Perspective: Siskiyou County Museum, Yreka, CA.

Siskiyou County Museum, Yreka, California.  Photo by Thomas Eddy

A gold mining town from its inception, Yreka still reflects how we envision the western frontier...providing visitors ignore the strip malls and big boxes south of downtown. Conifers protect themselves by growing only on the northern slopes of the surrounding hillsides while sage chaparral, juniper trees, and field stones scatter throughout the seemingly barren landscape.  Caught in the rain shadow of Mt. Shasta, its aridness is expressed in silvered wood of old barns and the rusted decay of farm equipment forever at rest.

Yreka is the Siskiyou County seat where I found the Siskiyou County Museum along the main drag just outside of downtown.  Inside, the museum is divided into three primary exhibits: Native Peoples and Anglo-American settlement patterns separated on the first floor, and vignettes of early interiors on the second.  Managed by the Siskiyou County Historical Society, the interpretation and displays succeeded in telling regional stories of people and place...complete with maps, photos, and artifacts in professional exhibits.  Despite this polished appearance, I left unsettled and confused by some of the interpretative materials.

Some of my discomfort was intended, as in the display showing how Americans have exploited First People's image for product branding. Greater emphasis was appropriately placed on innovations in Native design, spirituality, and social structures, to name a few, but it gave an appearance of being squarely set in the past.  To combat with this notion, visitors were reminded that "Native American cultures are alive and well today, and there is a resurgence of interest in and respect for their traditional ways," yet declined to interpret modern First People's lives balanced between traditional and American culture.

A similar but more brief exhibit on early Chinese settlement presented perseverance and ingenuity within the adverse conditions of a rural mining town, yet left visitors wondering what happened to Yreka's early Chinatown...short of a highly decorative, almost kitschy, Chinese restaurant on Miner Street.

Fair interpretation with not so subtle jabs at American capitalism, I felt the interpreters dodged a few political bullets while holding their subject in high regard.  Yet with all the innovation and genius of pre-contact people, why did the museums stakeholders usurp the narrative in the museum's interpretation of early trappers?  Here, "The Quest for Beaver" begins by stating the following:

The Mountain Man, in a very true sense, is a real American frontier hero who roamed the land still virgin and unpeopled in search of beaver?  No other country or period in history has produced such a distinctive breed of men.  America owes much to these trappers, for they opened the land to the pioneers and settlers who made it great.

The land was not "virgin and unpeopled," as clearly and previously exhibited.  Who indeed were the people who inhabited this land for over 10,000 years if not a "distinctive breed?"  We have a long ways to go in our interpretation of the people and places of California.