Tahoe National Forest: Maidu and Washoe Homelands, the Forest That Held the Water

The Tahoe National Forest sprawls across roughly eight hundred seventy thousand acres of the northern Sierra Nevada, from the American River canyon in the south to the Yuba River drainages in the north, a patchwork of granite peaks, river gorges, and old-growth fir forest that most visitors pass through on their way to the lake or the ski resorts and never look at directly. It is easy to look past a national forest. It does not have an entrance fee or an iconic overlook. It simply exists, holding the watershed.

This land belongs, in the deepest historical sense, to two peoples: the Nisenan Maidu, who occupied the lower elevations and foothills on the western slope, and the Washoe, whose territory centered on the Lake Tahoe basin and the eastern Sierra escarpment. The Washoe relationship with Da ow a ga, the lake they called the lake, extended across the full range from alpine meadows to the Nevada desert, a seasonal migration pattern tied to deer, pine nuts, fish, and gathering grounds that the arrival of American settlers, and later the federal designation of a national forest, systematically disrupted.

The Nisenan Maidu were among the peoples most devastated by the gold rush. Their villages in the American River foothills sat directly in the path of the forty-niner migration. By eighteen sixty, the population that had numbered in the tens of thousands had collapsed by an estimated ninety percent. The Nisenan did not receive a federal reservation in the manner of some Sierra tribes. Their dispossession was accomplished so completely that recognition and land restoration remained legally contested into the twenty-first century.

The forest that grew back after the gold rush logging is younger than it looks. Most of the timber you see here was cut at least once between eighteen fifty and nineteen twenty. Second growth. The original stands are mostly gone.