After 150 years, Shasta mystery lingers

By PAUL FATTIG

YREKA, Calif. - Betty Hall would be the first to acknowledge there is precious little in the annals of Southern Oregon and Northern California history about the massacre.

But that doesn't change her and others' firm belief that many of their Shasta Indian ancestors were murdered 150 years ago today.

"I've heard about this all my life," said the 67-year-old Fort Jones (Calif.) resident, referring to stories handed down through the generations.

"They try to say that Auschwitz didn't happen, either," she added. "But we know it did."

She knows there are ample photographs, documents and eyewitness accounts attesting to the horrors of the Holocaust. And she knows there is little to provide empirical evidence of the alleged massacre of some 3,000 Shasta people after eating strychnine-laced beef and bread during a feast at a peace treaty signing ceremony at Fort Jones on Nov. 4, 1851.

Nonetheless, she believes there is rock-solid documentation: oral history.

"Our oral tradition is very strong," said Hall, enrollment clerk for the Shasta Nation, one of several Shasta factions.

"We are still very close to this," she said, noting that her great aunt knew people who witnessed the poisoning. "We know it happened."

What they believe occurred 150 years ago today is reminiscent of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, noted Roy Hall Jr., the son of Betty and her husband, Roy.

"We know what the New Yorkers and the Washingtonians and all of the United States feels," he wrote in an e-mail. "We have been there, too. After 10 generations, we are still struggling to live with the knowledge that our people and culture were destroyed (sacrificed) for the 'good' of the country."

But the point of raising the issue today is to get others to understand their perspectives and beliefs, he said.

Many historic scholars are not convinced there was such a massacre. But they do acknowledge that the treaty signed 150 years ago was never ratified by Congress, that the reservation agreed upon that day never officially materialized.

The Shastas, whose members live largely in Southern Oregon and Northern California, never have been recognized as an official tribe by Uncle Sam. That remains a goal of the tribe, Betty Hall said.

Jim Rock, longtime archaeologist for the Klamath National Forest and president of the Siskiyou County Historical Society, doesn't believe there was a massacre 150 years ago.

"Betty is a very nice person but this is an impossibility and a myth," he said. "There are no newspaper accounts of this. There is no historic evidence.

"Science and empirical evidence is going against faith here," he added. "When you have true believers, it's very hard to change their minds. But, as far as I'm concerned, Keith has proved this is impossible."

Yreka resident Keith Arnold, a retired California Highway Patrol officer and vice president of the historical society, did an exhaustive study on the subject.

"I've always been interested in this kind of stuff," he said, adding that he was intrigued when he first found out about the allegation in the mid-1990s. "But I had never heard of this before. It had to be written down someplace."

He pored over countless historic documents and camped out at libraries. While he found evidence of other atrocities by whites upon Indians, he found nothing about a massacre on Nov. 4, 1851.

"None of the letters or diaries or newspapers from that time period mention it," he said. "Even the Sacramento Union (newspaper), which was very friendly to the Indians, fails to mention it."

After four years of research, Arnold concluded it didn't happen. He says that, contrary to the story being told, the site of the treaty signing was not at Fort Jones but at the confluence of two streams in the area, that there were no soldiers based in Scott Valley at the time, that two journals kept by members of the party indicated the Indians present that day "represented" 3,000 people.

If the 3,000 Indians had been present, then the sight of those at the head of the food line succumbing to quick-acting strychnine poisoning would immediately alarm those waiting behind them, he concludes.

"It's my opinion that this whole thing started as a way to make the case more plausible for the tribe to be officially recognized by the federal government," he said.

But Ashland anthropologist Nan Hannon cautions that oral histories handed down through the generations often prove true.

Consider Alex Haley, the "Roots" author who relied on his family's oral history to flesh out his best-selling book on the seven generations of his family's slavery past, she said.

"I think that a devastating event did happen around the time of the signing of the treaty that has persisted strongly in the cultural memory of the Shasta," she said. "Just because CNN or the Associated Press wasn't there to document it in a way considered legitimate by some historians doesn't mean that it didn't happen."

People today should also keep in mind that diseases such as measles and small pox introduced by largely immune European settlers were decimating tribes during that era, she said. Mortality rates were often 90 percent of a village, she added.

"Two large villages - one at where Gold Hill (on the Rogue River) is now and the Irongate Dam (on the Klamath River) - were there for hundreds of years," she said. "Those people were wiped out. It would have been difficult for tribes to differentiate between poisoning and an epidemic."

She observed there are verifiable incidents of militia volunteers and settlers intentionally poisoning Indian people during the mid-1800s. However, poisoning Indian people was not something that was duly noted for posterity, she said.

"I would no more dismiss the Shasta oral tradition of a devastating event contemporaneous with the McKee (1851) treaty than I would the Jewish oral tradition of exile in Egypt," she said.

Finally, if the event didn't occur precisely as Shasta oral tradition would have it, the tale of a mass murder is an apt metaphor for the thousands of Shastas who died at the hands of Euro-Americans during that time, she concluded.

Meanwhile, Betty Hall and her supporters continue to point to their oral history as evidence of a massacre. But she intends to continue poring over dusty tomes of historic documents to prove to those who want to see it in black and white.

"I will continue looking," she said. "There has to be something out there."

Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at pfattig@mailtribune.com

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