THE VILLAGE SITES IN TOLOWA AND NEIGHBORING AREAS IN NORTHWESTERN CALIFORNIA

N THE year 1909 Dr. Kroeber dispatched me to Northern California to look into the native life existing among the Yurok. The fruits of my brief labors there have appeared in part in print, though one paper, “Yurok Culture,” is still in storage in the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York. It contains the only detailed account of the northwestern California house. In the intervals of my business with the Yurok I used to look across the bay to distant Point St. George, dim, romantic and far away, and my soul took fire to wander thither and work with the Tolowa. Mr. Heye, to whose institution I committed my fortunes in 1921, actually sent me to the Tolowa territory to collect specimens for him, and accordingly during a month of that summer I lived in Crescent City, carrying out, at my own expense, some investigations on local ethnology. So little has been said about the Tolowa, that an essay on their habitat may interest the readers of the Anthropologist. They are an unusually interesting group, to me, very different in some respects from the Yurok. Everyone, I think, is familiar with the fact that a somewhat peculiar way of living characterizes the northwest California tribes. Native life changes quite rapidly as one goes northward into Oregon. The Yurok,. the Hupa, and the Karok have a somewhat highly specialized “house complex.” For example, among the Yurok every house has a name. The Tolowa to the north of them have apparently no names for houses. In fact, when we leave the Yurok we have to pass almost to Alaska before we again find the custom of naming dwellings. There is, in fact, quite a sharp line both in this and in other matters between the Yurok and the Tolowa, although they live together on one stretch of coast. The Tolowa maintained close contact by trail over the mountains with the Karok, more so than they did with the Yurok who lived within view of them on the beach. “Money” made of dentaliurn