Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1874. Charlie and his band of Western Shoshone try to navigate new pressures and old traditions, while Thomas Detter grapples with life-altering changes.
Dear listener,
Have you ever thought about the ways in which we, as humans, confront change? Why we find comfort in tradition but also seek out new experiences? And yet, why, when we’re forced to change, we can feel so adrift?
Charlie is a toddler now, still under the care of his grandparents in the hills and valleys outside of Eureka—places that look very different than just a few years earlier.
With each year, there are fewer pinyon pines to harvest for pine nuts, as they fall to the charcoal burners’ axes. And the Indian agents and soldiers of the US government, well, they keep pushing this one line: wouldn’t the Shoshone bands be happier, more prosperous, and better fed if they just gave up their annual migration and settled down on a reservation?
So far, the answers have been mixed. Many Shoshone are ready to embrace the farming life, growing barley and sunflowers and learning to work the plow. But others, like Charlie’s family, still forage, hunt, and move between summer and winter camps.1
How long they can keep up this way of life, well, no one knows.
Even the US government is having a hard time managing the crush of new arrivals that have shown up since they signed the Ruby Valley Treaty with the Shoshone a little more than ten years ago.
Case in point: the government had been eying some land in Ruby Valley for a Shoshone reservation. But by the time they got around to drawing up plans for the reservation, the land was already full of cattle ranches and farms.2
So, now the government tells the Shoshone that this land rush, it’s not going to stop anytime soon. Eventually, all the valleys and mountains that Charlie’s band rely on for their camps will be fenced off, parceled up, and turned into towns, farms, ranches, or mines. So the government men now have a new idea. They ask, why don’t you just move to an already-established reservation in another state, like Idaho or Utah?3
Of course, this wasn’t what the Shoshone leaders agreed to when they signed their names with an “X” on the Ruby Valley treaty a decade earlier. In that treaty, the agreement read:
“The…bands agree that whenever the President of the United States shall deem it expedient for them to abandon the roaming life…he is hereby authorized to make such reservations for their use as he may deem necessary within the country described.”4
The country described in the treaty isn’t Idaho and it isn’t Utah. It’s is a very particular slice of Western Shoshone territory here in Nevada, marked by the rivers and valleys that they have called home for at least one thousand years.
Naturally, the Shoshone chiefs do not agree to relocate to Idaho or Utah. And they turn away the blankets, clothing, and supplies that the government throws in to sweeten the deal. One chief in central Nevada tells the government that accepting the deal would mean selling out his ancestors. The newspaper reports, with their usual snobbery:
“Kawich thought that the acceptance of the articles would be equivalent to selling their birthright…Consequently the goods were returned to the railroad, and the Indians returned to the chase of jackass-rabbits and cast-off grub.”5
Still, the pressure is on, and it’s not letting up. There really is less land for the Shoshone to use to forage and hunt, and there is less food to survive the winter.
Already, some Shoshone have gone to work for the white settlers as miners or farmhands. A few have even used their talents with horses to become cowboys. And the local newspaper loves to print stories about Shoshone women—squaws, they call them—that come to town and try on dresses and jewelry for the first time.6
For now, though, Charlie is living between the old and the new, moving with the seasons while his band still can.
—
February is cold, colder than anyone can seem to remember, when Thomas Detter gets the news that Caroline has died.7
We don’t know if this changes him or shatters him or surprises him. In fact, we don’t know anything about the days and weeks before and after Caroline dies because, for once, Thomas Detter has run out of words.
The Pacific Appeal, one of Detter’s frequent publishers, runs an obituary for Caroline.
“Mrs. Detter was one of the most amiable colored ladies that migrated to this State. She was married in this city to Mr. Thomas Detter, a gentleman well known in Sacramento, San Francisco, and other cities of the State, for his integrity and gentlemanly deportment and his zeal as a writer on behalf of his race.”8
Caroline’s funeral takes place in San Francisco, at the AME Church at the corner of Powell and Jackson streets—almost twenty years since she first arrived here from Philadelphia.9
Certainly Detter’s friends still left in California must wonder what’s next for him. Without Caroline, would he stay in that remote Nevada mining town or return to the coast? Maybe it’s time to build back up his congregation and put away all that desert dirt and boomtown uncertainty.
And perhaps he considers it. After all, life would be easier in San Francisco, now a city of 150,000 people with real roads and real jobs and a railroad connection to the rest of the country. He could say goodbye to creaky wooden houses and cold cabins and the hustle and grind of a mining town.
But Detter decides to stay in Eureka, to raise his son Robert alone—but also not alone. He’ll have the town itself, full of neighbors, customers, and even a handful of friends, all clinging to a life of sorts in a faraway place.
So he writes less. He grieves, he runs his business, and he raises his son, quietly, in the desert.
But grief has a way of piling on. They say it arrives like a spasm that you can’t control, that first you feel like forgetting the pain, and then, when the numbness kicks in, you feel like remembering it instead. And when you think you’re done, that you’ve come out of the cave, it hits you all over again.
Four months after Thomas Detter loses Caroline, he loses his son Robert.10
It’s the kind of gut punch that no one can predict or understand. It’s another cut in the threads holding his life together.
We don’t know how Robert dies. Little ones are vulnerable in Eureka to all sorts of things, from a fire or a flood rumbling down from the mountains to a disease that spreads quietly in close quarters. A few years earlier, the town fell sick with smallpox, which crept from house to house and, eventually, out to the hills and valleys where the Shoshone and the miners and the ranchers lived. In one of his letters, Detter wrote about the outbreak, saying the “angel of death had hovered over our city.”11
Now, after all those years in mountain town after mountain town, all those long, orange-dusted back roads, all those letters and businesses opened and closed, all that time as a family on the move, Caroline and Robert are gone.
So, for the second time in four months, a eulogy appears in the Pacific Appeal for one of Thomas Detter’s family members. This one he probably writes himself.
“Died, In Eureka, Nevada, May 19th, Robert, aged 9 years.
No sickness there, no pain, no death,
No sorrow will he meet;
But bask in calm and holy life,
And angel’s food will eat.”12
One of the first causes that Thomas Detter had supported when he and Caroline had arrived in Nevada was the right for Black children to attend public schools. Following in the lead of California, Nevada had restricted Black students, Chinese students, and native students from their public schools.13
After pressure—including letters from Thomas Detter published in the Pacific Appeal—Nevada lawmakers dropped those restrictions just a few years into Detter’s time in the state.14
Detter must think about that struggle now, how he was able to get Robert a decent education alongside the other children in town. And it must be comforting and maybe a little bittersweet when Robert’s classmates all show up for his funeral.
Unlike Caroline’s service, Robert’s funeral takes place in Eureka, and people from all over town attend. When it comes time for the procession from the Episcopal Church to the town cemetery, a big group of townspeople travel with Thomas Detter and his lost son through the thawing spring streets.15
—
Charlie and his band probably do not make it into Eureka itself very often. People there don’t treat the Shoshone with much respect, and often the tribe members that do end up there get into trouble with drinking or gambling. Still, Charlie’s mother is buried there, in the willow grove on the edge of town. Week by week, that grove is being slowly submerged by the massive slag heap coming from the furnaces.16
Sometimes Shoshone men do go to Eureka for local celebrations, like the Fourth of July. And this year, two Shoshone men are enrolled in a running race for a decent-sized jackpot. While we don’t know if Charlie is there in the crowd, it’s quite possible he is, cheering in that joyful way that only kids can.
The race gets off to a fast start, and about half the people in the town of Eureka are there on the edges of the course to watch. The town is probably vibrating with sound—cheers, shouts, and the rumble of feet on dirt. One of the Shoshone runners is out front quickly, with a French Canadian newspaper printer named Alfred Chartz in second.
The race hits the midpoint at a flag planted on a hillside outside of town. The Shoshone runner is still in the lead, with Chartz in fast pursuit. At least a few of the runners have dropped out. Just as they make the turn around the flag to head back into town, the Shoshone frontrunner trips and falls, and Chartz is now in the lead. Pete, the second Shoshone in the race, speeds up and is now in second place.
But the race has shifted, and there’s too much ground to cover. Chartz bounds into town for the win, with Pete in close second.17
If Charlie is watching this race, this might be a moment he remembers, an insight that he’ll return to later in life—that, no matter what the miners and the newspapers say, a Shoshone can compete in the white world.
—
Thomas Detter is back at his desk.
One of the virtues of living in a mining town is that the work never really stops. If you wake up alive and breathing each morning, you just go to work—in the laundry, in the restaurant, in the barber shop, or in the mines. If it’s a day of rest, you go to church, or, if you’re of a different kind of person, you go to the saloon and have a drink.
It’s been about six months since Detter’s family left this life. He’s barely written anything, but he has kept his barbershop open and his customers served, and in this town, that’s sometimes the best you can do.
But now Detter is ready to take up his pen again. He hasn’t written about his wife or his son since their deaths, and he hasn’t written about ideas, either—nothing about politics or justice or civil rights.
He has a lot to say, and, so, he starts to write.
Over the years, Detter has never hesitated about putting his beliefs out into the world. Perhaps the smudged newsprint of the Pacific Appeal and the San Francisco Elevator have become his new pulpit, ever since he left behind his congregation in Sacramento. Maybe every letter is like a small sermon, aimed at converting one reader at a time, whether they are reading over their breakfast or at the barbershop or in the back of a bar getting drunk on some nameless street.
Now, Detter brings a renewed ferocity to his words. He’s been part of this fight for a long time, and lately he’s lost some crippling personal battles. So putting words down on paper must feel like a way to move a few steps forward, out of the cave.
Over the last 10 years, he’s seen more progress in the fight for civil rights than he’d seen in his entire life up to that point. The end of the Civil War brought with it a flood of legislation that aimed to dig up the dark root of slavery. These laws would fight the discrimination that had stained the United States since its founding.
First came the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, then the 14th, which established birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law. Then came the 15th, which swept away most restrictions on voting (at least for white and Black men). The US military maintained the laws across the former Confederate states, and for the first time, Black men ran for—and won—elected positions.18
Yet now, the momentum is starting to slow. The new amendments are powerful, but they are only effective if the federal government actually enforces them.
Up until now, the federal government has implemented parts of a larger Reconstruction plan. They’ve established the Freedmen’s Bureau, which helped Black people emerging from slavery be able to vote and find work. Recently, federal prosecutors have dismantled the Ku Klux Klan, which had formed to try to intimidate Black Southerners. Reconstruction has also brought with it public schools and railroads.19
But now that the economy is slowing down, there’s less appetite for expensive government programs like schools and public works projects. Plus, the federal government can’t shake allegations of corruption within the post-Civil War Reconstruction projects.20
But probably the biggest threat to progress is the familiar desire to turn the page on the past. Many northern anti-slavery campaigners and Southern white politicians now agree: with slavery abolished and the South defeated, it’s time to move on. The South does not need an armed military babysitter any longer, and the North is tired of paying for it.21
This kind of thinking gnaws at Thomas Detter. He knows that the work is far from complete. Across the country—not just in the South—Black citizens still struggle with everyday life, from sending their kids to school to finding a place to rest, worship, or even eat a meal. And violence and discrimination in the South hasn’t simply blown away on the wind.
So, here we are, with Detter preparing his next letter to the Pacific Appeal. This time he’s focusing on a piece of legislation that has been stuck in endless debates in Congress. It’s called the Civil Rights Act of 1870, and it’s been kicked around the Senate for so long that the man who wrote it, the Massachusetts anti-slavery Republican Charles Sumner, has died.22
The Act would go a long way towards plugging up the gaps left behind from the earlier amendments. It would ensure that the federal government, not the states, enforces civil rights law. And it would ensure that every citizen across the country could find a place to sleep, a public school to attend, a church to worship in, and even a cemetery to be buried in. It would also finally open up juries nationwide, a battle that Detter has been fighting since his earliest days in California.23
Many political commentators see the struggle for civil rights as a battle between the progress of the north and the regression of the south. But Detter recognizes that this struggle is national. In one letter he wrote not long before coming to Nevada, he argued that Reconstruction shouldn’t apply only to the South, but rather the whole country.24
He hasn’t wavered in that opinion since then.
Now, Detter comes out swinging, and he doesn’t stop. Whether it’s loss or anger or exhaustion, his words burn on the page.
“Is there a government in existence where the title of citizenship is such a farce to any class of its subjects as the title is to us?
Just think of it! An American citizen denied accommodations at a public inn—shelter, food, and a bed—and proscribed on almost every highway. And still our political friends, who have the power to remedy the evil, wink at it. They lack moral courage.
Until the life of a respectable colored man is estimated to be of as much value in the eyes of the law as that of the lowest white man who has nothing to commend to superiority save a white skin, we shall have no better state of things.”25
We don’t know how Thomas Detter feels as he finishes the letter and postmarks it back to the Pacific Appeal offices in San Francisco. But it must feel good, in some part of his being, to let out a righteous scream into the void.
If you’d like to learn more about other Black writers who explored the American West like Thomas Detter, check out Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Eric Gardner.
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. 30-31
2. Crum, The Road on Which We Came, pg. 32
3. Crum, The Road on Which We Came, pg. 33-34
4. “Treaty with the Western Shoshoni,” 1863
5. Eureka Daily Sentinel, January 11, 1874
6. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 24, 1874
7. San Francisco Chronicle, February 13, 1874
8. Pacific Appeal, February 14, 1874
9. Ibid.
10. Pacific Appeal, May 30, 1874
11. Pacific Appeal, April 13, 1872
12. Pacific Appeal, May 30, 1874
13. Elmer Rusco, Good Time Coming?: Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), pg. 80
14. Rusco, Good Time Coming?, pg. 81
15. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 21, 1874
16. Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories, 1993
17. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 16, 1874
18. S. Mintz and S. McNeil, “Congressional Reconstruction.” Digital History, 2018.
19. S. Mintz and S. McNeil, “Republican Governments in the South.” Digital History, 2018.
20. S. Mintz and S. McNeil, “The End of Reconstruction.” Digital History, 2018.
21. Ibid.
22. “Landmark Legislation: Civil Rights Act of 1875,” United States Senate.
23. Ibid.
24. San Francisco Elevator, December 27, 1867
25. Pacific Appeal, October 24, 1874