Great Basin Indians: An Encyclopedic History

GREAT BASIN INDIANS

AN ENCYCLOPEDIC HISTORY

MICHAEL HITTMAN

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

RENO & LAS VEGAS

University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

Copyright © 2013 by University of Nevada Press

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Hittman, Michael.

Great Basin Indians : an encyclopedic history / Michael Hittman.

      pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87417-909-5 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-87417-910-1 (ebook)

1. Indians of North America—Great Basin—History—Encyclopedias. 2. Indians of North America—Great Basin—Social life and customs—Encyclopedias. I. Title.

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Dedicated to Great Basin Indians, in whose remarkable survival for more than ten thousand years in the deserts and plateau regions of this part of western America we continue to rejoice. Ironically, despite the recent designation of Cave Rock as a Washoe sacred site, the current plan to bury radioactive waste atop Yucca Mountain, arguably a geologically volatile area not far from Charleston Peak, the Southern Paiute axis mundi, threatens us all.

What claim do the Indians put forward to the land? In reply to this question asked by the mayor of Corrine, Utah, a fellow Mormon, George Washington Hill, who knew Shoshone and worked as a translator, stated, Simply that they were the original owners and had never sold it. They make no other claim whatsoever.

—"The Indian Ejection," Desert News, August 27, 1875

I will not put my hand to the paper [Treaty of Spanish Fork, 1865] now. If it is a good paper, that is enough. This is my land. I shall stay here on this land till I get ready to go away, and then I shall go the Snakes [Shoshone] or somewhere else.

—Sanpitch, Southern Paiute

He who comes to my abode and bargains for free transit or a right-of-way across the land on which I live and which I proclaim to be my own certainly recognizes that I have a claim to it.

—Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas dissenting opinion,

Northwestern Bands of Shoshone Indians v. United States,

324 US 335, 65 Supreme Court 690, 89 L. Ed 985 (1945)

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: A Hand's-Eye View of the Great Basin

A TO Y

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

This book is an encyclopedic history of the Indians of the Great Basin, incorporating the fruits of several generations of scholarship as well as recent discoveries made possible by new areas of scientific inquiry. There have been many important discoveries in anthropology and other fields relative to Native American history over the past three decades that have not yet made their way from the specialized journals into the general literature. Moreover, new approaches to the study of Native Americans made possible by DNA testing (molecular anthropology), gender studies, and postmodernism, among other disciplines, have greatly enlarged the prism through which we continue to understand these indigenous peoples. My objective is to give readers a sound, up-to-date overview of what is currently known about the diverse indigenous people of the Great Basin and to indicate some potentially productive directions for future research.

I have chosen an alphabetical format rather than a traditional linear narrative in the hope that it will allow the casual reader, interested historian, and serious anthropologist a user-friendly reference guide. Highlighting people and events as separate entries allows them to stand alone and tell their own story, but entries are cross-referenced to aid in the evolution of a cohesive and hopefully coherent narrative. Start where you will, and use the book as your own needs and interests dictate.

To a degree, entry choices reflect my own biases and interests. Besides such standard topics as religions and languages, historical events like wars and massacres, and treaties that helped to shape Great Basin Indian history, I have focused heavily on portraits of tribes and individuals across the centuries. Other topics have been chosen with the aim of updating and expanding on previous studies and to bring recent new data and insights to the attention of specialists and general readers alike. So enter through whichever door you choose. My hope is that the book as a whole will allow readers to discover the rich history and culture of the various peoples who inhabited the Great Basin for millennia and whose descendants continue to make significant contributions to the region.

Needless to say, many people helped me to complete this massive work. At Long Island University, where I have been privileged to teach Native American courses for nearly a half century, Bebolyn Reynoso was my research assistant, Lisa Burwell of the Inter-Library Loan Office helped me locate sources, and Guillermina Pacheco, Anthropology and Sociology Department secretary, effected innumerable small favors along the way.

I also acknowledge Fawn Lewis for constant postings as director of Indian education in Nevada and the staffs at the Special Collections of the University of Nevada Library and Nevada Historical Society, both in Reno.

Marlin Thompson, the Yerington Paiute Tribe's NAGPRA representative, allowed me to ride with him while delivering commodity foods to poverty-stricken Great Basin Indians, many of whose reservations discussed in this book I, more than likely, would never have seen. But sad to say, my dear Northern Paiute friend Warren Emm died before I could present him a copy of this book, which he read (and approved) in manuscript form.

I also want to acknowledge two Great Basin Indian academic colleagues for reviewing this manuscript: Alex Ruuska and Richard O. Clemmer. Both spent an inordinate number of hours meticulously reading and correcting my errors. Any remaining errors of course remain my own.

At the University of Nevada Press, if Margaret Dalrymple, recently retired acquisitions editor, was the beacon of light who saw a book in the tonnage of pages I sent early on—and she was—Annette Wenda, my copy editor, donned a miner's helmet that provided the light at what I thought would never be the end of my tunnel. Although there is no way to say thanks in Northern Paiute, my English will have to do.

Finally, on the home front, I once again acknowledge the enduring emotional support of my wife, Meryl.

When once-upon-a-career-choice-long-ago I enjoyed the luck of the draw as a beginning graduate student in anthropology to commence fieldwork in Yerington, I met Ida Mae Valdez, a Northern Paiute, and her Mexican-born husband, Rafael. They invited me to their home on the Campbell Ranch Reservation on a Sunday afternoon, and like the man who came to dinner and stayed, I, too, never really left. Ida Mae is an extraordinary woman who instilled in their three daughters pride in her heritage combined with the desire to succeed in the taivo (white) world. Her daughter Linda is currently tribal chair. Today, at ninety, Ida continues to weed her lawn and tend to the summer vegetable garden. This book is for you, Ida!

INTRODUCTION

A Hand's-Eye View of the Great Basin

Before going headfirst into the individual entries, it would seem wise to offer an overview of the Great Basin, and what better way to start than with the elegant metaphor suggested by the American poet Edward Dorn:

If you were to place your right hand on a map of these western United States palm down, and so that your pinky touches Salt Lake City adjoining the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, then by splaying it, your thumb (on the scale of one-inch equaling fifty miles) will cover the Biggest Little City in the World, Reno, Nevada, nestled against those even loftier still annually snow-capped Sierra Nevada Mountains containing majestic Lake Tahoe near its summit and straddling the adjoining westward state of California; the tip of your middle finger, consequently, will also be seen as dipping into the Snake River in Idaho in the north while the heel of your palm accordingly covers the Colorado River and glitzy Las Vegas at the southeastern and southwestern boundaries of the Great Basin. (1966, 16)

Plenty of other good reasons exist for employing the hand as a metaphor for this wondrous, rugged 400,000-square-mile geographic expanse, which has been likened to an inverted equilateral triangle (D. Madsen 2007, 3) and, according to historian Gloria Cline (1963, 3), measures 880 miles north by south from southern Oregon to the Colorado River in northern Arizona and 572 miles on the diagonal from its southwestern terminus in Death Valley, California, to the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming on the northeast:

•   the appearance of straw-blown outline as well as actual handprints found on cave walls at Indian Creek, near Epsom, Utah (Castleton 1987, 1:10) as well as represented on those spectacular Barrier Canyon Rock Art Style pictographs (Schaafsma 1971, 2008; see Fremont; Rock Art) in this same eastern part of the Great Basin, which might well represent signatures of the earliest people to inhabit the New World

•   a world-famous Washoe Indian basket weaver's handprint employed as her signature to authenticate sales (see Datsolalee; see also Gigli 1974, 8)

•   the open hand believed to have been ingenuously extended in friendship by Great Basin Indians toward the first Euro-Americans, but more often than not was unfortunately in turn met with what historians have characterized as the mailed fist of ambitious and aggressive explorers, fur traders, emigrants, settlers, federal agents, and their like at the beginning of contact, if not ever since (see Christy 1978; see also Bannock; Northern Paiute; Shoshone; Southern Paiute; Ute; Washoe)

And the Last Shall Come First!

Encountering the remnants of a human population whose lives had been devastated by not only the effects of slaving expeditions but also an environmental holocaust caused by the very sort of stagecoach travel that brought this otherwise great American writer from Missouri to Virginia City in 1861 to write newspaper copy for his brother, Mark Twain (née Samuel L. Clemens) characterized those Great Basin Indians as

the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots…. I find but one people fairly open to that shameful verdict [that is, as degraded as the Goshoot]. The Bushmen [who with] our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo or Norway rat, whichever animal-Adam the Darwinians trace them to. (Neider 1966, 526–29)

One might defend Twain by claiming he was only using satire again as part of his familiar literary trope, but the more shocking fact remains that this sort of denigration of Great Basin Indians has also crept into what otherwise are outstanding contributions to our knowledge about them from professionally trained anthropologists specializing in Great Basin Indian studies. But despite what has generally been negatively written by scholars as well as nonscholars about Great Basin Indians, they, despite the relative paucity of their population spread across a vast geographic area, nonetheless can boast a seemingly disproportionate larger number of firsts than most if not all other traditional people. The oldest dated skeletal remains thus far discovered in North America, for example, were excavated near the Pyramid Lake Reservation and in the Stillwater Mountains adjoining Fallon, Nevada, with dates as far back in time as 9,410 and 9,515 years ago, respectively (see Spirit Cave Mummy; Wizards Beach Man). Some of the oldest known examples of the oldest fluted spear-point type of stone manufacture found throughout North America, Clovis spear points, have also been recovered and dated at surface sites in different parts of the Great Basin (see Beck and Jones 1997, 2010; Hockett, Goebel, and Graf 2008; Paleo-Indians).

Moreover, the oldest firmly dated woven textiles in the world come from the Great Basin. Woven sandals unearthed in southeastern Oregon yielded 7,000-year-old dates in 1951, thanks to the corresponding brand-new discovery of the absolute dating method called carbon 14 (see Fort Rock Cave). But other (truer) textiles previously found have subsequently been redated and are today known to be even older, such as the closely twined, decorated (with duck feathers) bags and matting recovered from Spirit Cave in Nevada in the 1940s, which today are dated back 10,600 years ago by a new chronometric technique called accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) (C. Fowler and Hattori 2008; see also Basketry). Indeed, the earliest directly dated coiled basket from the Americas not only was found in Cowboy Cave in southeastern Utah, but is also firmly dated today by AMS as 7960 (plus or minus 50 years) BP (Gelb and Jolie 2008, 84).

Yet other Great Basin Indian firsts are those oldest directly dated fishing implements in the New World found in association with Wizards Beach Man near the Pyramid Lake Reservation in Nevada—fishing cordage dated back 9,660 years (plus or minus 170 years) (Dansie and Jerrems 2005, 68–69). Indeed, archaeologists write about bone artifacts carved from the same mammoth bone that served as a serrated bone harpoon or leister used in fishing and was found in association with a Clovis point that dates back even earlier at this same site (10,360 years, plus or minus 50 years) (ibid., 68). But this important find, along with the fact that stemmed projectile points (see Archaic) are now dated back between 14,000 and 12,500 years ago in the Great Basin, lead them to surmise that the latter may be older than Clovis in the West (ibid., 72).

Still other Great Basin Indian firsts include the first published book by a Native American author, Life Among the Piutes, which movingly narrates the sorrowful plight of the Northern Paiute during the first half century of their contact with Euro-Americans (S. Hopkins 1883; see also Winnemucca, Sarah). And whereas another woman, Alida C. Bowler, became the first superintendent of any Indian Bureau agency in the United States—the Nevada agency—a Shoshone male from Fort Hall, Idaho, was the first Native American to rise within that federal bureaucracy and achieve a supervisory position over a reservation (see LaVatta, George P.).

Then, too, if the Malheur Reservation in Oregon was not the first federal reservation shut down by the federal government (in 1882), Shivwits, Kanosh, Koosharam, and Kanosh in Utah can certainly claim that dubious distinction; they were among the first let go during America's short-lived, seemingly trigger-happy attempt in the 1950s to sever all treaty-based, legally binding trustee responsibilities with federally recognized tribes (see Termination). By the same token, if the Shoshone were not the first Native Americans to file before the Indian Claims Commission, which was created in 1946 to pay cash for lands illegally taken from America's first peoples, along with winning their case in 1959, these Great Basin Indians surely were among the few Indian sovereignties who sought and won $1.15 million in reparations (in 1934) from the Court of Claims for hardships associated with the closing of the Malheur Reservation in 1882 (C. Wright and G. Wright 1948, 330; see Claims).

These additional Great Basin Indian firsts also deserve honorary mention:

—One of the first Native American voices ever heard in a Hollywood talkie belongs to a Great Basin Indian, Andrew Penrose, who was hired in the summer of 1936 to portray a Canadian Indian [sic] in that enduringly popular romantic musical Rose Marie filmed in Lake Tahoe (starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy). His hiring was doubly ironic, insofar as this Northern Paiute would have been punished for speaking those same words in his first language in the federal boarding school in Carson City (Stewart Institute) he attended at the time (see Uto-Aztecan).

—The first statue of any Native American placed in Statuary Hall in the nation's Capitol was Sarah Winnemucca in October 2003 (see also Sacajawea).

—The very first three-way Water Rights Compact successfully negotiated between the federal government and any constituent state and Native American sovereignty was the Fort Hall [Idaho] Settlement Act of November 16, 1990.

—Timbimboo (1888–1975), grandson of an important nineteenth-century Northwest Band Shoshone leader (see Sagwitch), was, despite questionable racial views about them, the first Native American Mormon convert to achieve a bishopric status in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (see Lamanites).

—And finally this (albeit dismal) first: despite the nationwide success of the new buffalo, that is, billion-dollar gaming casinos in America, the Kaibab Southern Paiute Reservation in Arizona was the first of its kind to be shut down (in 1996) for reasons of insolvency (Knack 2001, 295).

The Idea of the Great Basin

John Charles Frémont is credited with naming the Great Basin. Dissatisfied with US Navy commander Wilkes's maps from his expedition from Oregon to the Pacific Coast in 1841, the Great Pathfinder on his second expedition crossed the forty-second parallel before heading south from Oregon into Nevada, as part of his mission to confirm the existence of a mythic river that European colonists in America imagined might provide a shorter trade route across the nation to fantasized wealth in Asia (see Buenaventura River). Instead, Frémont on January 10, 1844, saw the imposing chufa formation located at the northern end of what remains a relatively untouched emerald-green body of water called by its Northern Paiute owners Stone Mother and Her Basket. Promptly naming the body of water Pyramid Lake—for the resemblance of that formation to the Egyptian temple of Cheops—he not only once and for all time disproved the existence of that long-sought transcontinental river, which according to Gloria Cline was believed in those years to transverse the whole breadth of the country, breaking through all the ranges, and entering the sea (1963, 214), but also gave us our first definition of the Great Basin: "a term which I apply to the intermediate region between the Rocky mountains and the next range [Sierra Nevada], containing many lakes, with their own system of rivers and creeks (of which the Great Salt is the principal) and which have no connexion [sic] with the ocean, or the great rivers which flow into it" (1845, 175).

Yet Frémont would acknowledge the role of two fellow explorers in coining the phrase Great Basin: Christopher Kit Carson and Joseph Reddeford Walker. Carson was a guide on three of his expeditions before becoming a fur trapper and Ute Indian agent operating out of northern New Mexico from 1854 to 1861 (Barbour 2002). Walker trekked across the Great Basin five years after Jedediah Smith in 1832 and lent his name to a pair of rivers and one lake in Nevada, as well as the Great Basin's most notorious Indian (Ute) slave trader (see Wakara).

The Great Basin as a Natural Area

Donald Grayson (1993, 11–44) writes that we should in fact envision five Great Basins. First is the hydrographic Great Basin, which he defines as 165,000 square miles in area, extending from the crest of the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades to the crest of the Wasatch Range, and from edge to edge of the Columbia River and Colorado River drainages…[and that] centers on the state of Nevada, but also includes most of eastern California, western Utah, and south-central Oregon, and small portions of southeastern Idaho and adjacent Wyoming (ibid., 11). Whether the figure is 165,000 or 200,000 square miles, the latter more recently provided by Catherine Fowler and Don Fowler (2008, 1), the main point is that the hydrographic Great Basin is a natural area containing rivers that drain internally. Included among twenty-three rivers that empty into lakes and dry basins and playas or sinks able to swell with flooding and consequently resemble lakes proper are the Snake in Idaho and the San Juan in southeastern Utah, the latter emptying into the Colorado in northern Arizona, both of them in fact constituting the northern and southern boundaries of the hydrographic Great Basin. Internally, there are the Truckee, Walker, Carson, Humboldt, and Quinn Rivers in Nevada; the Owens and Armargosa in California; the Donner und Blitzen in Oregon; and the Bear, Logan, Ogden, Jordan, Provo, and Sevier Rivers in Utah.

As for those relatively few lakes found in this first (hydrographic) definition of the Great Basin, eighty bodies of water remain from what was once a huge expanse of water covering 28 million acres during the Pleistocene, including Lake Bonneville and Lake Lahontan (Grayson 2008, 12). Among these are Utah's Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake, the latter constituting the largest freshwater lake in the United States west of the Mississippi; Mono Lake in California; Silver Lake in Oregon; Bear Lake on the Utah-Idaho border; and Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake in Nevada, fed by the Truckee and Walker Rivers, respectively.

The second natural Great Basin identified by Grayson (1993, 16–17) is the physiographic or montane. Bounded by the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains on the west, the Wasatch and Rocky Mountains on the east, and the Columbia and Colorado Plateaus on the north and south, respectively, this second definition of the Great Basin as a natural area includes approximately 200 smaller mountain ranges. These geological uplifts not only frame 120 north-by-south-trending, dome-shaped, fault-block basins or valleys that extend southward from central Oregon into northern Mexico, but individually also measure between 23 and 133 miles across and are typically bound on each of four sides (see C. Fowler and D. Fowler 2008, 2). Although the height of the majority of these smaller mountain ranges does not ordinarily exceed 4,000 feet, the summits of 28 of them in the physiographic/montane Great Basin reach 10,000 feet, with White Mountain Peak in eastern California, at 14,246 feet, constituting the tallest Great Basin mountain (Bettinger 2008, 87). Others mountains include the Toiyabe Range, which is 126 miles long and nearly 20 miles wide, its peak reaching 11,788 feet, while due east the Toquima Range is 76 miles long and 13 miles wide and reaches 11,941 feet (Grayson 2008, 7). Both mountains and water, as we shall see, were and remain essential to both the physical livelihoods and the spiritual lives of Great Basin Indians in the past as well as the present (see Sacred Sites).

The third Great Basin was originally defined in 1951 by W. D. Billings. On the basis of his botanical investigations, he noted six distinct vegetation zones according to floristic definition: the shadscale (Atriplex confertifolia), whose xeric plants include saltbush and rabbitbrush in the lowest layer of a shrub community, which is also called a cold desert and contains vegetation that must survive on little moisture; the sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), a grass-mixed plant zone found at a slightly higher elevation, whose alluvial aprons in many Great Basin valleys no doubt inspired more than one observer to employ yet another metaphor for the Great Basin, a sagebrush ocean (see Madsen and Kelly 2008, 79); the pinyon (Pinus monophylla; P. edulis) and juniper (Juniperus osteosperma; J. occidentalis), a conifer-forest belt ranging between 6,600 and 7,200 feet, with an understory of ubiquitous sagebrush plants; an Upper Sagebrush-Grass Zone; the limber-pine forest zone (P. flexilis) found at even higher elevations, whose amazing bristlecone-pine trees (P. longaeva) can live 4,844 years (Grayson 2008, 11); and finally the highest and coldest of these vegetation zones, the alpine tundra, where plant life is sparse because of elevation.

Woodlands, according to Grayson, occupy the middle elevation of mountains in all but the northern area and cover some 17 million acres, or about 18 percent of the hydrographic Great Basin (ibid.). The importance of plant foods in diet, medicine, and survival technology has been demonstrated by archaeologists for more than 10,000 years of Great Basin Indian history (see Desert Culture). Catherine Fowler (1986b) has tabulated 550 different plants utilized for food, medicines, and manufactures. All the same, destruction of the pinyon-juniper-belt forest containing an important winter staple food (see Pinyon Complex) as a result of silver and gold strikes in the nineteenth century, and newer environmental assaults in the twentieth century (see Ely Chaining), has not only led to eloquent protests by Great Basin Indians then (see Numaga) as well as today (see Dann, Carrie) but also caused inestimable hardships to these indigenous peoples.

Grayson defines a fourth natural Great Basin (1993, 33–34). Based on the region's fauna—600 vertebrate species thus far identified—the faunal Great Basin includes small game, such as jackrabbits and marmots, and large mammals that of course could be more readily hunted by Great Basin Indians in the past: pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra americana), bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis), elk (Cervus elaphus), mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), and even buffalo (Bison bison) (see Lupo 1996; Grayson 2008, 16). Catherine Fowler (1986b) has also enumerated 80 species of mammals, 75 species of birds, and 50 species of fish utilized in the immediate historical past, or what is called by anthropologists the ethnographic present. What is generally considered doubtful today, however, is that only 19 of those overall known 35 genera of Pleistocene mammals found in the Americas were hunted into extinction 11,500 years ago in the Great Basin following the last ice age by its original inhabitants, among them the Shasta ground sloth (Nothrotheriops), several species of horses, the flat-headed peccary (Platygonus), the shrub-ox (Euceratherium), and the giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus) (Grayson 2008, 14; see also Paleo-Indians).

On the other hand, the importance of fishing and fowling in marshlands and lakesides from the beginning of human inhabitation of the Great Basin until today is widely emphasized in contemporary Great Basin Indian studies (see Lovelock Cave; Wetlands; see also Janetski and Madsen 1990; Hemphill and Larsen 1999b; R. Kelly 1999b). Indeed, 230 species of birds in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon and 500 species in Nevada were if not still are enumerated as essential to the lives of Great Basin Indians in this fourth floristic natural area–type definition (Grayson 1993, 21–33).

Although Grayson (ibid., 34–40) also lists a fifth Great Basin—the cultural and historical, or ethnographic present—no overview of any natural Great Basin would seem complete without mention of the region's geologic volatility. Along with the area's characteristic aridity stemming from minimal precipitation—ranging from five inches of precipitation annually in Panamint Valley, California, to less than a half inch in Death Valley, California—seismographers recorded two hundred earthquakes alone in the Mono-Inyo craters in southeastern California from 1961 to 1970. Indeed, geologists have also documented that, much like the eruption of Washington's Mount St. Helens in 1980, Mount Mazama's eruption in Oregon around 6,750 years ago wrought nearly inestimable local damage while spreading volcanic ash over a wide area in the Great Basin, as far southeast as Utah.

The Great Basin as a Culture Area

A. L. Kroeber (1939) was the first anthropologist to formulate yet another Great Basin: that of a culture area. Likening this concept to the historian's use of temporal categories such as the eighteenth century, Kroeber, in effect, derived his formulation from the notion of food areas employed earlier by colleagues such as Clark Wissler and Otis T. Mason. What Kroeber initially termed the Intermediate and Intermontane Area, that is, the Great Basin, he significantly detached from the Southwest Culture Area.

Kroeber is also credited with the earliest ethnographic research program in the Great Basin, a culture area whose indigenous population reached forty thousand, according to Joy Leland (1986, 608–9), before being halved because of disease, war, and other factors associated with Euro-American conquest. Indeed, the number precipitously dropped to around thirteen thousand in 1910 before reaching an all-time low of eleven thousand in 1930. By 1980 it rebounded to twenty-nine thousand, and the population happily continues to climb in the new millennium.

Armed with a standardized checklist for the collection of a maximum of 299 so-called cultural traits, whose presence or absence graduate students and colleagues were sent out into the field between May 1934 and July 1938 to verify or collect from elderly individuals called informants, Kroeber amassed thirteen Cultural Element Distribution (CED) checklists, thanks, for example, to the efforts of Omer Stewart (1941a, 1942) on the Northern Paiute and Southern Paiute, based on a checklist of 2,750 questions involving fourteen consultants, who, incidentally, were paid twenty-five cents an hour (Howell 1998, 40), and Julian Steward (1941, 1943a), who accomplished the same for the Western Shoshone, Goshute, Northern Ute, and an additional Northern Paiute (4,662 elements) following interviews of forty-six consultants over the course of fifteen months. Other CEDs for Great Basin Indians were also collected on the Surprise Valley Paiute by Isabel Kelly (1932) and by Ana Gayton (1948) on the distantly related Western Mono (see Clemmer, Myers, and Rudden 1999, xii).

After World War II, a new generation of cultural anthropologists developed a rival scientific paradigm, such as it was (Linton 1940; Kuhn 1962). Abandoning their predecessors' noble hopes of ever reconstructing the pure culture of these indigenous peoples, they instead focused on the ways European colonialism and hegemony impacted them. Acculturation thus became the buzzword, as historical documents would achieve equal—if not greater—value than formerly de rigueur ethnographic-type data or texts obtained by word of mouth during fieldwork that involved individuals whose memories could supply information about cultural practices that often no longer existed (Kluckhohn 1945).

In the Great Basin, despite the fact that every important scholar since James Mooney (1896) has recognized the devastating impact of Euro-Americans on indigenous peoples, it seems almost surrealistic to write that, with the exception of the recognition of the impact of Spanish-introduced horses (see Shimkin 1986b), most postcontact types of cultural change were generally ignored until World War II in favor of ethnographic-present, seemingly romanticized studies. Thus, when anthropologists in the 1940s began earnestly studying acculturation (see Herskovits 1938), the newer reliance on historical documents created ethnohistory, a powerful approach that in the trenchant phrase used by Eric Wolf (1982) truly re-created people without history.

Omer Stewart (1944) arguably deserves credit as the first Great Basin cultural anthropologist to embrace the new paradigm. After completing his CED studies for Kroeber, he conducted an investigation of a new religion that was spreading before his eyes in the 1930s. He made it the subject of his doctoral dissertation, which was published several years later under the supervision of an adviser, Kroeber, who otherwise opposed the new paradigm (see Peyote Religion).

The Early Archaeology of Great Basin Indians

Edward Palmer's excavation of mounds in 1875 in Kanab and Santa Clara, Utah, is generally credited as the first archaeological study in the Great Basin (D. Fowler 1986b, 17). Palmer's unearthing of farming cultures with clear-cut southwestern Indian affinities, however, was to give rise to the mistaken notion of the Great Basin as a mere outlier of that other better-known adjoining culture area (see Anasazi). Indeed, in 1924 A. V. Kidder would adjoin the Great Basin with the Southwest, also diminishing its significance with the rubric Northern Periphery (ibid.). Luther S. Cressman (1951, 1962, 1988) then announced his controversial idea in the 1950s: the presence of Early Man not only in the New World, but in the Great Basin (southeastern Oregon) as well. Only when this was proven were scholars willing to admit both, as well as the possibility that the Great Basin might be a separate culture area.

Cressman achieved all this by the discovery of carbon-14 dating in 1949 (see Fort Rock Cave). Great Basin Indians (like most other Native Americans) maintain they have always lived in the Americas, if not their present homelands (see D. Thomas 2000), but archaeologists remain unconvinced, believing they originally trekked across Beringia, the land bridge inferentially connecting Siberia and Alaska before submerging under water approximately 14,000 years ago during the last ice age. Thus, in scientific belief (based on indisputable evidence), Great Basin Indians could not have taken up residence in this natural area much before what archaeologists today call the TP/EH, or Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene, a geological period dated between 10,000 and 11,700 years ago (Beck and Jones 1997).

Although there is mounting debate today about the naming of the periods of Great Basin Indian prehistory, until such time as this question is resolved, I will follow the usual threefold subdivision (after Simms 2008a, 142): big-game hunting (13,000–9000 BP; see Paleo-Indians), seed gathering (10,000 BP–2000 BP (see Archaic), and farming (2000 BP-1000 BP) (see Fremont).

Great Basin Indians: Postcontact

I also subdivide the postcontact history of Great Basin Indians into three familiar periods (see Malouf and Findlay 1986): Spain's New Mexico (1776–1821), independent Mexico (1821–46), and the American hegemony (1848–). Since much of what is known about the archaeological past will be found in the miniessays contained in the A–Y section of this book, I survey here the three colonial historical periods with regard to the ethnographic present of Great Basin Indians.

Spain's New Mexico (1776–1821)

Cabeza de Vaca's search for precious ores in the mythical kingdom supposedly located north of Santa Fe in the Land of Copola (see El Gran Teguayo) not only prompted subsequent explorations into the Great Basin, but also led to the very absorption of this enormous body of land as Nuevo Mexico by the Spanish Empire in the New World. Not even Coronado's subsequent disillusionment in 1540 following his entrada to Quivara (Kansas) would alter their (or subsequent other European colonialists’) fantasies about finding mineral wealth. A little more than a half century later, Diego Vargas, seeking tribute as well as Indian slaves, solidified Spain's northern frontier by settling 170 families in New Mexico during his expedition north in 1694, at the very southern edge of the Great Basin, in Ute territory (Blackhawk 2006, 33–34).

With Santa Fe as its capital city, the addition of Spanish settlements such as Socorro near the Rio Abajo soon forced the Spanish colonial empire to establish presidios (forts) to protect farmers and shepherds living within villages along the intercultural frontier. The area included other Native Americans (the Navaho and Apache) beside the Ute, who, like nomadic people around the world, either raided or traded with them over the following 250 years (Swadesh 1974).

But when some Utes who were captured by Juan de Oñate and others between 1597 and 1610 for employment as indentured servants began escaping between 1640 and 1706, they, according to Demitri Shimkin (1986b), introduced horses and equestrian skills into the Great Basin. Transformed from pedestrian bison hunters, Great Basin Indians were thus able to expand their traditional range after venturing into the adjacent Plains Culture Area for annual summer bison drives. Indeed, one such band of Central Numic speakers (see Shoshone) would ultimately split off and assume full-time residency on the southern plains, thereby becoming a prototypical Plains Culture Area people as the Comanche, who dominated as the Lords of the Southern Plains until smallpox epidemics and military defeat by the US Cavalry largely destroyed them. As for the importance of the horse in the Great Basin, Shimkin writes, By 1830 horses and horsemanship had spread in the Basin to all ecologically possible areas (ibid., 519).

Spanish explorations of the Great Basin for mineral wealth in the eighteenth century were apparently revived as a result of the arrival in Santa Fe of a Ute named Wolfskin carrying a small silver ingot. So much excitement was then consequently generated that New Mexico's governor, Tomás Vélez Cachupin, was prompted to dispatch a small expedition of eight men headed up by Don Juan Maria de Rivera in June 1765. It proceeded northwest from Santa Fe to the San Juan River in southern Utah and across the La Plata Mountains; they then probably descended the Dolores River before turning northeast, crossing the Uncompahgre Plateau and its same-named river to the Gunnison. In October of that same year, these conquistadores crossed the La Plata Mountains, which were subsequently named for the discovery of silver ore by the aforementioned Ute whom they called Cuero de Lobo (Wolfskin). After trading for pelts with the Ute along the way, they nonetheless headed home with reports that there was no transcontinental river to the Pacific. Along with the valuable diaries and maps he kept from this journey, Rivera on the second expedition also wrote in his journal how he carved Viva Jesus with his name at the top of a cottonwood tree before finally departing from the Great Basin (Cline 1963, 42, 44n, 54–55; Blackhawk 2006, 80–87).

The most important of these early Spanish forays into the Great Basin, however, took place in the same year as the American Revolution. Led by two Franciscan priests, Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Antonio Dominguez, these friar-explorers departed from Santa Fe on July 29, 1776, with the intention of establishing a direct road to Monterey, California, that could link the Pacific Coast with northern New Mexico on behalf of Spain's empire in this part of the New World—while of course bringing the message of Christ to the Ute and other Great Basin Indians along the way. Though the trip was ultimately unsuccessful, invaluable ethnographic information was nonetheless obtained as a result of their 158-day, 1,700-mile circuitous journey to the slopes of the Rockies and the White River in northwestern Colorado, where Escalante and Dominguez reversed directions and headed home along the Uintah Mountains, before finally exiting the Great Basin (through Ute territory in southern Colorado) and returning to Santa Fe on January 2, 1777.

We learn from Escalante and Dominguez, for example, that the Southern Paiute were already cultivating maize gardens alongside irrigation ditches in Ash Creek, Utah, and about the Laguna Utes who were fishing at Utah Lake. Indeed, after an encounter with eighty mounted Ute on September 1, 1776, these good fathers reported not only preaching the gospel to them, but also renaming the Ute leader Red Bear as Francisco. They also told of their promise to return with additional benefits of civilization (Bolton 1950; Warner 1995; Blackhawk 2006, 91–102; see also Ute).

Although their cartographer, Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, was to effectively disprove the existence of any Sea of the West (see Buenaventura River) sixty years before Frémont, maps from the Dominguez-Escalante expedition nonetheless depicted the fantasized Lake Teguayo. Their additional mention of Quivira fabulosa and Sierra Azul, the latter purportedly a blue mountain rife with silver and gold, would, however, also continue to inspire fantasies of wealth among Spain's succeeding colonists, the British, French, and Americans (see El Gran Teguayo).

Spain's rivalry with imperial France for control of the New World greatly impacted Great Basin Indians in the eighteenth century. Thus, when the French began supplying arms to the Comanche, New Mexico's viceroy, Bernardo de Gálvez, in turn increased the amount of trade in firearms to loyal Ute. Along with provisions from their fondo de Guerra y Paz, New Mexico's governors Juan Bautista de Anza (1778–88) and Fernando de la Concha (1788–94) then also attempted to bribe the Ute as allies with fondos de aliado (political alliances) as well as with fondos de gratificial (gifts). Anza, moreover, inaugurated the annual Taos Trade Fair in 1776, a monthlong period during which visiting delegations of Native Americans might obtain horses and belduques (long Spanish hunting knives) from New Mexicans in exchange for deer, buffalo hides, and captured Indians (Swadesh 1974, 47; see also Slavery).

Wars with the Comanche (and other Native American sovereignties as well) not surprisingly prompted the Ute to attempt to gain trading advantages through diplomacy by switching alliances between Spain and France between 1727 and 1786. During those complex and dynamic international times on the frontier, the Ute occasionally even served as auxiliary soldiers during colonial Spain's wars against the Gila Apache and other Native Americans.

Even so, taming the Ute remained the political challenge of the day. With so much in flux on the northern frontier, the governor of New Mexico would, for example, write on September 1, 1805, to his superior, the commandante at Chihuahua, outlining a plan to wreak vengeance against the Ute, who had by then become active slave traders with northern New Mexico hacienda owners. The plan was apparently suggested to him by a seventy-year-old genizaro, a mixed Spanish-Ute former slave trader named Manual Mestas, who had worked as an interpreter, so presumably knew what he was talking about (Swadesh 1974).

Our earliest evidence for the Indian slave trade in the Great Basin, however, dates further back—to 1639, when New Mexico's governor, Luis de Rosa, launched what his enemies called an unjust war against the ‘Utaca’ nation. The latter reportedly had brought back eighty captives, thereby inaugurating what Blackhawk has cryptically called the inappropriate and inauspicious beginning to Spanish-Indian relations in the Great Basin (2006, 25). A century and a half later, in 1778, Spanish colonial officials were forced to contend with what indeed had become risky business on the New Mexico frontier with the Ute (and others), by issuing royal proclamations called bandos against what had become a lucrative economic enterprise. Even so, two Ute-speaking genizaros, Mauricio Arze and Lagos Garcia, would defy Spanish authority by heading north from the slave-trading center of Abiquiu in New Mexico on March 16, 1813, on an Indian slave raid in the Great Basin. Following the Dominguez-Escalante route, they returned four months later (on July 12, 1813) with Indian slaves as well as trade goods. Subsequently arrested and ordered to appear for trial on September 1, 1813, these slave traders disingenuously claimed they were forced to barter in human lives out of self-defense north of Utah Lake because their horses had been confiscated by the Ute (S. Jones 2000).

Independent Mexico (1821–46)

Mexico achieved independence on August 21, 1821, under the Treaty of Cordova. According to its constitution, which was drafted three years later, all three northernmost provinces were permitted to deal separately with los indios. Then, one dozen years after President Santa Ana abolished the constitution of 1824, New Mexico became more or less a separate departmiento. Santa Fe officials now received five thousand pesos a month from custom houses in Mexico such as the one at Mazatlán to pacify los indios. Indeed, by 1826 conditions were deemed so bad on the frontier that it was not only declared la tierra afuera (the land of war), but also placed under direct military authority from Chihuahua, which in turn was placed under martial law (Weber 1981, 221). Martial law reportedly then gave rise to scalp hunters hired in 1826, who struck terror in the hearts of Native American adversaries while Santa Fe officials continued dipping into their fondo de aliado to proffer bribes to overtly friendly chiefs—provided, of course, the latter promised not to raid Spanish settlements. Among other sorts of material items distributed to the Ute and the Comanche (and other Native Americans in this general area) from the hacienda publica (national treasury funds) were vermilion, corn, mirrors, knives, bridle bits, buttons, scissors, bright cloth, as well other gewgaws (see also Malouf and Findley 1986, 503–6).

Some sense of what was on and off an international crisis can be gleaned from diplomatic letters written by Mexico's governor Joaquin de Real Alencaster, for they tell of treaties with—and even between—troublesome Ute and other so-called indios barbaros, salvajes, and nationces errantes. Revealingly, Great Basin Indians were also labeled gandules (tramps) by los pobladores, Spanish-speaking frontiersmen living on the northern edge of the newly formed independent Mexican nation in or near Ute territory (Swadesh 1974; Quintana 2004).

Manuel Armijo was to become a major player in this colonial game. Given the delicate task of dealing with the Ute, who were liable to attack the genizaro population of Abiquiu and other Indian-Spanish communities in northern New Mexico when angered by slights, the former Indian fighter held public office from 1827 to 1829, from 1837 to 1843, and then again from 1845 to 1846. Working out of the Governor's Palace in Santa Fe, Armijo taxed Spanish merchants for additional revenue to underwrite the cost of what was Mexico's larger war with the Navajo, even enterprisingly levying a fee of five hundred dollars per wagon on American settlers who had begun arriving in New Mexico in relatively large numbers.

Along with land grants also proffered to Spanish settlers willing to dwell on the northern frontier that were issued by the Mexican government—with the hope, of course, that these communities would serve as buffers against los indios—one New Mexico governor, Anza, attempted to persuade a Comanche chief named Ecueracapa to visit Santa Fe in 1846, thereby hoping to generate intertribal dissension with a bribe. Anza had been apprised of Comanche jealousy stemming from favors curried to Ute enemies by New Mexico colonial officials, who reportedly smoked with two Yuta principal chiefs, Mora and Pinto, talking, or friendly, chiefs. His gift of silver-headed canes and medals would be replicated as a diplomatic strategy when the US government took possession of New Mexico under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, following the Mexican-American War (see Malouf and Findley 1986).

One of the most provocative incidents between any Great Basin Indians and independent Mexico took place in the Palacio of Santa Fe in September 1844. It involved a delegation of six Capote and Moache chiefs and one hundred of their respective band members who had accepted an invitation by the acting governor of New Mexico, Mariano Martinez de Lejanza, from Mexico City, who allegedly sought peace negotiations. After these Ute reportedly expressed anger about a raid against them earlier that summer—as well as Spanish interference with their slave-trading activities—New Mexican soldiers promptly attacked them, killing seven warriors and taking their children captive. His treachery was such that after Martinez claimed to possess nothing for them by way of recompense from his fondo, he signaled Mexican soldiers hiding behind drapes, who then proceeded to stab eleven Ute to death. Not surprisingly, fleeing Ute then killed Mexican officials, thereby launching yet another decade of enmity with los pobladores in the small Spanish communities of El Rio and Ojo Caliente in New Mexico, for example, whose evacuation was consequently enforced (Swadesh 1974, 61–62). This was the context for John Calhoun's attempt to forge a treaty with the Ute in 1850 following the American takeover of New Mexico, as discussed later.

Nor would any discussion of this second period of Great Basin Indian postcontact history be complete without mention of the Santa Fe Trail, which the historian Cline (1963, 13), for good reason, has called the most important route through the southern Great Basin (see Old Spanish Trail). Essentially a mud road that opened in 1821 during Spain's imperialist quest to link New Mexico with mission communities on the Pacific Coast, the Santa Fe Trail really dates from 1776, when Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés of the San Xavier del Bac Mission in Arizona set out for Monterey six months before the more famous Dominguez-Escalante expedition.

By 1830, then, on what was also called the Mohave Trail, which had been used by the American explorer Jedediah Smith during his historic trek across the Great Basin in 1826 to California, New Mexican traders were annually carrying serapes and fesadas (woolen blankets) into Alta California, which they exchanged for horses and mules. Don Jose Avieta, for example, arrived on January 21, 1834, with 125 men and 1,645 serapes, 341 fesadas, and 171 colchas y tirutas (bedspreads and blankets) (E. Lawrence 1931, 30–32).

But so, too, did the Santa Fe Trail allow opportunistic Ute slave raiders to prosper. Emulating raids by genizaros such as the aforementioned New Mexico governor Mestas, and no doubt encouraged by incorrigible American mountain men like James Beckwourth, the Ute, like the Comanche, raided not only the Hopi and Navaho, but also Great Basin Indian communities for women and children, who were in turn sold to New Mexican hacienda owners for weapons (see Wakara). Indeed, Farnham's unflattering portrait of those hapless victims encountered in 1839 references poor [Sanpitch] creatures hunted in the spring of the year [in the region between the Little Snake River and Great Salt Lake or], when weak and helpless, by a certain class of men, and when taken are fattened, carried to Santa Fe and sold as slaves (Snow 1929, 69). As Blackhawk more recently poignantly writes, The serial rape of captive Indian women became ritualized public spectacles at northern trade fairs, bringing the diverse male participants in New Mexico's political economy together for the violent de-humanization of Indian women (2006, 77).

According to David Weber, The problem became so alarming that in 1826 Mexico's secretary of state asked the United States minister in Mexico City to stop the ‘traders of blood who put instruments of death in the hands of those barbarians’ (1981, 224–25). By then, American traders from Missouri were also exacerbating conditions on the New Mexico northern frontier when they plied the Ute with whiskey as well as superior weaponry and what one observer from the era characterized as very exquisite powder. Indian slaving would continue after the United States purchased the Utah Territory from Mexico in 1848, a form of commerce that proved lucrative enough to prompt New Mexico even to issue new prohibitions or bandos in Alta California, requiring passports as well as fixed places where the trade was to occur.

Yet another glimpse of life, and strife, as well as ethnicity on the northern frontier of Mexico during these same years is revealed by the story of the French citizen Antoine Robidoux. He originally constructed two trading posts on the Uintah and Gunnison Rivers, the former in the Great Basin's state of Utah, and oversaw covert operations from Taos that dealt in arms with the Ute in exchange for (stolen) Mexican livestock before finally fleeing south to become a Mexican citizen. Moreover, there is the case of Charbonneau, son of the famous Shoshone woman sold into (marital) slavery and the French frontiersman involved in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Charbonneau worked for a brief time in 1848 as magistrate (alcalde) for Mexico in the San Luis Rey Mission near San Diego, where this biracial, multicultural person's harsh sentencing of captive Indian workers aroused such negative resentment on both sides as to prompt his resignation (Furtwangler 2001, 311, 313–14; see also Sacajawea).

American Hegemony (1848–)

Fur Trappers and Explorers. Canadian British entrepreneurs followed by American fur traders were inspired by their own separate nations' aspirations of wealth and the hope of locating the mythic waterway to Cathay (see Buenaventura River). Donald McKenzie was the first fur trader in the Great Basin; his extended base of operations went south from Canada to Bear Lake in Utah in 1819–20 and then farther into Idaho, after Governor Simpson's reorganization of the Northwest Company in Canada in 1818 (Cline 1963, 94–99). Another Canadian, Peter Skene Ogden, traveled more extensively and worked longer as a fur trader in the Great Basin. Indeed, between 1825 and 1830, Ogden led six separate Snake Country Expeditions (ibid., 137–95). According to David Miller, no other fur trader went on larger expeditions farther over more unexplored territory or brought in more furs than he [Ogden] did during these active years (1962, 159).

Indeed, writing about the fur trade in the Great Basin that forever changed Great Basin Indian lives, Ogden himself said this about the Snakes in 1825: On Beaver skins they set no Value (Cline 1963, 107; see Shoshone). Curiously enough, he also reported their wearing beaver robes and beaver footwear and said they kept constantly raiding his traps (Clemmer 2009b). Four years later, in late May 1829, Ogden reported an encounter with twenty mounted and armed Indians (Northern Paiute?) at the mouth of what at the time was called the Unknown River, which Ogden renamed the Mary River (after the Indian wife of one of his trappers) and which was subsequently also called the Paul and the Barren River, before Frémont's appellation of Humboldt River (for Baron Alexander von Humboldt, the famed German explorer in the New World from 1799 to 1804) finally stuck.

Competition from American beaver fur traders, however, would prove as equally disastrous for Great Britain's colonial economy as to this relatively small Great Basin mammal upon which it depended. John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company in 1811–12, for example, which was established one decade prior to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in St. Louis by General William Henry Ashley and Andrew Henry—shortly before the Northwest Fur Company in Canada was purchased by the Hudson Bay Company—set in motion the greatest early nineteenth-century American colonizing scheme in the West (Blackhawk 2006, 159). Even so, one of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company's one hundred trappers, Jedediah Smith, was to discover that gateway to the Great Basin in 1824, the South Pass of the Continental Divide, leading into the Wind River area in Wyoming.

Unlike the Brits, who constructed forts and then essentially waited for the arrival of pelt-bearing Native peoples—such as McKenzie's Fort Nez Perce in Idaho, for example—the overall success of American fur trappers is attributed to their willingness to remain in the field for several seasons and do the trapping themselves. Then, too, in 1825 they established trade fairs. These fairs were held annually at different rendezvous sites in the Great Basin, where, for example, manufactured goods from Independence, Missouri, might be exchanged with Great Basin Indians laden with beaver and other furs. Owing to the trappers' success, however, conflicts resulted between Great Britain and the United States stemming from the Treaty of Ghent (1818) on the question of the ownership of Oregon and Washington. Simpson's rival Hudson Bay Company then launched its infamous scorched earth policy, whose goal was to create a fur desert west of the Continental Divide in the Snake area as a barrier through which no Americans could penetrate. Unfortunately, Ogden was successful, as he trapped out a stream on the Humboldt for several months in the spring for females and their kits and yearlings, thereby causing their population to dwindle before ultimately becoming extinct (Blackhawk 2006, 166; Clemmer 2009a, 555).

The other animal that became extinct in the Great Basin was the buffalo. This resulted indirectly from the arrival of an estimated one thousand Euro-American fur trappers at trapping's peak. Herds of buffalo were reportedly habituated in the following principal regions of the Great Basin: the upper Snake River in southeastern Idaho; the Bear Valley region, north of Salt Lake Valley; the valleys of the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake; the valleys of the Green River (and tributaries) in Wyoming; and the upper reaches of the Colorado in western Colorado (Van Hoak 2004, 6–7). Whatever their total numbers, the number of buffalo immediately spiraled downward until overall extinction resulted in 1834, as a result of their being both hunted as food as well as trapped for hides. In Utah, however, their extinction had already occurred in the 1820s, a date, according to Stephen Van Hoak, resulting from the deadly legacy of the fur trade (ibid., 16).

Some glimpse of the wealth accrued by Canadian and American fur traders, who in fact might trap within sight of each other (for example, Jedediah Smith's company of fifteen men adjoined Ogden's trappers) is indicated by the thirty thousand beaver skins brought in 1832 to Fort Vancouver, Canada, whose net worth at the time was valued at $250,000.

Needless to say, not all contacts between fur traders and Great Basin Indians were friendly. On October 4, 1833, for example, after a member of Joseph Walker's party of sixty trappers had accused a Northern Paiute at the Humboldt Sink of stealing beavers from their traps, at least three of those Great Basin Indians were consequently murdered. Then when a retaliatory force of between eight and nine hundred of these Great Basin Indians appeared, Walker's men thought to frighten them off by discharging their firearms. Thinking their strategy had worked, the fur trappers were shocked the next morning when yet another relatively large contingent of what were Northern Paiute appeared. When one or more trappers then became mistrustful during furtive attempts at communication involving sign language, and Walker furthermore did not trust their apparent desire to peaceably smoke together, he gave the fateful order to open fire on what were reportedly between eighty and one hundred Great Basin Indians. According to Zenus Leonard, who was Walker's scribe, thirty-two Native American fatalities resulted, thereby constituting what Cline has characterized as the first time that a battle between two such large groups, Indian and white, had taken place in the area of the interior drainage, and not until Nevada territorial days would there be a similar occurrence (1963, 174).

Although fur traders were ipso facto explorers, their economic activities in the Great Basin nonetheless led to the establishment of important roadways, including the Northern, or Oregon, Trail, for example. This in turn was followed by two of the most famous of all American expeditions to the Great Basin: the Lewis and Clark, whose Corps of Discovery was sent by President Thomas Jefferson on May 14, 1804, on a two-year scientific journey motivated at its core by the nation's desire to locate the long-rumored transcontinental waterway to Cathay, and that of John Charles Frémont, who effectively ended that colonial fantasy on one of his five expeditions (see Buenaventura River).

Lewis and Clark, of course, not only met but were aided and abetted by the very family of their famous Shoshone guide in August 1805 on the Lemhi River in Idaho (see Sacajawea); their invaluable diaries bespeak the transformation of northern Great Basin Indians into horsemen by then (ibid., 63–67). As for Fremont, after he explored the Wind River Range in Wyoming in the summer of 1842 on his first expedition, the Great Pathfinder would discover Pyramid Lake on January 13 and 14, 1844, on the second expedition, which began at the Great Salt Lake on July 13, 1844, and took him farther north and west to Fort Vancouver and Klamath Falls and then south into the Great Basin proper. Included among Frémont's own invaluable ethnographic notes, we, for example, read in the diaries about very fat [Indians]…who appeared to live an easy and happy life (see Northern Paiute). In another entry, Frémont wrote several days later about the seemingly altogether friendly Great Basin Indians, a Washoe in this case, who appeared while they were crossing the Sierra Nevada into California: He seized the hand of the first man he met as he came up, out of breath, and held on as if to himself of protection and gifts (1845, 345). Indeed, Melo, the name given to this Washoe based on the word friend in their language (see Hokan), apparently then guided Frémont's second expedition westward from Lake Tahoe over the Sierra Nevada and then down into Sutter's Fort in California—the same route previously drawn on the ground at Pyramid Lake by a Northern Paiute who also told Frémont about the Truckee River, which still empties into that remnant Pleistocene glacial lake, as well as about yet another important hydrographic fact of the Great Basin, the presence of Lake Tahoe in the mountains, three or four days distant, in a direction a little west of south (Cline 1963, 16).

In any event, after subsequently returning to the Bear River, and visiting the site that was to become the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho (see Reservations), Frémont once again wrote about the Great Salt Lake. He also pitched camp on May 23, 1844, at Utah Lake, close, in fact, to a rest stop used by the Dominguez-Escalante expedition in 1776.

Emigrant Trains. Commencing in the summer of 1841, John Bidwell led the first emigrant train across the Great Basin. The Bidwell-Bartelson Party started west from Kansas and braved the grueling Forty Mile (Humboldt) Desert, thereafter following its 290-mile Humboldt River across Nevada, after having first ventured