Today, a dispatch from northeastern Nevada, 1872. We’ll meet a woman and her son living under a vast sky in a world that’s changing fast.
Dear listener,
Have you ever been to a place where the sky goes on forever? Where you can see so many miles in so many directions that your eyes lose focus?
There’s a place like that in northeastern Nevada, in the western United States. It’s a place where a newborn boy, let’s call him Charlie, lives, with his family, under that sky.
Charlie’s family call their land the Mother Earth, and they call themselves “Newe”—”the people.”1
It’s been that way ever since the coyote opened his basket and her ancestors jumped out.
In this land, under this sky, Charlie’s band is small: grandparents, maybe his siblings, and maybe an aunt and uncle and their kids.
There are little bands like his all over the land, in a valley or by a river, and they have names that tell you something about how they survive in a place like this, a place without much food and water. Names like the rice grass eaters or the buffalo berry eaters.2
We don’t know the name of Charlie’s band. We don’t know the name of his mother or his father, either. His mother died in childbirth, and his father faded away into the margins.3
But we know a little bit about what life was like for Charlie’s mother before he was born.
We know that one of his mother’s jobs when the weather was good was to find food for her band. And that meant trips high up in the mountains, where she would shake pine nuts from the pinyon trees, then roast them until they were hot and they slipped out of their shells.4
And when the weather changed and blew in a new season, she would gather together with other bands from other mountains and valleys and rivers. And together, they would dance, often all night, for a week. And these dances might be the only times where she would tell stories or laugh or gossip with people outside of her band. Then, when it was over, they would all go back to their valleys and rivers and mountains.5
We don’t know when she first met a white person or what happened when she did. But it was probably a few years before Charlie was born, let’s say around 1864, when folks who were not Newe started showing up under that huge sky.
The cruel joke of it all was that they were there to dig, and yet they were the ones who would call her people “diggers” like spit flying from their mouths.6 She dug to feed her band, looking for crunchy and wet yampah roots. They dug for gold and silver and other rocks to be carted off and smelted down.
Her people weren’t the first to meet white folks. That had been the Newe who lived farther away, by the rivers where more things grew.
The first arrivals over there trapped the beaver and grazed their horses on the plants that the Newe ate.7
But Newe land stood between the old east and the future west, so it didn’t take long for more white people to cross this landscape with wagons, cattle, and guns.
And maybe she heard some of the stories about these new settlers, passed around as she ground pine nuts on lava rocks or helped her family build shelters for the winter.
They were bad stories, mostly.
Men digging for gold and silver would shoot when they spotted Newe. Later, soldiers in government-issued uniforms would kill them. And later still, some Newe would use the tools of the new arrivals—their guns and their horses—to strike back.8
About nine years earlier, in a place to the north called Ruby Valley, a group of Newe men and government men finally gathered together to sign a treaty to extinguish the violence.
The men took turns signing the treaty—the Newe signed each of their names with an X. The first line of the treaty read, “Peace and friendship shall be hereafter established and maintained.”9
And that was it. With the signature of the US president, the treaty was official.
The Newe kept the right to their land, but there were conditions.
For one, the Newe would put away their guns, and so would the white newcomers. The Newe would get 20 years of food and supplies from the US government, but white settlers would get the right to dig and build on Newe land.
And from now on, the Newe would have a new name: the Western Shoshone—and most of them would have a new place to live: on reservations with firm borders.10
How much she felt these changes we don’t know. Some Newe bands started getting things they had never had before but didn’t have much use for anyway, like white flour.
But over time, wheat, potatoes, plows, and cows had replaced wild deer, pine nuts, and chokecherries. Hunters had become farmers.11
And white people, once a novelty, were now all across the mountains and the valleys, building towns, digging tunnels, claiming land.
Like one Newe man remembered:
“First white man I saw in the willows. From then on, they come every year.”12
So, here is where Charlie’s story is beginning and his mother’s story is ending, with so much change on this land, under that sky. There’s even a new town growing in the valley below, which the white arrivals call Eureka.
To learn more about the history of the Western Shoshone, please take a look at two excellent books, both by members of the tribe: The Road on Which We Came by Steven Crum and Violence over the Land by Ned Blackhawk.
Works Cited:
- Steven J. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), pg. 1
- Crum, The Road on Which We Came, pg. 2
- Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories, 1993
- Richard O. Clemmer, “The Piñon Pine—Old Ally or New Pest,” Environmental Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1985.
- Crum, The Road on Which We Came, pg. 2
- Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 24, 1873
- Crum, The Road on Which We Came, pg. 13
- Crum, The Road on Which We Came, pg. 15
- “Treaty with the Western Shoshoni,” 1863
- Crum, The Road on Which We Came, pg. 25
- Ibid.
- “Survey of the Conditions of the Indians in the United States,” United States Congress, Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, 1932