Koyoongkawi

Koyoongkawi is the speakers' own name for Konkow, the Northwestern Maidu language of the Sacramento Valley edge: koyoo means meadow, so the word denotes the speech of the meadow tribe. Its bands held the lower Yuba and Feather River country, where hundreds of small independent villages shared similar customs and lived on acorn meal and the Yuba salmon runs.

Their villages included Yupu or Yubu, whose name was given to the Yuba River, and the Mechoopda, whose main settlement stood near Chico. Like other Maiduan peoples they had no chiefs beyond the leaders of their Kuksu dance societies, and their valley homes put them closer than the mountain bands to Spanish and Mexican travel routes.

In 1833 the malaria epidemic that swept the Sacramento Valley struck these river villages hardest, opening the way for the foreign settlement that followed.