Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1875. Charlie and his Western Shoshone band are caught up in a march to battle, while Thomas Detter marks a major breakthrough.
Dear listener,
Have you ever found yourself caught up in a moment that you don’t fully understand, giving into the temptation of anger or excitement, fueled by a crowd? If you have, you’ll know what Charlie and his band are experiencing in the hills and valleys outside of town.
Fall arrives with cooler temperatures and a wash of light across Eureka’s huge skies, and the miners hustle to stake their claims before winter hits.
Miners are always looking for anything that can give them an edge, and sometimes that means local knowledge of the mountainside and the soil. In recent years, miners have hired members of the Shoshone bands to guide them to possibly promising sites for digging.1 What could look like just another hillside of loose rock and scrubby pines may be a landmark or a waypoint for someone born and raised here.
But these partnerships don’t always lead to cooperation. Just 20 years earlier, miners would shoot Shoshone on sight, and suspicions haven’t just faded away since then. Plus, as it’s gotten harder to make a living as a miner, budgets have gotten leaner and negotiations have gotten tougher.
So here we are, in early fall, and a miner named James Toland hires Toby, a guide from the nearby Goshute tribe, to scout mining locations for him.
Toby works for 50 cents a day plus a place to sleep. He guides Toland and his partner, a miner named Leathers, through the mountain valleys that he knows, helping them prospect for anything that looks promising. He’s been working with the two men for some time, but now there’s a problem: they’ve fallen behind on paying him.
So one afternoon as the three men hike up a canyon, Toby decides to act. He takes the rifle that he carries in the backcountry, waits until the men are ahead of him on the trail, and then shoots Toland in the back. The miner hits the ground, dead.
Leathers scrambles for the Colt pistol that the two miners carry with them while Toby prepares for another shot. The two men fire at each other, both missing, and Toby takes off for the hills. Leathers makes his way to a nearby ranch, but it’s long into the night before he shows up. He tells the rancher that he doesn’t think that Toby is acting alone.
The next day Leathers leads a group of men back to where he had started the day before. They find Toland’s body, and then they encounter a Shoshone man who is riding a horse. They tell the man he’s under arrest and he quickly rides away. The group pursue the rider, then shoot and kill him.
The day after is a mirror image: a group of men searching for Toby encounter another Shoshone man, this time carrying a gun. The man insists that the gun is his, and he won’t surrender it. After a scuffle, the group, yet again, shoot and kill him.2
This is the kind of cycle that could continue, rinse and repeat, for weeks. This is the kind of cycle that can lead to a frenzy, to killings that no one ever records or writes down or remembers, to people simply disappearing in the desert hills.
But this time, there’s a different outcome. Once he hears about the killings, Levi Gheen, the US government’s Indian agent who works closely with the Shoshone and speaks their language, travels into the backcountry. He meets with the local chief, who tells him that he’s sent two members of his band to find Toby and bring him back for justice. Gheen suggests he send two more men, because Toby is on the run and he’s armed.
And then Gheen makes a wise decision. He knows that he needs to get the white residents in the area to settle down and put away their weapons or the killings will continue. And he also knows that this is bad timing for a mob to go stalking the hills for Indians to kill. It’s the season for fresh pine nuts, and families will be in the mountains in big numbers, picking the fresh trees and doing their harvest dances.
So Gheen tells the chief to urge as many of his people as possible to move to the closest mountain, where they will be safer from the searchers. It’s not foolproof but it may slow down the revenge killings that have kicked up over the past few days.3
Meanwhile, back in Eureka, the state militia is gearing up and marching out of town. The local newspaper writes a glowing review of these troops, who will protect the region from what many people think will be a Shoshone attack. By this logic, Toby’s murder of Toland is just the first shot of an impending war.
“Two Eureka companies of state militia…were handsomely received and entertained by the citizens. The fine appearance of the men and their quiet, gentlemanly demeanor won for them the good opinion of the people of this place. Many of them were soldiers in the late unpleasantness, upon the one side or the other, and understand hard fighting.”4
A few of the soldiers even stop by Louis Monaco’s photography studio to have their portraits taken in full uniform.5
Lewis Bradley, Nevada’s governor, worries that the militia may not be enough. There are all kinds of stories swirling around about an invasion plan from the Shoshones and Goshutes, plus a conspiracy theory involving secret Mormon baptisms of Indians. He’s worried.
“All the Indians in eastern Nevada appear to be on the warpath. Ask for 200 guns and ammunition.”6
Despite all this chatter, the higher-up military commanders aren’t convinced that a war is about to start. A major general writes to his superiors, and he’s blunt.
“Are you not misinformed? Thus far I learned only of a difficulty between one or two Indians and some white men.”7
Five days later, 12 tribal members locate Toby and escort him, all night, back to camp to be charged with the killing. Leathers identifies Toby as the shooter, and the Indian agent Levi Gheen turns him over to the state militia so he can face trial.
What happens next is exactly the type of justice that Gheen wants to avoid but can’t. He writes about it in his report after the fact.
“Soon after my departure, a written demand, signed by about 40 citizens, was presented for the Indian Toby. It was impossible to prevent the Indian from falling into the hands of the citizens, and Toby was taken and hanged in the presence of the entire camp.”8
This whole escapade sounds a whole lot like the phantom army of Shoshone warriors from a few years earlier that turned out to be just 2 Shoshone hunters shooting at a squirrel. But this time, four people are left dead.
Charlie is too young to know much about the details of all of this violence. But certainly he’ll hear about it growing up. There’s even a name for this brief flash of killing—the newspapers are calling it the White Pine War.9
—
We don’t know how Thomas Detter receives the update from Washington, DC. Maybe he reads about in the local newspaper, or gets a letter from a friend, or overhears the news from the attorneys and judges who pass through town.
It’s late winter—nearly spring—when Thomas Detter learns that the Civil Rights Act has passed Congress and has become law. A year ago, around this time, he was burying his wife. And just four months after that, he was burying his son. But now, in a twist of the universe, he’s celebrating the passage of what some in Congress are calling the most important civil rights legislation since the Civil War-era amendments.10
Since Charles Sumner first proposed the bill back in 1870, there have been some changes. Lawmakers dropped the requirement to open public schools nationwide, and cut back on the jury service requirements. But, at the end of the day, Congress had passed a bill that gave every resident of the United States equal access to a place to stay and ways to move around.11
It has been an exhausting, draining past year for Thomas Detter, but this is a huge victory. He’s spent years pushing to secure rights for Black Americans, and he’s often written about his frustration about the slow, start-and-stop progress in the Congress.
A year earlier, before Robert died, he had almost given up hope that the Civil Rights Bill would ever pass. He wrote:
“The Civil Rights bill seems still to linger, and I fear, like its great creator, it will die surrounded by its professed friends, who have not the moral courage to breathe into it national life.
I regard the title of citizenship of little value…when it does not make all equal and remove every political and civil disability.”12
Thomas Detter would sometimes write about the boom and bust cycles of the mining towns, and how strange it would feel to be up one day and down the next.13 But maybe this isn’t just something that happens in mining towns. Maybe this is just the rhythms of a human life, toying with us, sending us down onto our knees and then back onto our feet.
—
Thomas Detter likes to talk to crowds. Once a preacher, always a preacher, trying to sway the masses and bring even the skeptics in the back row around to his side by the time his speech is through.
About five years ago, back in Elko, the Black folks in town had thrown a parade celebrating the 15th Amendment, which allowed Black men to vote. Elko had really turned out for the celebration, although they were upstaged by the larger Black community in Virginia City, a bigger and richer mining town to the west. There, they had a full brass band and a hand-sewn flag that read “Justice is slow but sure.”14
Elko did their best to show off, though. Someone suggested setting off a cannon, but nobody had one, so they used two anvils instead.15
After a few speakers took their turns, Detter got up and gave a speech. When reprinted later in the San Francisco Elevator, his talk took up half the page. Some of the other speakers focused on the Black faces in the crowd, talking about their long lineage in this country. Detter did that, too, but he wasn’t shy about giving advice about how to make it in the capitalist society that the United States was becoming.
“Seek often those acquirements that make nations great—get knowledge and money.”
Then, at some point in his speech, he turned towards the white residents of Elko, and he spoke straight to them.
“My white fellow citizens, we want you to conquer your prejudices. Give us even justice—open wide the doors of your common schools to our children…”16
Now, Detter has the chance to deliver another speech, but this time it will be the most high-profile gathering he’s spoken to yet, back in his old stomping grounds in San Francisco.
—
In San Francisco, Horticultural Hall is big and verdant and full of people. The air is probably sweet and warm from plants growing in the “winter garden” inside, as well as the heat wafting from the crowd.17 Looking out from the stage that looms over the hall, Thomas Detter sees what is likely the largest number of people who have ever heard him speak.
First, there’s a choir, and then the eldest son of Detter’s old friend Jeremiah Sanderson, from his California Colored Convention days, reads the entire Civil Rights Bill out loud.
After an introduction, it’s Detter’s time to speak. Compared to Elko, he keeps this speech short. He starts by acknowledging that all men are born equal, and then he takes a moment to celebrate what has been a bumpy road up to this point.
“I regard the passage of the Civil Rights Bill as the last act in the drama of human rights, fixing ever, I trust, our political and social status in these United States.”18
He spends much of his speech urging his listeners to push the country forward, to stay vigilant over the Republican Party that has brought them this far but can’t afford to waver now. First, though, he looks out over the crowd and says:
“The negro is no longer a slave—he is a free man. Now and forever in his native land, he is an American citizen.”19
In life, we talk about events coming full circle, as though everything we start years earlier comes back around to a clean and predictable end. It’s probably fairer to say that the events in our lives ripple, and sometimes, at moments of grace or beauty or tragedy, we can feel the ripples from an earlier time, still running down the river.
If that’s the case, then perhaps Thomas Detter felt those ripples as he stepped down from the stage. Maybe he felt the ripple still spreading outward from his wife’s funeral, which had happened less than a mile from here a year before. Maybe he felt the ripple, smaller now but still there, of the letters he had written in those cold mining towns, pushing for the Civil Rights Bill to become law. And maybe, faintest of all, he felt the ripple from when he first stepped off the steamship onto the California shore, a few miles away and 23 years earlier.
If you’d like to learn more about the advocacy before the Civil War that laid the foundation for civil rights law, check out Until Justice Be Done by Kate Masur.
Works Cited:
1. Steven J. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), pg. 31
2. The White Pine News, September 25, 1875
3. Ibid.
4. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 9, 1875
5. Emerson Marcus, “Nevada’s Impotence and Anarchy: National Guard Disbandment, 1906-1928.” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2019.
6. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 9, 1875
7. Ibid.
8. The White Pine News, September 25, 1875
9. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone, pg. 27
10. “Landmark Legislation: Civil Rights Act of 1875,” United States Senate.
11. Ibid.
12. Pacific Appeal, May 16, 1874
13. San Francisco Elevator, March 19, 1869
14. Elmer Rusco, Good Time Coming?: Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), pg. 98
15. Rusco, Good Time Coming?, pg. 99
16. San Francisco Elevator, May 6, 1870
17. Image of Horticultural Hall, San Francisco, 1876, California Historical Society Collection at Stanford
18. Pacific Appeal, April 24, 1875
19. Ibid.