CHAPTER: VIL: 
THE UU-PA. 
Hoopa Valley, on the Lower Trinity, is the home of this tribe. Next 
after the Karok they are the finest race in all that region, and they even 
excel them in their statecraft, and in the singular influence, or perhaps 
brute force, which they exercise over the vicinal tribes. They are the 
Romans of Northern California im their valor and their wide-reaching 
dominions; they are the French in the extended diffusion of their language. 
They hold in a state of semi-vassalage (I speak always of aboriginal 
acts) most of the tribes around them, except their two powerful neighbors 
on the Klamath, exacting from them annual tribute in the shape of peltry 
and shell-money, and they compel all their tributaries to this day, to the 
number of about a half-dozen, to speak Hupaé in communication with them. 
Although they originally occupied only about twenty miles of the Lower 
Trinity, their authority was eventually acknowledged about sixty miles 
along that stream, on South Fork, on New River, on Redwood Creek, on a 
good portion of Mad River and Van Dusen’s Fork; and there is good reason 
to believe that their name was scarcely less dreaded on Lower Kel River, 
if they did not actually saddle the tribes of that valley with their idiom. 
Although most of their petty tributaries had their own tongues origin- 
ally, so vigorously were they put to school in the language of their masters 
that most of their vocabularies were sapped and reduced to bald categories 
of names. They had the dry bones of substantives, but the flesh and blood 
of verbs were sucked out of them by the Hupaé. A Mr. White, a pioneer 
well acquainted with the Chi-mal’-a-kwe, who once had an entirely distinet 
tongue, told me that before they became extinct they scarcely employed a 
verb which was not Hupa. In the Hupa reservation, in the summer of 
1871, the Hupa constituted not much more than a half of the occupants, 
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