Tracking Jedediah Smith through Hupa Territory

T WAS LATE WINTER IN Hoopa Valley. The year was 1828. Northwestern California was as yet unclaimed by any non-Indian government, including the ruling Mexican government of Alta California, distant by hundreds of miles to the south. The Hudson's Bay Company was a more ominous threat to Indian life, sending explorers from Oregon into California to find the northern passage to the mystical Buenaventura River. In 1827 Francois Payette, traveling with Peter Skene Ogden for the Hudson's Bay Company, led a scouting party down the Klamath River into California. He reached the Yurok Indian village of Weitchpec, only six miles north of Hoopa Valley. There he saw knives, axes, and even tea kettles, Hudson's Bay Company trade goods that had traveled south through the aboriginal Indian trade network, presaging the appearance of the traders themselves (Dillon 1975:60). White contact for the Hupa Indians occurred late in the history of the United States. The floodgates of change opened wide with the California Gold Rush of 1849. After 1850 Indian culture in northwest California, assaulted by tens of thousands of miners, was shattered (Norton 1979). Before 1850, before gold, there had only been a few trappers who explored northwest California by land and sea, in search of fur bearing animals. Few white explorers and trappers must have actually passed through Hoopa Valley itself before the Gold Rush, because by the 1851 McKee treaty expedition, there were still no white settlers in the valley, nor white allies to conduct the treaty negotiations on their behalf, as there were for the neighboring Yurok Indians on the Klamath River (Heizer 1972). Northwest California did not prove to be a successful trapping territory, and was largely ignored during this pre-1850 era. The landscape was too rugged, the region was poor in beaver and sea otter, and the Indians were considered hostile and dangerous (Engelson 1939). April 1828 in Hoopa Valley saw the creeks swollen with melting snow, the river running high, the deciduous trees in blossom, the prairie grasses becoming a green carpet. It was a time of awakening. These next two months were considered to be the most auspicious of the year for Hupa women to give birth.1 But something was coming, the old people were later to tell the anthropologist Pliny Goddard. In May 1828 Jedediah Smith with

Pedagogy · Sociology · Tracking (education · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Botany, Ecology, and Taxonomy Studies

• Our Home Forever

  Thomas Buckley, Thomas D Buckley et al.•The American Indian Quarterly•1984

  Add to list