Kelseyville is a bucolic town known for its annual Pear Festival and, more recently, its Beer, Wine & Swine Baconfest.
But this “friendly country town,” as its merchants like to describe it, now finds itself divided by an issue that cuts to its very identity.
The debate over Kelseyville’s name, and a Lake County group’s yearslong efforts to change it, is approaching full boil.
On a recent Saturday at Kelseyville Lumber, at a table set up beside pallets bearing sacks of wood pellet fuel, two women invited passersby to sign pre-written postcards and drop them into a box labeled “Save the Name of Kelseyville” — a phrase whose acronym, STNK, has become a source of mirth for its opponents.
A day later, at the Kelseyville home of Lorna Sue Sides, members of the group Citizens For Healing discussed next steps in their campaign to have Kelseyville changed to Konocti — the name of the dormant volcano lording 3,500 feet over the lake. The meeting started 90 minutes before the Super Bowl, which explained the lighter than usual turnout.
Citizens For Healing, or C4H, is a loose band of several dozen Lake County residents, formed in 2020 to change the name of Kelseyville. The group recently cleared an important hurdle in that process.
On Jan. 23, its proposal to “Change Kelseyville to Konocti,” appeared in the Quarterly Review List published by the Board of Geographic Names, a federal body operating under the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
The board has the authority to change a name that’s been determined to be “derogatory or offensive.”
While making that list was a key milestone in C4H’s quest, the proposal still has obstacles to clear and faces stiff opposition from locals determined to defeat it.
‘Like an insult’
This sylvan community of 3,800 is named for Andrew Kelsey, a pioneer who along with his associate, Charles Stone, enslaved, starved, raped and killed an untold number of Indigenous Pomo and Wappo people in the mid-1800s.
In 1849, the Natives they’d brutalized rose up and killed Kelsey and Stone. Those executions provoked a severe and bloodthirsty response from U.S. Cavalry and militias — including Kelsey’s brothers, Ben and Sam — resulting in the indiscriminate killings of “as many as 1,000 Indians, or more, across four Northern California counties,” wrote Benjamin Madley, UCLA associate professor and Native American historian in his 2016 book “an American Genocide.”
The most infamous of those mass killings occurred on May 15, 1850, at the north end of Clear Lake. Soldiers under the command of U.S. Army Capt. Nathaniel Lyon opened fire on Natives — mostly women, children and elderly — who’d sought refuge on the mile-long island called Bonopoti.
“The regiment took no prisoners,” wrote Jeanine Pfeiffer, an ethnoecologist and university instructor who is a consultant to the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians EPA office, “clubbing, stabbing and gunning people down as they tried to swim away, pursuing villagers into the tule marsh.”
According to conservative estimates, some 200 Indians were killed in the slaughter known today as the Bloody Island Massacre.
To a majority of the Native people still living around the lake — some of whose ancestors were harmed by Kelsey, “it’s really like an insult, to have this man, who did such horrible things, be rewarded by having a town named after him,” said Ron Montez Sr., a tribal historic preservation officer for the Big Valley Pomo.
For two years, C4H members hosted community meetings around Clear Lake, educating people “about the ‘real’ history of Lake County,” according to the group’s website, and to “reveal the true character of Andrew Kelsey.”
As a result of that outreach, elders from all seven Pomo tribes approved the use of Konocti, as the mountain was named by the East Lake Tribe of Elem, the area’s oldest existing tribe, whose roots in the area stretch back some 14,000 years.
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