Capay Valley

Yocha Dehe means “home by the spring water.” The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation writes that “centered in Yolo County’s Capay Valley, our Northern California homeland is at the heart of our culture and heritage.” Its Patwin ancestors lived in villages across a territory “that stretched from Sonoma Valley in the west to the Sacramento River in the east.” State Route 16, the road along Cache Creek, began as one of their footpaths.

They lived, in the Nation’s words, by “hunting, fishing, and gathering acorns, clover, wild oats, manzanita berries, and other native foods,” when “salmon ran in the rivers” and “tule elk and antelope grazed in the valleys.” Controlled burns renewed the grass for grazing animals and raised the yield of native seeds and wildflowers.

The Nation’s history records what followed: Wintun people enslaved to serve the missions, ancestors forced from their land by people “driven by gold and greed,” and a population that fell from thousands to about twenty adults living in six homes in Rumsey by the early twentieth century. The federal government moved the Tribe to a rancheria there, and in 1940 it made “a hard-won relocation to a small parcel of land further south in the Capay Valley.” The Tribe opened a bingo hall in Brooks in 1985, used the revenue to buy back traditional lands, and in 2009 changed its name from the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians to the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation.

In 1846 Governor Pío Pico granted nine square leagues along Cache Creek, the whole valley, to three members of the Berryessa family. Within a few years, a 1913 county history notes, “the great Berryessa holdings were soon held by strangers.” Langville became Capay on New Year’s Day 1875. Once the railroad ran up the valley, the Capay Valley Land Company advertised “The Earliest Fruit Land in the State”: ten- and twenty-acre lots at $60 to $150 an acre, with five years of interest-only payments for buyers who planted fruit trees or vines. The almond harvest got its own festival in Esparto on September 4, 1915, and the Capay Valley Almond Festival still runs every February.

Full Belly Farm started in Guinda in 1984 and has been organic since 1985. Riverdog Farm moved to the valley in 1996. The Capay Valley Farm Shop in Esparto, a food hub owned by farmers and the community, opened in 2007 and sells for more than 40 Yolo County farms.