Hiram Good

Good was born in 1836 in Pennsylvania, the second child and only son of four children born to Henry and Mary Good. In 1849, the Good family moved to Dayton City, Montgomery County, Ohio. Good’s first job at age 15 in the 1850 census was clerk for his father who was a hotel keeper. Sometime in 1854, when Good was 18 years old he left for California. He ended up homesteading in Lower Deer Creek (today’s Vina) in Tehama County, California. Good’s Proof of Claim was filed in the Marysville office on February 4, 1857.[1]

Indian problems escalated in 1857, threatening to usurp Good’s homesteading plans and very livelihood. By 1857, the first wave of Native American refugees who left the ailing reservations took sanctuary in the eastern foothill country of Tehama County. These many outraged, displaced, and now desperate Native Americans, became known as the “Mill Creeks.” The name is only a locational name, for the renegades’ hideaways were largely along the Mill Creek drainage. Presumably Good’s earliest encounter with Mill Creeks was recalled by Dan Delaney who wrote: “In 1857 there existed a band of savage Indians in the neighborhood of Good’s ranch in Tehama county, who were making frequent raids upon the section. Finding a number of them one day engaged in stealing his corn and having no weapons, he charged upon them with stones and put them to flight.”[4] In the winter of 1857, Robert Anderson added that “because the Indian raids became numerous and caused much uneasiness among the settlers, he and Good led a party of fifteen men. And that “Good was elected Lieutenant”.[5] By late August 1864, general massacres began in Shasta County, California, such that, “The whole number of surviving Yanas of pure and mixed blood was not far from fifty”.[6]

By 1865 and with California’s bounty on Indian scalps rescinded,  Good retired from being a paid scalp hunter and began sheep ranching in Vina, California. Good “obtained” a 12-year old Indian boy known only as “Indian Ned” as an indentured servant and sheep herder. On about March 15, 1870, Good, with three other men, ambushed a band of about fifteen Indians of the Kom’-bo (Yahi) tribe, who were gathering acorns along the Mill Creek drainage. When the band’s leader called the “Old Doctor,” tried to run to save himself, Good took aim with his Henry rifle and killed him. Three females were made captives. Good’s party returned with them to Good’s sheep camp where he ordered Indian Ned to guard them.[7] Two weeks later the remaining members of the tribe came to Good’s cabin. They make a formality of surrendering their bows to the number of five, known as “the five bows incident” Theodora Krober later wrote, “The presentation of the five bows was the climactic last act in Yahi history, determinative of the whole of its further course”.[8] After the bows are presented the Yahi are told that Good is away in Tehama. Soon his ranch hands give the Indians the notion that they are to be hanged so they flee and are never seen again. The three captives are handed over to a white man named Carter, living about a mile from Deer Creek.[1]

After the Yahi learned that their family members were sold off they sought revenge on Good, eventually persuading his indentured servant Indian Ned to kill his master.[4] On May 4th, 1870, Ned shot and killed Hi Good in an area of Tehama county known as Ned’s Draw. The obituary read that he was “pierced with twelve bullets and his head smashed with rocks”.[9] Ned later admitted to killing Good, and was subsequently killed by Good's friend and partner, Sandy Young.[10]

Good is buried in the Tehama county cemetery.[11]