Surrounded By Trees

Surrounded By Trees. . Long ago, young Lucy Cooper became annoyed by the wind that blew her clothing around. She brought sacred acorn meal from her house and offered it to the wind. The wind stopped. , Lucy Cooper's Pomo village, called Kah-la-deh-mun, "surrounded by trees," provided her people with a summer site for collecting the plentiful coastal foods. , An accident alerted Europeans to the trees for which Lucy's village was named. In 1850, the San Francisco bound brig Frolic wrecked on a reef a few miles to the south. When Jerome Ford arrived to salvage the cargo, he "discovered" the redwood forests. Within a few years, lumber mills operated at nearly every cove along the coast. In 1856, a military base, called Fort Bragg, was built to control native people so that commerce could take advantage of newly-found richer. , Lucy Cooper could not stop the influx of settlers. Nor could she halt the removal of her people from these bluffs and the deadly march to a Covelo reservation. When she and her husband escaped the reservation and returned here, she found that a lumber mill had replaced her home. , Nevertheless, Lucy stayed and rebuilt her life here, creating the woven baskets for which she is now famous. She passed away in 1945.