Achomawi

The Achomawi, whose name means river people, are the nine northerly bands of the Pit River Indians of northeastern California, holding both banks of the Pit River from Goose Lake to Montgomery Creek, with the related Atsugewi in the Hat Creek valley beside them. Their Palaihnihan language is grouped with Yana and the Shastan languages within the proposed Hokan phylum.

Each kept a central village with satellite settlements, spending the summer in cone-shaped tule-mat lodges and wintering in semisubterranean houses of bark and earth; they took salmon and deer, gathered acorns and roots, and worked obsidian from Glass Mountain into arrowheads.

The bow and arrow reached the valley around 200, and in later centuries mounted Klamath raiders carried them off as slaves. Fur trappers passed through from 1827, and epidemics in the 1830s thinned the Pit River villages before settlers occupied their land.