WHO'S ON FIRST?

    Who did what first matters a great deal to historians. The California Story is filled with narratives that credit explorers, pioneers, and adventurers – preferably or allegedly white – with putting their mark on the landscape: such as the agents of the Spanish crown who entered Trinidad Bay in 1775, or Jedediah Smith and the Mountain Men who trekked through northern California in 1828.

    Who gets credit for first writing into History a place called Big Lagoon – my home away from home, located by the Pacific Ocean in northwest California, a few miles above Trinidad – has also been a matter of some interest, though there is a tendency to forget that people lived for at least hundreds of years at Big Lagoon – from “time immemorial,” as the Yurok tribe put it – without committing it to literary memory.

    Since the late nineteenth century, the conventional wisdom had been that a Bostonian trader, Jonathan Winship – captaining an American ship on a Russian mission with Kodiak hunters to kill otters --for the China market in furs – was the first to write about Big Lagoon in 1806. According to Hubert Howe Bancroft, the pioneer of California history, the O’Cain “anchored just north of Trinidad Bay, where Washington Sound, now Big Lagoon, was discovered, named, and partially explored.”

    I checked out Bancroft’s footnotes – not only because of my inherent skepticism of all secondary sources, but mainly because I wanted to find the original source and a direct quote for an interesting story: the man who first mapped Humboldt Bay also checked out Big Lagoon and named it after the Great White Father.

    The source for Bancroft’s unambiguous assertion turns out to be an obscure, handwritten, mid-19th century manuscript, with the quirky title of Solid Men of Boston in the Northwest, attributed to a seafarer named William Phelps. Luckily for me, the Bancroft Library in Berkeley has the original. After reading it, however, Mr. Phelps’ provenance seems anything but solid.

    I followed a thread to see if anybody has questioned Phelps as a source and came across a published essay by Warren Heckrotte, who is merciless with poor Phelps’ geography, but accepts his view that Winship’s crew came into Big Lagoon: “they anchored just north of Trinidad Bay … reported that otter were abundant and the existence of a sound….”

    But it turns out that neither Phelps nor Heckrotte had seen a copy of the O’Cain’s original log, so there was still no primary source to illustrate my story. End of investigation, so it seemed.

    But, wait, there’s more! Right at the end of Heckrotte’s essay is a postscript. He informs us that “after the paper was submitted for publication.” he’s been in touch with somebody who does have a copy of the original O’Cain log. The man with the ship’s log is a Mr. Giesecke, who subsequently wrote a scholarly and popular account of his research that gives him the last word, for now.

    It turns out, contrary to Bancroft and Phelps’ claim, that the O’Cain anchored south, not north of Trinidad, and that Big Lagoon was never mentioned in the log. The “spacious sound” entered by Winship’s crew was Humboldt Bay, where they found otters “in the greatest plenty.” Winship had both “discovered” and profited from Humboldt Bay. “Big Lagoon was probably not seen” by Winship, concedes Heckrotte.

    I found my quote, but not the one I was expecting: “Our Indian Hunters this day,” Winship wrote in his journal on June 10, 1806, “I believe experience Perfect happiness.”

    Winship was referring to what he assumed was the state of mind of his forced Kodiak laborers from Alaska, not the free Wiyot Hunters on shore who a generation later would experience their own Perfect sorrow.

    Giesecke has persuaded me that the Bostonian Jonathan Winship was not the first person to document Big Lagoon in 1806. So, if not him then, who when? That’s another story.

    Meanwhile, let’s remember that while the Yuroks of Big Lagoon did not publish their memoirs, they were not mute. For many years, they called the big lagoon O-ke’to or, in English, Where It Is Calm. And they explored every cranny of the area around the lagoon, naming some thirty identifiable places. When the first white settlers and gold miners, and later, the first generation of Berkeley anthropologists showed up, the Yuroks passed on this information. The calm was quickly broken.

Comments

[Juan José]

Tony,

Read and enjoyed.

"Who's on first', an Eurocentric question of "discovery" and possession. Instead, your piece hints at the true relevant questions: what is the nature of this place and who is responsible for taking care of it? I am siding with the Yuroks' vision: O-ke’to. That is the nature of the place.

More importantly, as the inhabitants that you all are now, post-modern if you like, but dwellers after all, your quest for information needs to be recorded for good, particularly if it does the magic to debunking foundational myths, bring back the non-written traditions, the reflection as to the relevance of the name of the place...

Big Lagoon is such a powerful place.

[Lydia Chavez]

Perfect Happiness? In life or provided him? I wonder how they would have described him. Best, lc