Calpella, California

Calpella is a small settlement in Mendocino County, six miles north of Ukiah, and its name is one of the oldest Indigenous names preserved on the California map. Kalpela was a Pomo leader of the nearby village whose people had lived along the Russian River for generations before American settlers arrived in the early eighteen fifties. The community was named after him, and the post office took the name in eighteen sixty.

The Northern Pomo families in this area were displaced as homesteaders claimed the river-bottom land through the eighteen fifties and eighteen sixties. Today the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians holds a rancheria a few miles north of Calpella, maintaining a federally recognized presence on a small portion of their ancestral homeland. The town itself remains rural and unincorporated, a quiet stretch of Highway One Oh One in the redwood country north of the Ukiah Valley, carrying a name that outlasted nearly everything else from the world that came before.