Shastan

The Shastan peoples are a cluster of four closely related Hokan-speaking groups, the Shasta proper, Konomihu, Okwanuchu and New River Shasta, scattered through the Klamath Mountains of northern California and southern Oregon. The Shasta proper called themselves Kahosadi, plain speakers, and were divided into bands named after their waterways.

Their villages held only one or two families beside a stream, and they lived on salmon, deer taken in forests kept open by controlled burning, and acorns and roots gathered in season. The name Shasta was not their own but reached print through the Hudson's Bay Company trader Peter Skene Ogden, who in the 1820s became the first Euro-American to record it, in spellings such as Sastise and Sasty.