Driving up highway 101 south of Orick, Calif., I kept an eye out
for a scenic rest area that, according to a memoir by his wife, Theodora,
had once been the site of a cabin owned by Alfred Kroeber.
It's through Kroeber that the Yurok people made their way in the
world of learning, their lives distilled into a monograph and footnote. In
1900, Kroeber, the father of academic anthropology in California, began a
series of encounters with the Yurok that lasted many years. Many of these Q
& A sessions were at this cabin, formerly located in the scenic rest area
where I was now peering under the hood of my wagon, trying to figure out why
my brakes had stopped working.
Here, at the place known as Sigornoy, Kroeber would interrogate
Indians, chiefly Robert Spott, a Yurok theocrat. Their conversations
eventually had academic consequence in such works as "Yurok Narratives" and
figured in Kroeber's dispassionate reflections on the supposed "character"
of the Yurok, scattered through various works. The Yurok were, he wrote on
one occasion, an "inwardly fearful people . the men often seemed to me
