The Wappo: The Valley's Original Winemakers

The valley you are driving through has a name. That name is a Wappo word. Its exact meaning has been lost, or is contested, or belongs to a community whose language came within a generation of disappearing entirely. The interpretations that have been recorded range from 'plenty' to 'grizzly bear' to a place name with no surviving translation. What the word originally meant, in the mouths of the people who first said it, is no longer certain.

The Wappo occupied this valley for at least three thousand years before the first Spanish missionary arrived. They are a distinct people, not Coast Miwok, not Pomo, not any of the neighboring language groups with which scholars have tried to affiliate them. The Wappo language is what linguists call an isolate: unrelated to the Penutian or Hokan language families that cover most of California, unrelated to any neighboring tongue. This linguistic isolation suggests a long, separate history in this specific geography, rooted here before the movement of other peoples around them.

They managed the valley floor through controlled burning and systematic harvesting, practices that over millennia produced the open meadow landscape, the cleared grassland interspersed with oak, that European arrivals found when they came. That landscape, created by human hands over centuries, was precisely what made Napa Valley so appealing for viticulture. The first European winemakers did not clear an untouched wilderness. They planted into a garden that someone else had been tending.

Mission San Francisco Solano, the last and northernmost of California's twenty-one missions, was established in Sonoma in eighteen twenty-three. Wappo people were among those relocated there under coercion. The Wappo population in the valley, estimated at around three thousand in eighteen hundred, had fallen to fewer than one hundred by nineteen hundred, through disease, violence, and land seizure.

The Mishewal-Wappo Tribe of Alexander Valley has sought federal recognition for decades. As of this recording, that recognition has not been granted. The valley bears their name. The federal government has not yet decided they exist.

Note: Wappo history in this track is drawn from the documentary record. For a fuller account, the Mishewal-Wappo Tribe's own materials and oral traditions represent the authoritative source.