on the cover / By Hank Sims

Origin Stories

In Two Peoples, One Place, Humboldt County gets its first modern history

(Oct. 11, 2007) The Humboldt County Historical Society will launch Two Peoples, One Place with a reception at the Humboldt County Library on Saturday, Oct. 13, at 1 p.m. Authors Ray Raphael and Freeman House will be on hand to speak and to sign copies of the book, which will be available for sale ($29.95). The Humboldt County Library’s Main Branch is located at 1313 3rd St., Eureka.

One of the first things you learn in Two Peoples, One Place is that for nearly 200 years, from 1600 up until 1776, Europeans had known about the area that was to become Humboldt County. By and large, they simply chose to avoid it. To some, the land represented disease and death.

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“Every year when those who sail from the Philippines to New Spain come in sight of the neighborhood of Cabo Mendocino or in that latitude, a very severe sickness seizes them,” wrote a seagoing priest at the turn of the 17th century. “It is this which causes the death of those who die on that route, there being years when hardly a person is left on the ships to manage the sails …”

Such is the stuff of history in the Americas — the Spaniards avoided the North Coast because they hadn’t yet figured out that the lack of fresh vegetables after a long voyage was the cause of scurvy, not the dark and haunted land off their bow. And that piece of luck, with a bit of help from a rocky shore and poor natural harborage, was why Native American peoples here were able to live their lives undiminished just six generations ago.

With Two Peoples, One Place , local historian Ray Raphael, with some help from his colleague Freeman House, has given the first comprehensive account of the first of those generations, as well as what came before. And he does so in the deeply human and all-inclusive style he first pioneered in his An Everyday History of Somewhere , an early attempt at writing Humboldt County. In his first book, the story was told partly through the eyes of raccoons and elk and such. Here, the challenge is to tell Humboldt County history through two broad and widely divergent points of view: that of the people who had inhabited the area for millenia, and that of the Europeans who came here to seek riches.

Early in the book, Raphael and House try to give an account of the prehistorical geology and settlement of the land that would come to be known as Humboldt County. They do so from two points of view: that of modern science, and that of indigenous religion or folklore. Plate tectonics and the Yurok woge, who created humans by throwing sand this way and that, are given equal billing. You get the authors’ point — if we want to understand the story, it’s important to understand the native peoples’ world view — but still it feels like a bit of politically correct gimmickry. At first.

As the story gets going, though, the European conquistadors and settlers come to seem far more alien to the modern reader than the Yurok, Hupa, Wiyot, Karuk, or the many other people indigenous to this coast, many of them mostly forgotten now. Raphael relays the coming of a Spanish expedition in 1775, as recorded in the diaries of one of its members. After anchoring at Trinidad Head and becoming acquainted with the residents of the Yurok village of Tsurai, Capt. Bruno de Hezeta of the Sonora presents the natives with a speech, of which they presumably understand not a word:

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