Mad River

The Mad River is a river in upper Northern California. It flows for 113 miles in a roughly northwest direction through Trinity County and then Humboldt County, draining a 497-square-mile watershed into the Pacific Ocean north of the town of Arcata near Arcata-Eureka Airport in McKinleyville. The river's headwaters are in the Coast Range near South Kelsey Ridge.

Before Euro-American settlers arrived in the mid-1800s, the native peoples occupying the lower Mad River watershed were the Wiyot who spoke a dialect affiliated with the Algonquian language family, with upriver reaches controlled by three different groups whose languages are related to the Athabascan family, the Whilkut, Nongatl and Lassik . Today, among these distinct groups, only the Wiyot-affiliated Blue Lake Rancheria and the Wiyot Tribe of the Table Bluff Reservation are federally recognized tribes and the United States holds lands in trust for their citizens. The Whilkut, Nongatl and Lassik were essentially annihilated during the Bald Hills War in the 1860s. The river was named in December, 1849 in memory of an incident when Dr. Josiah Gregg lost his temper when his exploration party did not wait for him at the river mouth.

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