Yuba River - History

History

The Yuba River valley was originally situated in one of California's largest Native American population centers. Historians divide the natives living in the Yuba area into several groups – the Konkow, Maidu, Nisenan and Miwok. Despite the connotations of these names, they are only used for reference purposes. The truth about pre-19th century Yuba River peoples was that they were divided into hundreds of small villages, with distinct names but similar customs. Like other Sierra Nevada people, their staple food were acorns, but they also hunted and gathered for other foods from the environment in which they lived.

The California Gold Rush brought some of the first American settlers into the area, followed by many Mexican, African and Chinese emigrants. Within a few years diseases which the Native Americans had no immunity over, brought by the incoming people, wiped out most of the native population. The Yuba River and its forks were one of the more popular destinations for the gold miners, who poured to the region in great numbers. Although first gold was extracted by simple methods such as panning and sluicing, mining operations quickly turned into large-scale industrial hydraulic mining. About 685,000,000 cubic feet (19,400,000 m3) of debris was carried down the Yuba alone. Hundreds of acres of land were covered, the riverbed was raised by tens of feet in places and flooding events became more severe for the river was no longer in its old channel. After farmers whose fields had been buried under the onslaught sued the gold mining companies, the practice ended. The debris left by the destruction of hydraulic mining still remains as the Yuba Goldfields.