Native Americans An archaeological site on the Trinity River at Cox Bar, with spear points dating from 3000–6000 BC, has some of the oldest evidence of human habitation in Northern California. This site is believed to be part of the early
Borax Lake Pattern culture.
Natinixwe is an
endonym meaning "people of the place where the trails return". Their name for the Trinity River was
hun' simply meaning "river". The name "Hupa" or "Hoopa" appears to originate from the
Yurok word for the Trinity River country,
hopah, which was first recorded by ethnologist George Gibbs in 1852. The Hupa lived in the fertile Hoopa Valley along the Trinity River and the Hyampom Valley on the South Fork – some of the few flat lands in a region otherwise dominated by rugged mountains. A Yurok village called Weitspus stood at the site of present-day Weitchpec at the confluence of the Trinity and Klamath Rivers. The Hupa traded with the coastal
Yurok and
Karok by using canoes to navigate the Trinity and Klamath Rivers. The trade arrangements with neighboring tribes were complex and involved the use of
dentalium shells as currency. The
Tsnungwe people, also known as the South Fork Hupa, lived pre-contact in the South Fork of the Trinity River area and Burnt Ranch/New River area. After the Gold Rush of 1849, many years of battles occurred between the Trinity River Indians and the miners/soldiers. Most surviving Tsnungwe were taken to the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. By 1900, a Tsnungwe community had re-established around the ancient principal village of at the mouth of the South Fork of the Trinity River. The tribe is still surviving there today and is recognized by both Humboldt County and Trinity County. The federal government considers the Tsnungwe to be a "previously recognized" tribe. The Tsnungwe Council is working towards having their federally recognized tribal status restored. The
Chimariko people lived along the Trinity River canyon near its confluence with the New River. They were enemies of the Hupa, but had friendly relations with the Wintu. The now extinct Chimariko language was of
Northern Hokan origin, in contrast to the
Athabaskan dialect of the Hupa and the
Wintuan languages spoken by the Wintu. Carl Waldman describes in
Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes (2014) that "the Chimariko occupied one of the smallest homelands, if not the smallest, of any distinct linguistic group in North America." Native peoples also made meal of berries, seeds and acorns, and hunted game animals such as deer and elk that were drawn to the Trinity River. Due to their proximity to trade routes in and around the Central Valley, the Wintu came into frequent contact with European explorers, traders and settlers. These initial meetings were peaceful, but the Wintu population – along with many other Central Valley tribes – were decimated by a malaria epidemic in the 1830s, accidentally introduced by
Hudson's Bay Company fur trappers. In the following decades the remaining Wintu became embroiled in conflict as prospectors and settlers occupied their traditional lands. Some of these conflicts ended in deadly massacres. In 1846, one of the bloodiest single encounters occurred when soldiers led by
John C. Frémont killed 175 Wintu,
Maidu and
Yana. In 1850 about 100 Trinity Wintu perished after being given poisoned food by white settlers. By 1910 the Wintu population had been reduced to about 1,000, from an estimated 12,000 prior to European contact.
Explorers Jedediah Smith's expedition to northwestern California in 1828 were some of the first Europeans to set foot in the Trinity River country. After departing from the Sacramento Valley Smith passed over the Klamath Mountains and arrived at what is probably now
Hayfork Creek on April 18. They followed the creek to the South Fork and from there to the Trinity River and the Klamath River. After following the Klamath to the Pacific, they traveled north towards Oregon, thus becoming the first white men to travel from inland California to coastal Oregon.
Gold Rush In July 1848, not too long after James Marshall's famous gold find at
Sutter's Mill – which started the
California Gold Rush – Major Reading discovered gold on the Trinity River. The find attracted thousands of miners to the area and created boomtowns such as Douglas City, Francis, Hoboken, Lake City, Lewiston, Junction City and Quimby. Weaverville, located at the end of the trail Reading had established from the
Sacramento Valley to the Trinity, prospered as the main trade center through which gold was exchanged for imported supplies and services. The initial discoveries were
placer deposits, carried by the river to settle in gravel bars. The Trinity River gold rush is also noted for the large number of Chinese miners attracted to the area, as many as 2,500 by 1854. Many of the Chinese were from the
Pearl River Delta (
Guangdong region). Mining activity was initially concentrated in the eastern (upper) valleys of the Trinity River around Weaverville, as the hostile Native Americans and treacherous gorges around Burnt Ranch precluded the transport of rations and equipment to places further west. For about two decades the area was extremely productive, second only to the
Sierra Nevada (the
Mother Lode) itself. The rate at which gold was extracted, and new methods pioneered to access the harder to reach deposits, was feverish. The area was soon profiting $1.5 million a year, with hundreds of claims along the Trinity River equipped with flumes, waterwheels and other apparatus to separate fine gold from river gravel. spurring prospectors to push west, establishing a pack trail to the area around the New River and the South Fork of the Trinity. In fact, the New River was named thusly for being a "new" river to explore for gold.
Post-Gold Rush settlement In 1884 the California legislature banned hydraulic mining as the flow of tailings from hydraulic mines in the Sierra Nevada was silting up the
Sacramento River, making it unnavigable. However, the Trinity hydraulic mines escaped this ban, as the remote and swift flowing Trinity River was not considered a navigable watercourse. Nevertheless, the largest deposits had been played out by the 1920s, and the mining settlements were abandoned or fell into decline. This brought on the last stage of commercial gold mining along the Trinity, as floating
dredges (called "doodle-bugs" by the miners) were used to turn over the river bottoms that had been inaccessible by the placer miners a half-century earlier. One Mr. Jorstad who had been mining in the Trinity River country since the 1930s, continued to live in a small cabin at Pfeiffer Flat on the North Fork until his death in 1989. Although settlers had been farming and ranching in the Trinity River valley since the beginning of the gold rush, the number greatly increased after the gold rush when miners decided to settle down and homestead in the area. One of the major ranching areas was the wide valley known as Trinity Meadows, which is now flooded by Trinity Lake. In 1988 several environmentalist groups including the
Wilderness Society,
Audubon Society and
Sierra Club filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service, preventing the cutting of 18.4 million board feet of
salvage lumber in an area with particularly high erosion risk. This generated pushback in the local timber industry, whose decline has partly been attributed to more stringent environmental regulations.
Central Valley Project As early as the 1930s, the state of California had floated the idea of diverting water from the rainy north to support irrigation in the fertile, but dry
San Joaquin Valley. A diversion of the Trinity River was contemplated in order to boost the available water supply for the Central Valley watershed, but planners eventually determined that the extra water was not yet needed. The
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation took over the
Central Valley Project from the bankrupt state of California during the
Great Depression in 1933 as a federal public works project, and in 1942 it began investigations to dam the Trinity River. However, the Trinity River plan was dropped in 1945, after the completion of nearby
Shasta Dam. As the 1950s began, demand on the
Colorado River – which forms the border of California and
Arizona and provided most of Southern California's water – was moving toward unsustainable levels. The Bureau of Reclamation restarted its surveys of the Trinity River basin as part of a larger proposal to move water from northern to southern parts of the state, and compensate for the shortages on the Colorado. The United Western Investigation, in 1951, proposed the damming of nearly every river in the North Coast region of California, chiefly the Trinity, Klamath and Eel. The
Ah Pah Dam would have flooded the canyons of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers to form the largest reservoir in California. These grandiose plans culminated in the Pacific Southwest Water Plan of 1964, which sought to comprehensively link the water systems of California and the rest of the Colorado River Basin. One of the key projects was an aqueduct to transport North Coast water to the
Imperial Valley, reducing its reliance on water from the Colorado River. However, with the exception of the upper Trinity River project, none of these dam and diversion projects were ever realized. The Trinity River project was first drafted on October 1, 1951, and authorized by Congress on January 2, 1953, as the Trinity River Division of the Central Valley Project. In 1955 Congress authorized an annual diversion of of water (56 percent of total flow) from the Trinity River, stating that the water could be exported "without detrimental effect on the fishery resources" of the Trinity. In 1957 the Bureau of Reclamation revised the export volume to . Construction of
Trinity Dam started in 1956 and was completed on December 23, 1963. The reservoir was originally named "Clair Engle Lake" to commemorate United States Senator
Clair Engle, who played a crucial role in shepherding the Trinity bill through Congress; however, the name proved unpopular with locals, and it was changed to Trinity Lake in 1997. Trinity Dam, an earth embankment structure high, was the tallest embankment dam in the world at its completion in 1962 (it was surpassed by
Oroville Dam, also in California, in 1968). Other residents welcomed the dam project for the economic benefits it would bring via hydropower and tourism, as the gold mining industry that had long supported the region was greatly diminished by the 1950s. By 1986 tourism in the Trinity River country accounted for 50–75 percent of business in the summer and 25 percent in the winter. ==Ecology==