***Ask anyone on the reservation, and he or she will tell you that the biggest growers are the Littlefields. Sylvia Littlefield—a Yurok member until last year, when she disenrolled in protest of the tribe's marijuana ban—and her husband, Roscoe, are now in their 80s; their son, Timothy, still a Yurok member, allegedly runs the family enterprise. No one—not even the officers who had raided them in the past—knew how many plants the family grew, though most assumed it was many thousands. My merely mentioning the name Littlefield conjured in locals a mixture of laughter, fear, and envy. "Wear your boots, 'cause the shit gets deep," a woman said when I asked about Roscoe. I was advised never to go near Timothy, because "he'll shoot." People told stories about how wealthy the family was, about their houses and pools and flat-screen TVs, or their appearance two years ago on an episode of Pot Cops, a show on the Discovery Channel. I had seen this episode and, I admit, felt some pity for Timothy—an eccentric hermit minding his own business until some narcs came hacking at his "medicine." Those I met did not share my sympathy. To their critics, the Littlefields embodied all that had gone wrong with marijuana: family enterprise turned to industry, survival to excess. "They took it too far," I heard more than once. Fletcher put it this way: "There's big fields, and then there's Littlefields."The tribe estimates that 100,000 marijuana plants grow on the reservation over the course of a year. A single plant, according to government documents, consumes up to six gallons of water a day.
Over time theirs grew to an even larger operation, the details of which neither Timothy nor his parents wanted to discuss. When I asked how many plants Timothy had, he said, without pause, "Ninety-nine." (Humboldt County permits each grower up to 99 plants a year, to be consumed solely by oneself or by another medical marijuana licensee for whom the grower is a "primary caregiver.") This was after I had seen the greenhouse, the terraces, and the two school buses installed with grow lights, which altogether looked like they contained several hundred plants. (Timothy would later claim that all but the legally permitted 99 marijuana plants on his property were, in fact, tobacco plants.) When I asked Timothy how he sold his pot, he insisted that he grew it for only himself, his family, and anyone working with him who had a license. I asked Sylvia who their buyers were, and she replied, "I don't know. We had people all over the country!" For some years, she said, a man flew a plane from Ukiah, in Mendocino County, and they delivered their crop to him by truck. Sylvia paused after she mentioned this. "I don't want to incriminate myself," she said.To their critics, the Littlefields embodied all that had gone wrong with marijuana: family enterprise turned to industry, survival to excess.
Some hours later, as the sun set, we headed for the gate. C. J. ran ahead, howling, his limbs splaying gleefully from his body. There was something sad about the whole thing, I thought. Maybe it was Tommy, or the empty liquor bottle waving about in C. J.'s hand. Or was it loneliness I sensed, creeping up the ridge with the night's shadow? I thought about these things—about war, about drugs, about drought, about land taken and livelihoods lost—and it struck me that here, on this mountain, injustices collide, and if it were not for water, for the diminished band of river arching out toward the sea, it would be hard to say who was right and who was wrong. C. J. undid the gate and let us through. Then he said, "Make sure those Natives know who the fuck they're fucking with."***It was a chilly Tuesday morning in July when I arrived at the Tulley Creek fire station, northwest of Weitchpec, to attend the raids. Sixty-or-so guardsmen, county deputies, and tribal officers were sipping coffee and eating fry bread at fold-out tables—a festive gathering despite the guns and bulletproof vests. The raids had begun the day before, on Mitchell Hill. Among the first growers raided was Edward Mays, the tribal member I'd met with Carlton Gibbens. Behind his house, an officer recalled, they had found a field of marijuana stumps, freshly cut, and buds strung up to dry in the woods. The grow was small—a few hundred plants—compared with another site found earlier near the top of the hill, where officers had destroyed 10,000.At 8 AM, our convoy assembled and departed for a wooded ridge to the south. There were 14 vehicles; I rode with the environmental enforcement officers. The sites we would visit that day were on the edge of Yurok territory, tucked between the reservation and national forest, so county authorities took charge. They led us in from the north, torching gates when they found them locked, to the top of the ridge, where we stopped, suddenly, at a large trench dug by growers to slow our progress. The morning was dark, and mist sifted through the trees like ghosts. The officers stood quietly at the edge of the trench, and then one climbed in and found it twice his height. Beyond the line of men was a second trench, and then a third, both as deep as the first. We waited—for what, I wasn't sure—and then, single file, the men cut through the brush above the trenches and continued down the road on foot.The site was the most impressive I had ever seen. There were nine rows, impeccably gridded, each framed with plastic pipe and strung with wire and lights. There were 5,000 plants in all. No one was on site, though in a small encampment officers found a warm pot of coffee and wet towels hung to dry. The irrigation system had been pulled up, as if to obscure its source, but a state biologist, Scott Bauer, spotted some pipe in the leaves. This led to a water tank, and then a small stream, dammed to form a pond. Farther up the ridge, Bauer found what he was looking for—the headwater of Miners Creek, a main Klamath tributary, and black pipes, not wider than his forearm, drawing, by his estimate, a fifth of the flow. "It may not look like a big deal," he later told me, "but when you walk down that creek, it's boom, boom, boom. Pipe after pipe, for pot. You see that, and it's like, 'That's where the water's gone.'"We did not go anywhere I recognized until the third day. That morning, as we gathered, I overheard an officer ask if we needed a backhoe. "Are we going past the Littlefields?" his commander said. We were. "We'll need chainsaws out, then.""People are scared," said Troy Fletcher, a leader of the Yurok tribe. "They've gone out to gather acorns and basket materials, or to ceremonial sites, and been approached and stalked by heavily armed individuals."