Oral History
A few years ago, I went with my mom and Veltha Coleman to videotape an interview with Irene Stapp out in Hettenshaw Valley (that’s in the southwestern part of Trinity County). One of Irene’s great-grandfathers opened the first store in Blocksburg, while another, as legend has it, battled a grizzly bear with a knife by shoving his arm down the animal’s throat and stabbing it from the inside. Grizzly Mountain is named for the incident, although Irene says that isn’t where it happened. Anyway, I just got around to putting up this Quicktime clip, where Irene talks about her Wailaki heritage and Lucy Young, who lived through the massacres of the 1860s and provided anthropologists with much of what is known about Wailaki life before the arrival of white settlers in that region.
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