Crooks Canyon: "Place of Many Soldiers"

" Then, during that time, my grandmother knew that place pretty well . . . . and she hollered to the others saying, 'follow me, I'll take you to a safe place - to the cave.' So the rest hollered back to the others to come with them. They passed the word around all along. And so they all went along with those who were going into the hiding place, which was close by the tules. "

The immediate panic of the attack at Infernal Caverns is captured in the remembrances of Ike Leaf, and specifically in the directive to . . . find a hiding place. But the Achumawi had been under threat of attack long before General Crook rode into South Fork Pit River Valley. Early accounts suggest that horse-mounted Klamath, Modoc, and Paiute people made regular forays into Pit River territory for the purposes of raiding and acquiring slaves. Without horses, the Achumawi had but one choice: to position their villages in mostly inaccessible and protected locations.

Archaeologists have only recently begun to understand how social conflict and warfare - including even the perceived threat of violence - influenced where people lived, the size of their settlements, and the ways in which they gathered their food. No longer is it just a matter of documenting the more obvious indicators of violence, such as burned villages or arrow tips embedded in human bone.

Settlement Size

Elsewhere along the project corridor, the latest-dating Native houses tend to be solitary features where one family may have camped off-and-on for several seasons. In contrast, house structures in Crooks Canyon occur in clusters and even in large, multi-feature complexes. Some archaeologists now feel that larger aggregations of people deterred raiding and direct attacks. Lacking the defensive fortifications and architecture we see in such places as the American Southwest, the concentration of people in a few big, rather inaccessible, settlements may have been a more realistic way for these small bands of hunter-gatherers to defend themselves.

Weaponry

At the Battle of Infernal Caverns, Lieutenant Parnell, General Crook's Executive Officer, reported being "met by a perfect hail-storm of arrows" as the soldiers climbed toward the caverns. While the Native defenders had a few firearms, most of them also used the traditional bow and stone-tipped arrow. While arrows were also used for hunting, the large caches of arrow points found in some of the Crooks Canyon houses suggest another use, one that required vast numbers of weapons - like the "hail-storm" mentioned by Parnell.

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