Mendocino National Forest: Yuki and Pomo Dispossession, the Innermost Range

The Mendocino National Forest is the only national forest in California with no paved highway running through it. That is not an oversight. It is geography. The Coast Ranges here rise steeply east of the Mendocino coast and drop away into the Sacramento Valley, but there is no convenient pass, no river corridor that made the kind of through-road that built every other mountain route in the state. The forest is approximately nine hundred thousand acres of chaparral, oak woodland, and pine forest at elevations from a thousand to eight thousand feet, traversed by dirt roads that close in winter and draw a self-selecting visitor.

This is the territory of the Yuki, one of the most severely affected peoples in California's dispossession history. In the decade between eighteen fifty and eighteen sixty, the population of the Round Valley area, the Yuki homeland at the center of the Coast Ranges, fell from an estimated five thousand people to fewer than a thousand. The mechanisms were familiar: settler ranching that displaced food systems, slave raids by valley ranchers who captured Yuki children as domestic labor, and a state-sponsored and vigilante militia campaign against any resistance. The Mendocino War, as it was documented in state records, killed hundreds of people in a span of months.

The federal government established the Round Valley Reservation in eighteen fifty-six and then systematically marched Native people from across Northern California onto it, regardless of tribal affiliation or home territory. Yuki, Pomo, Wailaki, Nomlaki, Pit River people, and others from different language groups and cultures were forced together onto land where they had no established relationship, often in conditions of extreme deprivation.

The Covelo Pomo and Round Valley tribes whose descendants govern at Round Valley today carry the compacted history of a reservation that was itself built on violence. The forest around them is what survived the clearing.