Hank Larrabee – Humboldt County Honors a Murderer

Ten days ago, the Humboldt Herald featured a post entitled Toward a Full Disclosure of the Names of the Men Responsible for the Indian Island Massacre.

There is one man whose participation in the grizzly murders appears certain.

Hank Larrabee was a violent thug who had murdered other indigenous people in what is now known as Humboldt County prior to the massacre on Indian Island:

Larrabee–called a “thug” even by the other rowdy white miners in the area… had killed Native American children on several occasions previously, and committed another massacre, of Eel River Athapaskans.

Despite being a homicidal psychopath, Humboldt County continues to honor this asshole by retaining his name on the map. Humboldt County still has a “Larrabee Creek” and “Larrabee Valley.”

Larrabee was not a nice guy by day and a murderer of Indians under cover of night. To the contrary, this man bragged about his murderous rampages against native people. The early white settlers of Eureka awarded him by giving him guns and weapons.

[Hank Larrabee] killed this little (Indian) boy, whose parents lived on this other man’s ranch and worked for him. And this little boy just happened to be on Larrabee’s property and he killed him, and pinned a note to him and sent him down the river on a makeshift raft. And I think the note said something like, this is what’s going to happen to you if you continue to harbor Indian people. Larrabee also used Indians as target practice. They see an Indian up on the ridge, you know, they start shooting at them and things like that… [Larrabee] brought his goon squad into Eureka and started gathering people. And doing things, you know, beating up people. I guess they said that he was given guns by merchants or the people in town. And they say these people knew who did it. And it wasn’t just the island that got hit that night, it was also the (Indian) people on the south spit and on the Eel River. [1]

Larrabee’s reputation as a blood-thirsty Indian killer wasn’t restricted to Wiyots. He even appears to have enjoyed murder by hand weapons rather than distance offered by a gun.

[M]any white settlers in California considered the Yuki subhuman. Why else would settler Dryden Lacock proudly brag that he routinely joined Yuki-massacring parties while his neighbor Hank Larrabee boasted of killing 60 Yuki children with his hatchet. [2]

Larrabee was eventually “driven out of town over a more mundane altercation with other white men in Eureka.”

The city of Eureka did a good thing in 2004 when it returned 40 of the 270 acres of Indian Island to the Wiyot people. It was an overdue first step.

But more needs to be done to remove the “dark cloud” that hangs over Humboldt County. While some things are more difficult than others, the easy stuff should happen without delay. It would be painless for the county to acknowledge the role of a long dead, shameful butcher of innocent humans and promptly remove his name from Humboldt’s geographic landmarks.