To understand where we are, we must know what came before.
The History of This Place
Long before there was a military fort or a city called Fort Bragg, Indigenous peoples lived in relationship with the lands and waters of the Mendocino Coast.
Understanding Our History
The Indigenous history of this coast is not the history of a single people or a single name.
The Indigenous peoples of this coast had their own languages and names for the lands, waters, villages, and places they knew intimately. With several Tribal communities connected to this area, there was no single Indigenous name for what later became the city of Fort Bragg—and we do not claim that this place was historically called Noyo Bida.
Noyo Bida is the name our organization has chosen as part of an effort to return Indigenous language and presence to the public landscape. The name draws on the locally familiar name Noyo and Northern Pomo language. Its meaning has been interpreted differently by language experts, including as “The Fishing Place” and “Village by the Sea.”
For us, Noyo Bida is not an attempt to reconstruct a historical name we cannot verify. It is an intentional choice about what we want to carry forward: restoring Indigenous language, history, and presence to a landscape where they have too often been erased.
The Mendocino Indian Reservation
The arrival of American settlers in the mid-19th century brought profound disruption to Indigenous communities throughout Northern California. Settler expansion, logging, disease, violence, displacement, and government policies radically altered Indigenous life on the Mendocino Coast.
In 1855, Congress authorized the purchase of 25,000 acres in Mendocino County for the establishment of an Indian reservation. The Mendocino Indian Reservation was established the following year along the coast, extending roughly from the Noyo River north toward Ten Mile River and inland toward the coastal hills.
Indigenous people from multiple Tribal communities were brought to and confined on the reservation. Historical accounts document forced relocation, inadequate food and resources, forced labor, physical and sexual abuse, disease, and violence.
A 2026 City of Fort Bragg planning document, drawing upon historical research, describes Native people being rounded up and required to remain on the reservation, inadequately rationed, and physically abused. By the summer of 1857, the reservation reportedly held thousands of Indigenous people from many different Tribal groups.
The Mendocino Indian Reservation was part of a much larger system of dispossession and violence against California Indigenous peoples during this period.
Who was Braxton Bragg?
Understanding why the name Fort Bragg remains controversial requires understanding the man
Braxton Bragg was an enslaver, plantation owner, defender of slavery, and senior general of the Confederacy. He had no meaningful connection to the Mendocino Coast and never visited the California community that bears his name.
Bragg was born in North Carolina in 1817 into a slaveholding family. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served as a U.S. Army officer during the Seminole Wars and the Mexican-American War.
After resigning from the Army in 1856, Bragg purchased a sugar plantation in Louisiana. Historical biographies document that more than 100 enslaved men, women, and children were held and forced to labor there.
Bragg did not merely participate in the institution of slavery as a plantation owner. He publicly defended it.
When Southern states seceded from the United States, Bragg joined the Confederacy and rose to become one of its highest-ranking generals. He commanded the Confederate Army of Tennessee and fought against the United States in some of the Civil War’s major campaigns.
His military leadership was also deeply controversial. Bragg developed a reputation for harsh discipline, conflict with subordinate officers, and costly battlefield decisions. Several of his senior commanders sought his removal. Confederate President Jefferson Davis nevertheless continued to support him, and Bragg later served as Davis’s military adviser.
Why Is His Name on the Mendocino Coast?
Braxton Bragg did not establish the fort here. He did not live here. He did not serve here. And he never visited this community.
In 1857, U.S. Army Lieutenant Horatio Gates Gibson established a military post within the Mendocino Indian Reservation. Gibson had previously served under Bragg and chose to name the new post Fort Bragg in honor of his former commanding officer.
At the time, Bragg had not yet become a Confederate general. He was, however, already a Louisiana plantation owner and enslaver.
The military post was short-lived. It was abandoned in 1864.
But the name survived.
More than two decades later, when the growing settler community incorporated as a city in 1889, it retained the name Fort Bragg.
Even the U.S. Army Questioned the Name
The controversy over Bragg’s name is not a modern invention.
During the Civil War, while Braxton Bragg was commanding Confederate forces against the United States, Union Colonel Francis J. Lippitt, commander of Fort Humboldt to the north, proposed changing the name of the California military post because Bragg had joined the Confederacy.
The name nevertheless remained.
Today, more than 160 years later, a Northern California city still bears the name of a Confederate general, plantation owner, and enslaver who had no meaningful relationship with this coast.
Why We Believe the Name Should Change
For the Noyo Bida Truth Project, this is about more than Braxton Bragg’s individual character.
The name Fort Bragg originated with a military installation established within the Mendocino Indian Reservation during a period of forced removal, violence, dispossession, and profound disruption of California Tribal communities.
The public landscape remembers the military fort and the man for whom it was named. Far less visible are the Indigenous peoples who lived here, the names they gave these lands and waters, the suffering that occurred during the reservation era, and the Native communities that survived and remain present today.
We believe our community has an opportunity to choose what—and whom—we carry forward in our public identity.
Changing the name cannot undo this history.
But continuing to honor Braxton Bragg is not historically neutral either.
The question before us is not whether we can change the past. It is what we choose to honor now.
The Mendocino Indian Reservation
From the Research of Robert Winn
The Mendocino Indian Reservation is central to understanding the history of the place that later became Fort Bragg.
Established in the 1850s, the reservation encompassed a large area of the Mendocino Coast. Indigenous people from different Tribal communities were brought there during a period of violent settler expansion and government-sponsored removal.
Robert Winn’s historical research examines the creation and operation of the reservation, the experiences of Indigenous people confined there, relations with settlers and government agents, forced labor, violence, removal, and the eventual opening of reservation lands to non-Native settlement.
The following material is excerpted from Robert Winn’s The Mendocino Indian Reservation and is presented here as a historical resource.
In 1855, following a year of famine and freezing weather, white settlers complained indigenous people, Pomo and Yuki, were stealing their crops and property. They threatened a war of “extermination” (pg. 10) in response.
A reservation was established in 1856 on the Mendocino Coast and thousands of indigenous people were driven to and held on 25,000 acres between the Noyo and Ten Mile Rivers. The land was farmed and buildings erected. The corrupt white administration of the reservation stole funds allocated for the indigenous and allowed the construction of a private white owned saw mill at the mouth of the Noyo, on government land, disrupting fishing grounds. Indigenous people were pressed into labor. Sexual abuse by Whites was common and venereal disease an epidemic (pg. 24)
20 US soldiers arrived in 1857 to establish an Army post. At first they protected the indigenous people from the worst depredations but by 1861, accord to the Superintendent’s report they were “worse than useless.” (pg. 27). Most troops were withdrawn to fight in the east when the Civil War began, White settlers as vigilantes replaced them.
The government abandoned the Reservation in 1866 and opened it to public sale. Vigilantes began “a campaign of extermination” (pg. 28) in what became known as “The Mendocino War.” William Frazier of Long Valley testified of one massacre: “we attacked and killed twenty, consisting of bucks, squaws, and children . . .” (pg. 29)
“Between 1858 and 1873 the population of the Yuki decreased from 3000 to 500, while the population of the Pomo fell from 3600 to 1800.” (pg. 31)
“White slave traders . . . had been stealing Indian children and selling them to settlers as ‘apprentices’ for 50 to 100 dollars apiece.” (pg. 34) Finally the indigenous were removed from the Coast and forced inland.
Indigenous Survival and Living History
Harriet Campbell Stanley Rhoades: Living at Kah-la-deh-mun
The history of the Mendocino Coast is not only a history of displacement and loss. It is also a history of survival, continuity, advocacy, and enduring relationship with place.
Harriet Campbell Stanley Rhoades’ life offers an important window into that continuing history.
In his profile of Rhoades, local journalist Chris Calder explores her family connection to Kah-la-deh-mun, her life on the Mendocino Coast, and decades of work advocating for Indigenous people, cultural recognition, and protection of Native heritage.
Her story reminds us that Indigenous history did not end with the closure of the Mendocino Indian Reservation.
It continues through the lives, memories, families, cultures, and work of Indigenous people today.
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Harriet Campbell Stanley Rhoades lives on the north bluffs overlooking Noyo Bay. Even in this region of beautiful vistas and peaceful spots, few places can compare with Harriet's. Her back door opens onto an infinity of sea and sky. Wonderfully serene on a clear summer day, in winter it stands full in the face of the mighty gales that can sweep out of the southwest.
Harriet grew up on this spot, as did her children and grandson. For that reason alone, her attachment to the place is unbreakable. Even so, travel takes her far and wide these days. In August, it was to Milwaukee, where she was elected treasurer of the National Indian Council on Aging. In September and again in October, it was Albuquerque, where she served on the selection committee for a new NICOA executive director. In between her longer trips, she heads to Sacramento, where she chairs the Native American Advisory Council for the California Department of Forestry, protecting sacred and archaeological sites and cultural resources affected by logging and forest fire-fighting.
“My philosophy is that you are only on this good old Mother Earth for a breath of time,” she says, “so being involved in issues that will help a group of people is the way I want to do it, and that's how I've structured my life.”
California’s Indigenous Genocide
A Larger Historical Context
What occurred on the Mendocino Coast was part of a much larger catastrophe experienced by Indigenous peoples throughout California during the 19th century.
Historian Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 documents the killing, forced removal, enslavement, starvation, dispossession, and other forms of violence experienced by California Indigenous peoples following the American occupation of California.
Madley’s research also examines the roles played by state and federal governments, militias, soldiers, and settlers.
His scholarship provides essential context for understanding the Mendocino Indian Reservation and the experiences of Indigenous peoples on the Mendocino Coast as part of a broader system of violence and dispossession across California.
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Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, Indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.
Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1.7 million on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials' culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book
Racism, Exclusion and Power in Mendocino County
“Defend Against All Enemies”
The end of the reservation era did not mean the end of racial exclusion or organized white supremacy in Mendocino County.
Matt LaFever’s “Defend Against All Enemies” examines the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Mendocino County during the 1920s and its relationship to local politics, civic institutions, ideas about citizenship, and racial and religious exclusion.
We include this research not to suggest that every period or form of racial injustice is the same, but to provide a broader understanding of how questions of race, belonging, and power continued to shape this region long after the Mendocino Indian Reservation had closed.
On December 17, 1924 the Fort Bragg Advocate published a small article entitled “K.K.K. Organized at County Seat”. Reportedly a “branch of the Ku-Klux Klan was organized in Ukiah” the previous Monday and the attendees were “sworn to secrecy” leaving “definite details of the meeting” difficult to obtain. Of the fifty to sixty attendees, twenty-five to thirty attended resulting in an initiation ceremony that would be held in the upcoming days.
On July 7, 1926, the Fort Bragg Advocate wrote of a five-day celebration in the town describing it as the “most eventful celebrations that the city of Fort Bragg has ever held.”
The celebration was hosted by the town’s American Legion, a civically-minded organization made up of veterans of American wars.
Attendees of the celebration would have seen carnival rides, sideshows, and a boxing match. A dance was held and a parade was replete with floats and decorated automobiles.
Embedded in a surprisingly long and detailed narrative of the celebration was evidence of the Second Klan’s successful integration with the civic life of Mendocino County.
A flag-raising ceremony brought attendees together on Sunday in front of Fort Bragg’s City hall. The city was presented with a new silk flag donated by the Sequoia Post of the American Legion.
At one o’clock residents gathered around while a patriotic oath was read.
Looking up at the new Stars and Stripes, the attendees pledged to “support its constitution; to obey its laws; to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.”
Some attendees might have had drifting eyes during the recitation of the “American’s Creed”, and they might have taken note of the flagpole Old Glory was raised upon. They might have remembered that it was the local chapter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan that had erected it.
Despite the public’s misgivings H.G. Grannis had attempted to disprove in his press release, it was clear the Klan had successfully integrated itself into Fort Bragg’s civic life. Working in tandem with the American Legion and the City of Fort Bragg, the Klan became part of a civically-minded infrastructure despite a history wrought with violence.