Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1878. Charlie’s band faces even more suspicion in town, while Thomas Detter experiences a moment of celebrity. Matilda Ashim tackles a difficult reality and Tone considers an alternate direction.
Dear listener,
What do you do when a request turns into a command? Do you obey? Do you push back? Or do you try to find a middle ground that preserves your dignity and defuses the threat?
Though Charlie’s band may not know it, the Western Shoshone are not the only tribe being pushed into reservations by the US government.
The native people of the western states are living through the tail end of what the white people call the Indian Wars. Soldiers straight from the battlefields of the Civil War have spent more than 10 years out west fighting tribes like the Modoc of Northern California and the Lakota of the Great Plains. Some of these conflicts have even become household names across the country, like the Battle of the Little Bighorn where Custer’s cavalry fell.1
The Western Shoshone have mostly steered clear of these conflicts, although they, too, have suffered at the hands of the US military.
Now, the US government is trying a new policy. The leadership in Washington has decided it will be cleanest, easiest, and most efficient for western tribes to live on centralized reservations, even if that means combining tribes together on the same land. There, they can have their own protected space and, according to the government, they can learn to speak English, learn to worship a white god, and learn to become farmers.2
This is a steep request for many tribes, including the Western Shoshone. Relocating far away from ancestral lands not only cuts the connection between people and place, but also moves them far away from the animals and plants they rely on to eat.
Plus, the government now has a problem of its own making. In many of the peace treaties they’ve signed with tribes, they made commitments to allow the tribes to stay on—or at least close to—their traditional lands.
As the government tries to cajole the tribes to move to far away reservations, they are breaking their own promises. We’ve already seen this happen with the Western Shoshone, when Indian agents tried and failed to persuade them to move to reservations in Idaho or Utah instead of the land they were promised in Nevada.3
Now, the same thing is happening with the Bannock tribe in southern Idaho. Like the Western Shoshone, the Bannocks are experiencing a bait and switch moment with the US government. Under a peace treaty they signed in 1868, they were promised good land in southern Idaho that included many of the plants they rely on to forage. But when it comes time to relocate, they instead end up in a reservation in another part of Idaho, a place with fewer plants and worse conditions.4
And the land they were promised? Well, that ends up in the hands of white settlers—and, worst of all to the Bannocks, much of that land is then given over to cattle and pigs, who dig up and eat the camas root which the tribe depends on.5
After all of this, the Bannocks are not going to compromise. So, led by their chief Buffalo Horn, the tribe gathers together about one hundred men, who start to attack settler towns, ranches, and farms. They even take over a ferry that runs across the Snake River and sink it. That’s enough to draw the attention of the US military, which sends troops to put down the rebellion.6
For a few months, the war seethes like a low ember, with the US military sending gunboats down the river and Bannock warriors striking back against militias, ranchers, and settlers. It’s a bloody, messy, desperate fight driven by fear and deprivation on all sides.7
Soon enough, the news reaches Eureka, and the pages of the local newspaper. If you read enough of their coverage, you start to detect a pattern in their coverage of the Shoshone. When it comes to the Indians, every small incident, every gathering on the outskirts of town or every sideways glance on the street, the newspaper sees as a sign that a plot to attack is underway.
And this Bannock war, the newspaper says, may be just the spark that will light the Western Shoshone into a full-blown fire.
“The war of the Bannocks is becoming serious. Outrages within our own borders have already been committed….The war spirit is abroad among the red skins and there is no telling where they may strike. Of course the hostile will ultimately be put down, but it is highly probable that many valuable lives will be sacrificed before troops are brought face to face with the marauders. We repeat our warning that settlers in the outlying valleys cannot guard too diligently against surprise and attack from the murderous devils who have taken the war path without apparent cause or justification.”8
Certainly, some Shoshone in Idaho and Oregon, who consider themselves close relatives of the Bannocks, go and join in the fight. But in Nevada, the Western Shoshone don’t join the uprising. You wouldn’t know it by reading Eureka’s newspaper coverage, which includes this snarky report:
“It is plainly to be seen that some unusual and exciting subject is disturbing the members of the Shoshone tribe in this vicinity. The few who remain in and around the town are restless, ill at ease, and are either gathered in groups…or on the move…They make no concealment of the fact that the fighting men of their tribe have already gone to the front, leaving their squaws to await their return…On Friday last a band numbering about twenty, mounted on their hardy little ponies, passed through Newark valley…They were very saucy…There is no doubt that the Indians are furnishing aid to the Red Devils north of the railroad.”9
Something has to be done about these saucy Shoshone on their little ponies, the paper says.
The US government’s Indian agent, Levi Gheen, travels to the new Western Shoshone reservation in northern Nevada. He sees no signs that the Shoshone on the reservation are joining the Bannock in the fighting, and he says so in his letter.
“I will vouch for their good behavior with my neck, and if they violate their pledges of peace, I am willing that the people should string me up.”10
Gheen lives to see another day, as the Western Shoshone never get involved in the Bannock War.
For their part, the Bannocks are not so lucky. They lose their chief, Buffalo Horn, in battle, and US soldiers put down their rebellion. Just five months after the violence first started, the Bannocks are back on the reservation that they tried so hard to escape. The pigs and cattle continue to feast on camas roots in the lands the government promised them.11
Even the US military commanders assigned to fight tribes across the west have second thoughts after all this violence. They recognize that these Bannock fighters are really just hungry, exhausted, and frustrated people with nowhere else to go.
General George Crook, who has spent plenty of time fighting in the Indian Wars, tells a Nebraska newspaper what he thinks about the Bannock War.
“A harder thing to do is to be forced to kill the Indians when they are clearly in the right. I do not wonder, and you would not either, that when these Indians see their wives and children starving, and their last source of supplies cut off, that they go to war.”12
Closer to home, all of this chatter must be unsettling for Charlie’s band. After all, they are still trying to find a way forward in this land. Certainly the inhabitants of Eureka sometimes look at Shoshone like them with quick, anxious glances, having heard fantastical rumors that their tribe is sending guns and ammunition north to the Bannocks. That Charlie’s band or the other Shoshone in the area could be running guns when they can barely harvest enough pine nuts each year is a detail that no one ever bothers to explain.
—
The members of Charlie’s band find themselves in town more often now. When the weather cooperates and they have a good harvest of mushrooms or pine nuts, they head into Eureka to sell the excess.
This is a strange new lifestyle for the Shoshone. Prior to the arrival of white settlers, there really was no need for money to change hands for goods. Instead, tribal members would harvest what they need to survive from the land around them.13 The goal of gathering more money than the next person would have been useless in a place where survival meant shelter, food, and being able to rely on others.
But that way of life is almost gone. Now, in order to survive in this new land, the Shoshone have learned about a strange new concept: making a profit. When mushrooms are in season, they sell the excess to the town’s cooks, and steak and mushroom becomes a popular dish. The newspaper reports that the Shoshone salespeople “are turning an honest penny” with their harvest.14
Of course, money wants to be spent, and some of the Shoshone may look to spend their coin on more than just food and supplies. Some may even wander over to Eureka’s one-block-wide Chinatown, where they can purchase some low-quality liquor. There, and elsewhere in town, merchants will turn a blind eye to rules against selling alcohol to Indians.
This is an open secret, as the newspaper reports:
“It is an impossibility for our officers to prevent the sale or furnishing of liquors to the Indians. The Chinese are the worst but not the only offenders. Depraved white men, who associate with the unchaste females of the tribe, barter whiskey to them.”15
Many of the Shoshone do keep their money close to their chest. When they go to harvest edible plants or nuts from the trees, they bring with them a coin or two. After each harvest, they will place that coin in the soil or at the base of the tree in thanks. You simply can’t harvest without leaving a tribute to Mother Earth, especially in this new era of fewer trees, less land, and slimmer pickings.16
—
Billy Martin tries hard to be a hero. He’s just one of those people who shows up whenever there’s a stolen horse to be found, a town emergency to be solved, that kind of thing. He even loans his mule to the town race track so the locals can have some fun.17
But Billy Martin tries hard to be a hero because Billy Martin, all too often, is not a hero—at least not lately. People say that his divorce might be the cause, or the fact that he’s raising his daughter on his own with help from a widow in town.18
Whatever it is, Billy now rarely turns down a drink, no matter the time of day, and when he drinks, he takes out his gun.19
When Billy is sober, he tries hard to atone for the times when he isn’t. And when he’s drinking, he makes life harder for when he’s not.
This year alone has been a case study in the Billy Martin cycle.
In May, on a Thursday afternoon, he’s sitting in the Palace Saloon with Dick Guiberson, an old-timer who likes to carry his rifle into the bar. Billy, probably a few drinks in, challenges Dick to some target shooting. The winner will take home 20 dollars.
Dick defers, and Billy gets angry and ups the wager: now the two men should step out into the street for a shootout, with the survivor taking the 20 bucks. When Dick again says no, Billy draws his revolver and aims at the man’s face. It takes a few friends of Billy’s in the bar to settle him down and holster the gun. The whole affair ends up in the newspaper, where a probably hungover Billy likely reads about it the next day.20
So, a few months later, as summer hits, it’s time for Billy Martin the hero to emerge, to wipe away the misdeeds from earlier in the year and, once again, become the savior.
Billy is out riding in a canyon on the edges of town one morning when he first sees the floodwaters rising. Canyons like this one can turn from dry alleyways into gullets of dark water in minutes when the rains start. So Billy finds a mule and races out of the canyon.
Instead of riding to safety on higher ground, he spurs the mule into a gallop and tears off for town. He yells at anyone he can see that there’s a flood coming, just minutes behind him. His exploits make it into the paper, where he’s given credit for being the first person to warn of the floodwaters as they roll down the canyon.21
Billy has played his part, and he’s a hero in town again. But just as certainly as floods will wash through town, Billy won’t stay on top for long.
—
For at least two generations—and probably more—Matilda Ashim’s family has been in the retail business. Her father sold textiles and clothing in Charleston after stops in New York and London. His brother, Matilda’s uncle, left their home in Prussia to open a tailoring shop in Copenhagen.22 And now Matilda carries on the legacy with her grocery store in Nevada.
But entrepreneurship like this is an uncertain way to live. Even in the most stable, settled cities, businesses fail all the time as customers shop for the lowest prices or cut back spending during a recession. And a town like Eureka is hardly stable, with the economy so dependent on the boom and bust cycles of the mines.
Some members of Matilda’s family have found ways to reduce this risk. Often, this comes with moral and ethical compromises. Take Matilda’s brother Nathaniel. He’s found stability through power.
Back in South Carolina, when the Civil War broke out, he joined the Confederate Army, where he put his business acumen to work.23
After the war, Nathaniel ended up in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he now runs a popular hardware store. He’s been a founder of the local synagogue and his service in the Confederacy has kept him well-connected to the city elite.24
This is not the path that Matilda and Simon have chosen. They’ve accepted the full risk of being sole proprietors of their businesses without political connections or rich friends. Instead, they have simply put their heads down and worked.
And they have been successful, by all accounts. Simon and Solomon’s store has become a ubiquitous part of life in Eureka, so much so that when Pepi Steler moves his watchmaking business next door, he advertises his store as “one door south of Ashim & Brothers.”25
Matilda and Simon’s son Baruch now runs his own store in Eureka, too. The Miners’ and Mechanics’ Trade Depot sells discounted goods imported from San Francisco and New York. And around the holiday season, Baruch prides himself on offering the biggest selection of kid’s toys in town.26
But all of this success hinges on a few core beliefs: the belief that Eureka will continue to grow and prosper, the belief that customers will continue coming through the doors, and the belief that the Ashims will always be able to show up for work.
In the spring, Matilda starts to feel off. We don’t know exactly what knocks her down, but whatever it is takes her away from her business for weeks. It’s probably a flare-up of rheumatoid arthritis, which robs her of the ability to use her hands and stay on her feet for long hours, which she needs to do to run her grocery store. If it’s not treated properly, rheumatoid arthritis will leave her feeling exhausted, feverish, and racked with swollen, painful joints in her hands and feet.
Matilda has always been active, and that activity has often been centered around her hands. She’s sewn costumes for the plays and masquerade balls and parades in town. She’s stacked poultry and fish and cans and boxes, day after day, in her grocery store. She’s raised children and cleaned houses and served food. She even used her own hands to protect her son as gunshots rang out.
Now, laid up in bed, she can’t keep up that same drive. Little by little, her business suffers. Her husband and her oldest son, both running businesses of their own, probably do what they can.27
But by the late spring, she’s forced to sell off her inventory of groceries, glassware, and pottery for cash just to cover her expenses.28 And by mid-summer, she makes a decision that must have felt impossible just a year earlier: she declares bankruptcy. In the same newspaper where, just one year ago, she announced that she was setting out on her own, she must now advertise to everyone in town that she can’t pay her bills.29
And then, just to add a final blow, another big flood bursts through town one month later—the same flood spotted by Billy Martin in the canyons. Her grocery store is swamped, hit harder than almost any other business in town, with $5,000 in damage.30
It has been an impossibly difficult year for Matilda. But she’s been here before. Her family had left South Carolina 15 years earlier in the wake of a lawsuit and a stint in sheriff’s custody. They’ve lost one town to a fire and almost lost another to a flood. But they’ve rebuilt their lives each time. Maybe this time will be the same, or maybe this time will be the tipping point.
—
It’s summer in Eureka. With longer days and a heat wave, people are out and about. There’s a new roof going up on the Sazerac bar. A policeman is trying to domesticate a wild gray eagle. The miner’s union up on Ruby Hill is preparing for their choir performance. And Thomas Detter is writing his lecture notes.31
Detter has lived in Eureka for six years now, and little by little, he’s become a bit of a town celebrity. Sure, he still has to work long hours at his Bathing and Shaving Saloon near Main Street, especially with competition popping up as people move in. But he’s becoming well known around town for his commentary, and Eureka likes to show him off now and then. In the local newspaper, they write:
“Dr. Detter, the colored orator of Eastern Nevada, bears the reputation of being an able and fluent speaker.”32
You know, this may not sound like much, but it is high praise when you consider that these same editors love to call out people they don’t like. In the same issue in which they celebrate Detter, here’s how they describe the people of a nearby town:
“It is crowded with tramps, roughs, scrub-fighters, thieves and scalawags, who make day disorderly and night hideous.”33
No one writes down Detter’s talk, so we don’t know what he covers. But being noticed and maybe even appreciated must be a boost for him, especially since he’s likely still feeling the sting of last year’s political upheavals.
Eureka is far from a tranquil place to live, but for Thomas Detter, it’s the place that has sustained him and his writing for longer than anywhere else since he moved to the mountains.
Once, many years earlier, he lived in Idaho City, a mining town that sprang to life when prospectors discovered gold near Boise. He wrote in his letters that it was a town that burned down every year, only to be rebuilt again.
At the time, he wrote about what it felt like to live in a place that was reborn year after year.
“A mountain life is indeed romantic, as well as novel, its best times are always ahead. The changes a man has to undergo are often sudden, deceitful and discouraging…He who would succeed must not surrender but fight the battles of life.
Hope on, hope ever!”34
Now, that letter could just as much describe the backwards and forwards dance of living as a Black man in the United States. He’s found a town that’s stable, that accepts him, mostly, for who he is and what he does. But the sudden changes are always lurking on the margins, because that’s what life in the mountains—that’s what life in this country—is all about.
—
The mines on Prospect Mountain are looking promising. Maurice Hartnett, the old hand who’s worked the mountain for years, has been digging for two weeks straight. He tells the newspaper that he expects two of his mines to hit profitable ore soon.35
But for Tone, there may be a new opportunity growing to the west. Out there, about 100 miles from Eureka, there’s an unusual mining town that’s doing things differently than the other camps.
The town is called Cortez, and it’s the brainchild of an English miner named Simeon Wenban.36
About 16 years earlier, Simeon Wenban was just another would-be fortune seeker looking for faint traces of silver or gold in the Nevada hinterland. The story is that he was traveling with his wife and two daughters about 70 miles from the nearest town, when he stumbled upon a group of Mexican miners collecting small pieces of silver ore.37
Wenban later told the papers:
“When I began operations in Cortez, I was without a dollar, I did not even have a whole sack of flour, and my children were obliged to wear shoes made out of coyote skins.”38
Wenban did what so many miners without much money had done before him: he started digging, and he didn’t stop. He dug out what he thought would be his ultimate find. At first, the mine looked pristine, with a massive central ore deposit. Wenban was convinced that there were other deposits to uncover, so he dug more than 200 feet into the ground, then tunneled even further into the earth. But he couldn’t find any more ore.
For all this work, Wenban had assembled a team, including some Chinese miners, that he would now need to pay. But money was tight, and investors weren’t interested in funding a hopeless excavation.
So, Wenban decided to look for capital from an unlikely source. Along with some of his Chinese miners, he traveled to San Francisco, where he took meetings with Chinese businessmen. And they reached an agreement: they would loan him $20,000 on the condition that he would hire Chinese miners to work his mines.39
The Chinese bet turned out to be a good one. With a new workforce, Wenban continued digging on his property and hit a strong band of profitable ore.
Other investors soon followed, including a wealthy Californian named George Hearst. And suddenly, the Cortez Mining District became a place on the map.40
And so Simeon Wenban continues to run his Cortez operations with mainly Chinese workers.
Wenban isn’t being a philanthropist when hires Chinese employees. He can pay his workforce less than the going rate for non-Chinese miners, and he doesn’t have to fight other mining districts for labor.
And sure, life in Cortez is basic. It’s certainly not a boomtown like Eureka, with restaurants and shops and saloons. Living and working in Cortez is stripped down. Workers usually live in bunkhouses, where, on their off hours, they play games of chance, smoke some opium, and, on special occasions, roast a pig. In some ways, life in Cortez isn’t all that different from life up on Prospect Mountain. Wenban even hires Italian charcoal burners to work in the hillsides and produce charcoal for his furnaces.41
And, unlike the mines around Eureka, where the owners usually live far away in comfortable houses, Simeon Wenban lives on-site and works the mines alongside his crews. His wife insists that they stay committed to the place until it pays off. His daughters don’t need to wear coyote skin shoes anymore, though. Wenban made enough to send them to school in San Francisco.42
We don’t know when word of this strange place reaches Eureka. Probably miners swap eye rolls and stories about this remote mining camp where Chinese workers outnumber white workers and the boss lives on the land alongside his men.
The Chinese miners on Prospect Mountain likely hear the news, and some probably leave to go work for Wenban. Tone, though, decides to stay put.
Simeon Wenban has invested more than 10 years of his life to Cortez, and it’s just starting to pay off. Tone is doing the same on Prospect Mountain.
If you’d like to learn more about the history of the Bannock tribe and their conflict with the US government—as well as how they survived and adapted, check out The Shoshone Bannocks: Culture and Commerce at Fort Hall by John W. Heaton.
Works Cited:
1. “Indian Wars Campaigns,” U.S. Army Center for Military History
2. Steven J. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), pg. 43
3. Steven J. Crum, The Road On Which We Came, pg. 34
4. Steven J. Crum, The Road On Which We Came, pg. 29
5. Michael McKenzie, “To The Brink and Back: The Bannock War Pounds at the Door to Washington Territory,” Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, Summer 2008.
6. Dick d’Easum, “Bannock War at Camas Prairie,” The Idaho Statesman, July 20, 1969, courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society Reference Series
7. Michael McKenzie, “To The Brink and Back.”
8. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 13, 1878
9. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 23, 1878
10. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 23, 1878
11. Michael McKenzie, “To The Brink and Back.”
12. Pendleton East Oregonian, July 13, 1878
13. Steven J. Crum, The Road On Which We Came, pg. 8
14. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 14, 1878
15. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 2, 1878
16. Joe Ducette, “Clara Woodson & Gracie Begay Oral History,” Great Basin Indian Archive, March 16, 2006.
17. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 28, 1877
18. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 4, 1880
19. Ibid.
20. The Daily Appeal, May 30, 1878
21. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 16, 1878
22. Svend Jacobi, Hvorfa-Hvortil? Slægten Jacobi’s Historie (Viborg: F.V. Backhausens, 1976).
23. Connor, Boyd, et. al. History of North Carolina (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1919)
24. Leonard Rogoff, “A Tale of Two Cities: Race, Riots, and Religion in New Bern and Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898,” Southern Jewish History, 2011.
25. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 22, 1878
26. Eureka Daily Sentinel, December 20, 1878
27. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 19, 1878
28. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 21, 1878
29. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 19, 1878
30. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 16, 1878
31. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 28, 1878
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. San Francisco Elevator, May 22, 1868
35. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 10, 1878
36. Loren B. Chan, “The Chinese in Nevada: An Historical Survey, 1856-1970,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Winter 1982.
37. Charles Labbe, Rocky Trails of the Past (Las Vegas: C.H. Labbe, 1960).
38. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 8, 1873
39. Charles Labbe, Rocky Trails of the Past.
40. “Archaeological Studies in the Cortez Mining District, 1981, Technical Report No. 8,” Bureau of Land Management Nevada, 1982.
41. Ibid.
42. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 8, 1873