North Fork Smith

The North Fork of the Smith River drains the Klamath Mountains of northwestern California — country that forms the heart of Taa-laa-waa-dvn, the ancestral territory of the Tolowa Dee-ni'. The Tolowa Dee-ni' are an Athabaskan-speaking people whose homeland extends roughly one hundred miles of coastline and millions of acres from Wilson Creek in the south to Sixes River in the north, bounded eastward by the Applegate watershed and westward by the Pacific horizon [1]. The territory was organized into eleven traditional districts, each governed by a headman responsible for the well-being of his district. Tolowa villages were established throughout the Smith River drainage; the Yvtlh-'i~ (governance district) of Yan'-daa-k'vt specifically encompassed the territory "east beyond Gasquet to include the drainage of the upper-middle and north forks of the Smith River" [1]. Tolowa people maintained large redwood plank settlements, sea-going dugout canoes carved from old-growth redwood, and managed the landscape through burning — including control-burning ridgelines east of the coast to maintain elk and deer meadows [1].

The arrival of miners and settlers beginning in 1849 initiated a period of violence, dispossession, and population collapse. California's Indian Act of 1850 authorized the indenture of Native people into forced labor; state and local militias mounted massacres against Tolowa villages throughout the 1850s, including the destruction of the major settlements at Xaa-wan'-k'wvt and Yan'-daa-k'vt on the Smith River [1]. By 1855, the California Indian population had declined from approximately 150,000 to 50,000; the Tolowa Dee-ni' population fell by eighty percent to roughly 2,000 survivors in California and Oregon [1]. Gold and chromite mining in Del Norte County, which began before the Civil War with chromite deposits in the Klamath Mountains back-country and intensified with gold and copper extraction through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, brought additional waves of non-Native settlement into the upper Smith River drainages [4].

The 1855 Xaa-wan'-k'wvt Treaty was followed in 1862 by the establishment of the 17,000-acre Smith River Reservation. That reservation was annulled in 1868 and the Tolowa were forcibly relocated to Hoopa Valley; many returned to Del Norte County and continued living in their ancestral territories. A congressional act in 1906 funded purchase of lands for California Indians, and in 1908 the Smith River Rancheria was established on 160 acres near the mouth of the Smith River [1]. Federal tribal recognition was terminated under the California Rancheria Act of 1958 and restored in 1983 through the Tillie Hartwick court case [1].

Federal forest administration in the North Fork Smith River area began with lands transferred to the Klamath National Forest (established May 6, 1905), then shifted to the Siskiyou National Forest, headquartered in Grants Pass, Oregon, under whose Gasquet Ranger District the North Fork Smith country was administered for decades [4]. Timber exploitation was central to the regional economy, and by the 1930s the Forest Service had begun active planning to bring the north coast timberlands under a dedicated California administrative unit. On June 3, 1947, President Harry Truman signed Presidential Proclamation 2733 creating the Six Rivers National Forest from pieces of the Siskiyou, Klamath, and Trinity National Forests — the youngest national forest in California. The Gasquet Ranger District, comprising 308,138 acres transferred from the Siskiyou, became the administrative home for the North Fork Smith watershed [4]. The forest took its name from the six major rivers within its boundaries: the Eel, Van Duzen, Mad, Trinity, Klamath, and Smith.