The Hover Collection of Karuk Baskets

From the Preface:

The middle course of the Klamath River in northwestern California has been the home of Karuk-speaking people for many centuries. Until 1850, the Karuk had very little contact with white culture. During the mid-nineteenth century, their territory was suddenly invaded by gold miners who made little effort to establish cordial relations with the indigenous peoples. Most of the Karuk villages as far north as the Salmon River were burned, and many Indians simply left the area, preferring to live in the surrounding hills or on the reservation lands in Scott Valley, originally the home of the Shasta Indians. By the end of the nineteenth century, mining operations had more or less ceased, leaving behind a disrupted social system and way of life.

Soon after white contact, the Indians of northwestern California came under the scrutiny of explorers and anthropologists. Most ethnographic descriptions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on the more populous Yurok Indians who lived in permanent villages along the Pacific coast between Trinidad and Crescent City as well as along the lower forty-five miles of the Klamath River. The material culture and belief system of the Yurok appeared nearly identical to that of the Karuk and Hupa cultures, and little individual attention was concentrated on these neighboring groups.

The information in this catalogue was drawn from a number of studies produced since the late nineteenth century. Kroeber's Handbook of California Indians (1976) and William Bright's summation in the Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 8 (1978:180-189) provide general cultural data. Other useful sources on material culture are Driver's (1939) study of the distribution of `culture elements' in Northwest California, Isabel Kelly's The Carver's Art of the Indians of Northwestern California (1930), and two monographs on the neighboring Hupas, Pliny Goddard's (1903) study and Otis T. Mason's (1889) report for the Smithsonian Institution, The Ray Collection from Hupa Reservation. Karuk culture during the early twentieth century is brought to life in In the Land of the Grasshopper Song, an account by two schoolteachers who lived in the Happy Camp-Somes Bar area at that time.