The original inhabitants of the Lake Tahoe Basin the Washoe are a fascinating people. With a history in the Sierra Nevada stretching back 9000 years they are the oldest tribe in California. They have a fascinating history before and after the coming of the Americans. In American history the Washoe guided Kit Carson and Charles Fremont through the Sierra Nevada, later they were the first to bring food to the stranded Donner Party. The Washoe have tribal lore that speaks of the Si Te Cah tribe, long believed to be just an ignorant savage fantasy, recent discoveries have proven they are true. The Si Te Cah otherwise known as Sasquach or Bigfoot truly did exist and their mummified re-mains have been found in several locations. From a population numbering approximately 1,500 people whos homeland stretched from Mono Lake in the South to Honey Lake in the North the Washoe were reduced to only 500 people in 1866 with no land to call their own. They persevered and are still living in their homeland as friendly, hardworking, creative American citizens.

Against the backdrop of this western town, a number of dramatic historic events took place. While California was still Mexican territory, William Johnson purchased at auction the Mexican land grant formerly belonging to Pablo Gutierrez. Johnsons Rancho, as it came to be called, was the last stop on the Emigrant Trail to Sutters Fort in Sacramento. Seven members of the ill-fated Donner Party staggered into this ranch in 1847, seeking help for those left in the snowbound Sierra Nevada Mountains. Camp Far West was established here in 1849 as a military outpost to protect wagon trains heading into California, and when the state entered the Union in 1850, the area had become the logistic gateway to the Sierra foothill gold mines. Ultimately carved from Johnsons Rancho and incorporated in 1874, Wheatland became known for its agriculture and as a supply center to the mines, as well as being the site of the bloody 1913 Hop Riot, the first major migrant-worker labor confrontation in California.

Nowhere was the linguistic diversity of the New World more extreme than in California, where an extraordinary variety of village-dwelling peoples spoke seventy-eight mutually unintelligible languages. This comprehensive illustrated handbook, a major synthesis of more than 150 years of documentation and study, reviews what we now know about California's indigenous languages. Victor Golla outlines the basic structural features of more than two dozen language types and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages—from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the twentieth-century by Alfred Kroeber and his colleagues, to the extraordinary work of John P. Harrington and C. Hart Merriam. Golla also devotes chapters to the role of language in reconstructing prehistory, and to the intertwining of language and culture in pre-contact California societies, making this work, the first of its kind, an essential reference on California’s remarkable Indian languages.

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