Oroville Attractions

Butte County

Location and origin

This town, 62mi/100km from Sacramento and 154mi/245km from San Francisco (via the U.S. 80 and CA 70), was established at the time of the gold-rush around 1850, and amongst its first settlers it must have had some gold-diggers who were well versed in the Bible and who named it Ophir City (after the legendary Old Testament land from which Solomon's fleet brought back gold and other precious items). Only six years later it was re-named Oroville by its inhabitants who were obviously Latin scholars.

The last of the Yahi Indians

At that time the region was still inhabited by the Yahi Indians, who were to be wiped out by the whites in the decades which followed; the last member of this tribe was discovered, half-starved, in a slaughter-house near Oroville, and spent the last five years of his life in the Museum of Anthropology of the University of California in Berkeley, where he, as the last surviving wild Indian, was transplanted from stone-age culture into the 20th century. His biography appeared under the title of "Ishi", and contains interesting pointers to earlier Indian culture.