400 INDIANS OF WESTERN NEVADA AND CALIFORNIA. 



agent for a score or more of Indians for this purpose; and a short leave 

 of absence is granted them, if not inconsistent with the interests of the 

 reserve. 



Eeturniug to San Francisco, I was again delayed a few days, and left 

 the city on the ISth of December for Hoopa Valley reservation, via 

 Sacramento and Reddiug, at that time the quickest route. I reached 

 the reservation, after some hardships, December 24th, and remained only 

 two days. This reservation contains about 700 Indians, and is in charge 

 of Rev. J. L. Broaddus, of the Methodist Church. This is the number 

 of Indians belonging here, but more than one-third of them were in the 

 mountains, frightened away by the rumor that they were to be removed 

 forcibly from this reservation, and transferred to Round Valley. 



The majority of the Indians here are Hoopas; most of the remain- 

 der are called Redwoods, and are closely related to the former in lan- 

 guage and customs. Both these and the two tribes on the Klamath 

 River, as well as some others in Northern California, seem to belong to 

 the Athabascan races rather than to the California Indians. They are 

 a much finer people than the latter, lighter in color, faces more oval, 

 cheek-bones not so broad and prominent. A very interesting discovery 

 is that the Hoopa language is very closely related to the Navajo of New 

 Mexico. There is very little doubt that the vigorous and warlike tribes of 

 Arizona, Nevada and Oregon migrated southward from some unknown 

 source in the North, and on the great Shasta plains on the north of 

 Mount Shasta, encountered, centuries ago, tribes belonging properly to 

 those known to-day as the California Indians, whom they eventually 

 drove out to the south of the great mountain or else exterminated. 

 This is not the place for giving in detail the facts which sustain this 

 conjecture. At the time when the gold-hunters arrived in the country, 

 this southward migration was still going slowly forward, the more vigor- 

 ous northern race beating back the southern ; and the Wylackies, the van- 

 guard of the migration, had nearly reached the headwaters of Eel River, 

 having, within the American period, displaced a tribe on Mad River, and 

 driven them as homeless vagabonds over into the Sacramento Valley. 

 Consequently we find among the Hoopas and the Klamath River tribes 

 evidences of a northern origin. They excavate iuside of their house a 

 cellar or pit four or five feet deep which points to a long occupation 

 by their progenitors of a much more rigorous climate than the Califor- 

 nian. The sweat-house (used also as a club-house and assembly-hall) is 

 wholly underground. They are better hunters and bolder watermen 

 than their southern neighbors; their women are more virtuous; their 

 men less generous and hospitable, and more avaricious. 



The arable land on this reservation (about 700 acres) is barely suf- 

 ficient in extent for the maintenance of its present inhabitants, and as 

 it has to be cropped every year without intermission, to do this, the soil 

 is steadily deteriorating, and a few years more must witness its total 

 exhaustion, when the Indians will have to be dispersed. Ill mauage- 



