Fields Landing

History

Before the arrival of European settlers, the area now known as Humboldt County was occupied by a number of indigenous peoples, including the Wiyot, Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Chilula, Whilkut, and the southern Athabascans. Fields Landing is located within the original territory of the Wiyot tribe. The first recorded entrance into Humboldt Bay occurred in 1806 by members of a Russian-American company from Sitka. The Josiah Gregg party arrived by land in December 1849, and by 1850 the first ships came to the bay bringing men seeking gold. As the Gold Rush subsided, the economy shifted to the use of the surrounding natural resources, mainly timber, salmon, and agricultural land. The area was a prime exporter of agricultural products from 1857 to 1900. Fort Humboldt, built in 1853 to protect settlers from retaliatory attacks and keep peace between the settlers and the natives, was a failure, as the garrison did neither successfully. Indians were enslaved under the terms of the 1850 "Act for the Government and Protection of Indians" that provided legal basis for the continued Californio practice of capturing and using Native people as forced workers, particularly that of young women and children, which was carried on as a legal business enterprise. Intrusion of professional hunters and settlers and their herds of cattle and pigs into the hunting and gathering areas of the natives in the interior led the reduction of their food supplies and native resistance to this began the Bald Hills War. Development around the bay, disease, and the February 26, 1860 Indian Island Massacre, and consequences of the Bald Hills War, led to decimation of the peaceful Wiyot reducing their numbers from 3,000 to less than 100 survivors by 1865. In the 1880s, docks were built in Fields Landing for…

Race & ethnicity