SHASTA

The Shasta proper, along with the Konimihu, New River Indians, and Okwanuchu, made up the Shastan (or Sastean) language family of the Hokan language phylum. The Shastan family, according to some scholars, includes the neighboring ACHOMAWI (PIT RIVER INDI ANS) and Atsugewi (also known as Pit River Indians), whose Palaihnihan dialects have some similarities. The Shasta homeland—mostly mountain and plateau—was located on the Klamath, Scott, and Shasta Rivers in present-day northern California and on the Stewart River and Little Butte Creek in present-day southern Oregon. To their south were the New River Indians along the New and Salmon Rivers, the Konimihu even farther south along the Salmon River, and the Okwanuchu to the west of the Konimihu along the McCloud and upper Sacramento Rivers, near the 14,162-foot-high Mount Shasta. The name Shasta, pronounced SHAH-stuh, is thought to be derived from a village name or a chief’s name.

The Shasta are generally grouped among CALIFORNIA INDIANS—with permanent villages providing the primary sociopolitical structure, and acorns and other wild plant foods, deer, and rabbits their food staples—although they shared cultural traits with NORTHWEST COAST INDIANS, such as their wood plank houses and dugout canoes, and PLATEAU INDIANS, such as seasonal fishing of rivers in their homeland. Families had rights to certain hunting and fishing places, inherited patrilineally. The Shasta traded regularly with the KAROK living to their south on the Klamath River, providing obsidian for arrow points, deerskins, and sugar-pine nuts in exchange for dentalia (tooth shell money crafted by Northwest Coast Indians), baskets, salt, seaweed, and other goods.

The Shasta had contacts with traders and trappers in the early 1820s. With mining and settlement, especially during the California gold rush starting in 1849, Shasta were victims of random violence. In 1851, at a treaty signing at Fort Jones in northern California, a number of Shasta were poisoned by settlers. Some Shasta participated with the TAKELMA and Tututini in the Rogue River War of 1855-56, after which they were forced to settle on the Grande Ronde and Siletz Reservations far from their homeland in northwestern Oregon. Others merged with the Achomawi. To cope with reservation life, like other tribes of the region, the Shasta became involved in a number of religious revitalization movements, such as the Ghost Dance of 1870, founded among the PAIUTE.

In the 1930s, a road-building crew working near Gottville in northern California uncovered a 4,000-pound sacred boulder. Known as the Rain Rock, it was buried by Shasta medicine men some two centuries ago to stop rain and flooding. It was eventually moved to a museum in the town of Fort Jones. A group known as the Shasta Tribe, maintaining Shasta political identity, is centered in Yreka, California. They are among those people who sometimes request that museum staffers cover the rock on special occasions to prevent rain.