Wintu

The Wintu (also Northern Wintun) are Native Americans who live in what is now Northern California. They are part of a loose association of peoples known collectively as the Wintun (or Wintuan). Others are the Nomlaki and the Patwin. The Wintu language is part of the Penutian language family. Historically, the Wintu lived primarily on the western side of the northern part of the Sacramento Valley, from the Sacramento River to the Coast Range. The range of the Wintu also included the southern portions of the Upper Sacramento River (south of the Salt Creek drainage), the southern portion of the McCloud River, and the upper Trinity River. They also lived in the vicinity of present-day Chico, on the west side of the river extending to the Coast Ranges. Today most Wintus live on reservations and rancherias in Colusa, Glenn, Yolo, Mendocino, and Shasta counties. California Genocide The first recorded encounter between Wintu and Euro-Americans dates from the 1826 expedition of Jedediah Smith, followed by an 1827 expedition led by Peter Skene Ogden. Between 1830 and 1833, many Wintu died from a malaria epidemic that killed an estimated 75% of the indigenous population in the upper and central Sacramento Valley. In 1846, John C. Frémont and Kit Carson accompanied by local white settlers killed 175 Wintu and Yana by force of arms Settlers tried to take over Wintu land and relocate them west of Clear Creek. At a "friendship feast" in 1850, settlers served poisoned food to local natives, from which 100 Nomsuu and 45 Wenemem Wintu died. More deaths of Wintu and destruction of their land followed in 1851 and 1852, in incidents such as the Bridge Gulch Massacre. The Wintu language is one of the Wintuan languages. The religious stories and legends of the Trinity River Wintu were told by Grant Towendolly to Marcelle Masson, who published them in A Bag of Bones (1966). Scholars have disagreed about the historic population of the tribes before European-American contact. Alfred L. Kroeber estimated the combined 1770 population of the Wintu, Nomlaki, and Patwin as 12,000.