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The Maidu lived on the western slope of the Sierras to the north of what is now Sacramento. They, like their Miwok neighbors to the south, spoke a language from the Penutian group, yet inside the Maidu there were also language divisions between the northern groups and the southern groups. Each area of division was marked by geographic features - crests of mountains that formed watersheds in valleys that were cut by major rivers, like the feather, American, or Yuba, and they lived from the crest of the Sierras down into the lower foothills of the Sacramento Valley.

Choosing a village site in a high mountain area

This part of the Sierras, the deep valleys and rivers originated during a glacial period where massive stretches of hard snow and ice pressed down on the land from the north, and scraped out deep granite gorges. With this steep terrain in the backcountry, the Maidu found it easier to build their villages on the crests of the ridges that divided the rivers, or on knolls part way up the mountainsides. The qualities they sought for a good village site were: a spring with a clearing that was level and southwest facing.

· Why were these qualities ideal?

The spring provided fresh water, the natural clearing meant less work opening space to build their houses and better sunlight out of the tress for warmth and health; being level was important for ease of building and living; and southwest facing provided the best exposure to the sun all year round.

One of the foremost authorities on early California life was an anthropologist who worked out of UC Berkeley, A.L. Kroeber, who was the white man that also befriended Ishi, the last Yahi, that we are covering on the backcountry reading track. In Kroeber's famous book "Handbook of the Indians of California " he notes:

" In the northern high sierras the mountains are practically uninhabitable. The flat-bottomed glacial valleys charm the eye with the soft vivid green of their carpet. But they are snow blanketed half the year, and likely to be spongy meadow or outright marsh most of the remainder. The northeastern Maidu therefore built along the edges overlooking the valley, with the pine timbered highland on one side of them and the open level on the other. A farming to cattle-breeding population might have selected sites in the flat stretches. For a people living directly upon nature, the Maidu choice of locations was by far the most practical. "

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