Along California’s rugged northwest coast, a freshly paved highway exit
marked “Bald Hills Road” is for most nothing more than the entrance to Lady
Bird Johnson Grove and Redwood National Park. For the Yurok, the state’s
largest and perhaps poorest American Indian tribe, it’s where the road home,
and the Yuroks’ struggles, begin. Past the park, Bald Hills quickly narrows
to a deadly, one-lane logging path and snakes high into the Pacific coastal
range. Around blind corners and frequent cliffs, charred remains of Jeeps
and rusted cars litter the ditches of a 40-mile-long washboard welcome mat.
It is a clan the state, if not time itself, has left behind. For years, the
Yurok have asked California lawmakers for permission to operate slot
machines to begin making the money they say could help pull the poorest of
their 5,000 out of grinding poverty. Their casino would be so remote it
would seem few might visit, but the tribe estimates it could bring in more
than $1 million a year, as much as doubling its discretionary budget in bad
years and allowing the tribe to begin saving money to pave, or at least
regularly grade, roads such as Bald Hills. Here, surrounded by steep hills
and stripped redwood forests, hundreds of Yuroks survive dug into the
remote, muddy banks of the Klamath River. Most live without electricity or
clean running water in clusters of dilapidated trailers supplied after a
flood when Lyndon B. Johnson was president. Children still learn in one-room
schools. Wood fires warm homes. And a tribe that once thrived off salmon
grapples with a river with few fish. The tribe’s only jobs come from federal
grants, or in helping timber companies take the very trees Yuroks believe to
be their own. The way the Yuroks’ gambling efforts have been thwarted for
years, both through bureaucratic slip-ups and in the crossfire of larger
political feuds in the state Capitol, is the story of a tribe beset by
misfortunes as confounding as any in the state.