Sustained European contact came first through Russian fur trappers in the 18th century, drawn to the northern California coast by sea otter pelts. The 19th century brought American gold prospectors and settlers who arrived in numbers that quickly overwhelmed the native populations. The Pomo, like many Indigenous peoples of California, watched their world contract with terrible speed. Their lands were taken, their communities disrupted, and their autonomy eroded by waves of newcomers who saw the same fertile valleys and oak-studded hillsides not as homeland but as opportunity. By the turn of the 20th century, many Pomo families were effectively landless -- living on the margins of a landscape they had once defined.

In 1915, the federal government purchased land in Dry Creek Valley for use by both the Dry Creek Indians and the Geyserville Indians. The purchase was part of the U.S. rancheria program, which ran from 1893 to around 1922 and acquired 58 tracts across California where, as the government put it, "homeless" Indians could live rent- and tax-free. Special Indian Agent John Terrell selected and purchased most of the land, taking care to find good plots -- and Dry Creek Valley was and remains prime agricultural territory. Adults were supposed to receive assigned plots, but in practice, most families simply moved onto the rancherias without formal assignments. No one was forced to live there. Today the reservation covers 75 acres, a startling remnant of the roughly 86,400 acres the tribe once held. Much of the original reservation land disappeared beneath the waters of Lake Sonoma after the construction of Warm Springs Dam.

The tribe reorganized through Articles of Association adopted on September 13, 1972, and approved by the Secretary of the Interior on April 16, 1973. The formal name changed from the simple "Dry Creek Rancheria" to "Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians" -- a deliberate assertion of cultural identity within a bureaucratic framework. Federal recognition brought legal standing, but the challenges of self-governance on a diminished land base remained formidable. The tribe conducts business out of both Geyserville and Healdsburg, and owns an additional 277 acres south of Petaluma for which it applied to have taken into federal trust before suspending the application. In 2013, a 60-room hotel was added to plans for that Petaluma property, though tribal leadership insisted there were no plans for a second casino.

In 2002, the tribe opened River Rock Casino on its reservation near Geyserville, joining the wave of tribal gaming enterprises that transformed Indigenous economies across the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The casino complex includes the Quail Run Restaurant, the Oak Bar, and Lounge 128. For a tribe whose land had been reduced to 75 acres, casino revenue represented something more than profit -- it was leverage. Gaming operations provided funding for tribal services, infrastructure, and the legal resources necessary to navigate disputes with county, state, and federal authorities. The casino also made the Dry Creek Rancheria a significant employer in the Geyserville area, shifting the economic relationship between the tribe and the surrounding wine country communities.

Sovereignty carries its own turbulence. In 2001 and again in 2010, the tribe experienced internal political upheavals that the source materials describe, without understatement, as coups d'etat. The 2010 crisis involved competing special meetings called by the chairman and opposing board members, each attempting to recall the other. No recall succeeded, but Chairman Harvey Hopkins stepped aside temporarily to allow a cooling-off period before normal operations resumed. Membership itself became contested: in 2009, with approximately 970 enrolled members, tribal leadership proposed disenrolling between 70 and 143 people, sparking protests. In 2014, another 75 members were notified they faced expulsion. These are not unique struggles -- many tribal nations have grappled with questions of enrollment, belonging, and who gets to define the community. For the Dry Creek Pomo, these disputes play out on a stage measured in dozens of acres, among families whose connections to the land predate the nation that now surrounds them.