no chief of the entire Tribe like the Indians of the plains. Each village along the Klamath River was autonomous, and the family with the most wealth usually had the most influence in the village. A little known fact about the Yurok Indians is that some people owned land in a similar manner to the Whites, though there was no official legal recognition as such. Some families even kept slaves!
Before and for a short time after the Gold Rush, the Yurok Indians lived in redwood plank houses, which were uniquely suited to the climate in which they lived. To build a house, or o’-lehl,1 it was first necessary to level the ground to an area of about thirty or forty square feet. Next, a large square hole was dug in the ground about fifteen feet across and five feet deep. At the perimeter of the hole, thick slabs of wood were placed into the ground to keep the sides of the hole from collapsing. Then walls were put up about three to five feet away from the perimeter of the hole, leaving a ledge all the way around the inner pit. A round porthole about two feet across served as the entrance door, and the roof was designed to keep out the rain while still allowing the smoke to escape. The o’-lehl was the house where the women, children and elderly slept and where the meals were cooked for the family. The men slept in a smaller house, built in a similar fashion, known as ‘r’-gerrk,2 and also served as a sweathouse and social gathering place.
Travel from village to village was accomplished either by walking or taking a canoe up and down the river. An Indian canoe, or ohl-wey-yoch,3 was carved whole out of a large redwood log, and every one had to have certain features for it to be a proper means of conveyance for an Indian. A true ohl-wey-yoch is thought to be literally alive, and as such it has to have organs just like an animal. Each canoe had a seat at the stern and two raised knobs on the edges, known as kidneys, that the person paddling would put his or her feet on to help with paddling. In addition, every canoe had a raised circular spot in the center just behind the bow known as the heart. In front and on either side of this projection were two wide, oval shaped grooves known as the lungs. At the very tip of the bow was a small, round horizontal projection that pointed towards the back of the boat, and this was called the nose. The ohl-wey-yoch was not only an ideal mode of transportation, but it also allowed the Yuroks to take full advantage of the abundant natural resources at their disposal, especially fishing (Thompson 1991).
All this began to change rapidly with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. Construction began on then Captain John A. Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California in the fall of 1847. The following January, the contractor building the mill, James W. Marshall, brought to Mr. Sutter’s attention a few yellow pieces of metal that had been found while digging a waterway to turn the mill wheel. Though Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the discovery a secret, it wasn’t long before the whole world knew that gold had been discovered in California. Their secret made it to San Francisco on March 15, when The Californian printed on the back page:
GOLD MINE FOUND: “In the newly made raceway of the Saw Mill recently erected by Captain Sutter, on the American Fork, gold has been found in considerable quantities. One person brought thirty dollars worth to New Helvetia, gathered there in a short time. California, no doubt, is rich in mineral wealth, great chances here for scientific capitalists. Gold has been found in almost every part of the country.” (Bancroft 2006 “Permanent Exhibitions”)
By May 29th, The Californian had to suspend publication as there was no one left in town to read it. In the final edition, the editor wrote:
The majority of our subscribers and many of our advertisers have closed their doors and places of business and left town....The whole country, from San Francisco to Los Angeles and from the seashore to the Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry of ‘gold! Gold!! GOLD!!!’ while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes. (Koeppel “Introduction”)
He then promptly left town himself to begin a new career in prospecting for gold (Koeppel “Introduction”). With thousands of people rushing into the northern wilderness to find gold, conflicts were bound to occur.
With the subsequent discovery of gold at Trinidad, Yreka and Jacksonville, Oregon, perceived tension between the Whites and the Indians grew to such an extent that in the summer of 1851, Colonel Redick McKee was sent on an expedition to make peace treaties with the northern Tribes. McKee set out with about 40 mounted men and traveled from Santa Rosa to Happy Camp signing eighteen treaties with the Indians along the rivers. McKee’s enthusiasm for peace treaties was met with equal disdain for them in the Senate, however, and none of the eighteen treaties were ratified the following year in Congress. Regardless of treaty status, there were plenty of Whites ready to kill Indians over gold. During that same expedition, Colenol McKee encountered a miner named Tom Hinton, who proudly proclaimed “that he would shoot Indians whenever he could find them; that he had done so, and would continue to do so” (Bauer 2000:19). This attitude was common among some miners, and tensions continued to rise.
The fear and misunderstanding of the Whites towards the Indians led to brutal massacres and hostile public policy. In February of 1852, a miner from Missouri named Gwin Tompkins shot a young Indian boy who worked in the mining settlement with the dueling names of “Happy Camp” and “Murderer’s Bar” (Gibbs 1851:“George Gibbs’ Journal”, footnote 66), and his body floated downstream to be found by the local Indians. When the Indians questioned a miner who was returning home near the village where they lived, he became fearful of retribution. He returned to the mining camp to raise an armed party and returned to the village, shooting every Indian male and several females, and burned the village to the ground. The same party traveled two miles upriver to a place known as Indian Flat and repeated the process at the village located there (Bauer 2000). Massacre followed massacre in the days of the Gold Rush, including the largest massacre in American history in Yontocket in 1853, where up to 600 unarmed Tolowa Indians were killed during their world renewal ceremony (Medley 2006). When the miners weren’t simply killing the Indians to gain unrestricted land, they were busy destroying the very land that they sought. Modern mining technologies left far more lasting effects than simple massacres.
If mining in solid rock were the only technology used in the Gold Rush, perhaps the impact of the Gold Rush on the indigenous population would not have been so great. Placer mining soon became the most common technique to extract gold from the surrounding countryside. A placer is created by the natural erosion of solid rock over thousands of years, and it is a place where gold is found in the form of dust, flakes or nuggets mixed in with gravel or sand. Placer mining is the process of washing the gravel or surrounding soil to separate the gold (Gold Miner’s Headquarters 1992 “Definitions”). With the advent of new mining technologies like hydraulic mining, which is placer mining on a huge scale, the sacred land surrounding the Yuroks and other Northwestern California Tribes was almost completely destroyed. Charlie Thom, a Karuk Indian, describes the effect that these devastating technologies had on the land:
Placer gold, water moving, hydraulics, erosion, everything taken. I seen that, they (miners) took a lot of Indian land. So you see, Karuks really suffered from this mining. Because all there was left was rock, with all the gold gone. I heard in the history of the mining of gold, of rock plows, way back in 1851 when the first gold hit. The Gold Rush of California, there were thousands and thousands of people, thousands and thousands of people came in 1851…. How can they turn the soil upside down and out and do nothing about it? Today we are living in a rock pile along the Klamath. We’re living in a rock pile. No more soil. The erosion came and hit. (Lowry 2000:12)
In addition to destroying entire villages and crucial plant life, the miners made the fertile lands surrounding the rivers into a wasteland of bedrock and gravel, suitable for neither farming nor housing. The impact of the Gold Rush days was felt for over 150 years since it began (Lowry 2000).
In 1846, just two years before the Gold Rush, the population of the California Indians numbered 150,000. At the time of the Yontocket Massacre just seven years later, that figure had dropped to less than half. By the time the Gold Rush was all over in 1859, the population of the California Indians stood at a little over 30,000 and continued to drop at a slightly less alarming rate than during the previous eleven years (Medley 2006). It was not just the Gold Rush, however, that contributed to the near extinction of the northern California Indians. Systematic oppression and institutional racism that have remained entrenched since 1852 have contributed to a culture of shame that remains prevalent today. This institutionalized policy of racism was embodied in the letter that then California Governor John Bigler wrote in response to Colonel McKee’s complaint about the twin massacres at Happy Camp:
These reflections imply an imputation upon the character of American citizens, and I assent neither to its justice nor its propriety. As a private intercessor between American citizens and their savage enemies…I cannot yield my approbation to any imputations upon their intelligence or patriotism. Nor can I refrain from expressing the opinion that an investigation of the circumstances, such as I design to make, will fully acquit the citizens residing in the northern counties of the charge of “murdering naked and defenceless [sic] Indians in cold blood.” (Bauer 2000:23)
Governor Bigler told McKee that whatever investigation, if any, would be carried out would have the foregone conclusion of exonerating the white miners. This attitude was codified into law when Congress passed several enactments designed to “educate” and “civilize” the Indian—for his own good, of course (Pevar 1992:4). Perhaps the worst development of this new policy towards the American Indian, aside from allowing Whites to murder Indians with impunity, was the creation of boarding schools, where Indian children were removed from their families and forbidden to speak their own language. Boarding schools lasted for over a hundred years, and generations of American Indians learned to secretly despise their own culture and eschew the language of their ancestors.
On the surface, modern Yurok Indians appear much different than the Yuroks of the Gold Rush days. They live in modern houses, drive cars, and talk on cell phones. Instead of traveling on the Klamath River in an ohl-wey-yoch, many Yuroks have aluminum jet boats, which might be referred to as simply ‘yoch4. There are many similarities, however. Yurok Indians still fish with nets, families are important, and salmon is still at the core of Yurok culture. The main difference is that most Yuroks no longer know how to speak the Yurok language. However, that too is changing. The Yurok Tribe and several dedicated members have made great strides in resurrecting the Yurok language in the community. If you, the reader, would like to help, the best thing that you could do is to learn to “Please speak the Yurok Language”, or, Cho’ saa-a-goch-em!
Conclusion
The Tribes on the Klamath River lived in relative peace until gold was discovered in California. Land that was unattractive for agricultural purposes suddenly became potentially priceless to thousands of miners, settlers, and criminals. Legends of a land filled with gold that had been around since the time of Cortez gained new credence. It was convenient for unscrupulous prospectors to simply kill any Indians who may have gotten in the way of easy riches. The resulting fear and mistrust between the Whites and the Indians resulted in an official policy to destroy the “savage” spirit of the Indians by destroying their culture and their language. It is for this reason that I believe that the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 was the singular event that led to the near destruction of the Yurok language.
Footnotes
1. (Berkeley 2005 p. 194)
2. (Berkeley 2005 p. 197)
3. (Exline p. 21)
4. (Berkeley 2005 p. 205)
Bibliography
The Bancroft Library. “Permanent Exhibitions”. University of California, Berkeley: November 17, 2006. http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/events/permanent.html
Bauer, Willy, and Dr. Linda Pitelka. “Using Indian History from Local Communities in the Classroom”. Presentation handouts and primary source documents. Eureka, CA: Humboldt State University, 1999.
Berkeley Department of Linguistics. Preliminary Yurok Dictionary. Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, 2005.
Exline, Jessie. Yurok Dictionary. Klamath, CA: The Yurok Tribe. No publication date.
Gibbs, George. “George Gibbs’ Journal of Redick McKee’s Expedition Through Northwestern California in 1851”. Heizer, Robert F. ed. The Klamath Bucket Brigade. http://www.klamathbucketbrigade.org/Gibbs_...ition040406.htm
Gold Miner’s Headquarters. “Definitions”. Heavy Metal Mining Company: 1999. http://www.goldminershq.com/FRAME/FORMS/DE...TM#Anchor-PPPPP
Koeppel, Elliot M. “Introduction”. (The California Gold Country: Highway 49 Revisited) http://www.malakoff.com/goldcountry/tcgcintr.htm
Lowry, Chag, ed. “Northwest Indigenous Gold Rush History: The Indian Survivors of California’s Holocaust”. Eureka, CA: Humboldt State University, 1999.
Pevar, Stephan L. The Rights of Indians and Tribes. Second edition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Thompson, Lucy. To the American Indian. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1991
[hr]
Looking back, I could have done much better work. Ah well, that's what I get for writing it at the last minute the day before it was due.
-C
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