WAILAKI
The Wailaki, the southernmost group of Athabascans on the Eel River, are as little chronicled as most of the Athabascan groups. As far as geography and language are concerned we have very good information (Goddard, 1923a; 1923b), but there is very little general ethnography. Kroeber was able to devote to them only a little more than three pages in the Handbook (1925, pp. 151-154), and we know scarcely more today.
The territory of the Wailaki lies for the most part outside the redwood forest (pls. 11b, c) and for that reason they had access to a more abundant supply of the food, particularly acorns, used by the interior peoples than did most of the Athabascan groups. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps simply because of proximity, the culture of the Wailaki shows considerable affinity with the culture of Central California and correspondingly less with that of Northwestern California. This affinity is particularly evident in their tribelet organization, which obtrudes itself in the accounts of both Goddard and Merriam. In the groups farther north such organization receives little attention.
Merriam's information on the Wailaki consists for the most part of ethnogeography, including villages, tribelets, and place names. His informants in this group were Fred Major and Wylakki Tip. I have been able to find out nothing about Fred Major, but Merriam gives the following statement on Wylakki Tip.
My informant, known as Wylakki Tip, a full blood Tsennahkennes [Eel R. Wailaki, but see Kroeber's data, p. 229], whose father and mother were born and lived at Bell Springs, tells me that they belonged to the Bell Springs Canyon band known as Tsi-to-ting ke-ah, named from the neighboring mountain tsi-to-ting. He adds that from the mouth of Blue Rock Creek northward the Tsennahkennes owned the country to the main Eel, and that the present location of Bell Springs Station, on the west side of the river, is in their territory but that the east side of the river from Bell Springs Station to the mouth of Blue Rock Creek was held by a so-called Yukean tribe.
In Merriam's notes there is no general statement on the Bahneko or North Fork Wailaki; he was evidently somewhat undecided whether they were truly a distinct group. However, he comments on the Tsennahkennes, or Eel River Wailaki, as follows.
Map 5. Villages and tribelets of the Eel Wailaki and the North Fork Wailaki. Roman numerals indicate tribelets, arabic numerals village sites.