Martha C. Knack and Omer C. Stewart As Long as the River Shall Run, An Ethnohistory of Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1984, 433 pp.
Arrival of the Anglos and Their Frontier Culture
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[p. 44] The next major events in the white history of Nevada involved not ranching, commerce, or travel, but mining. The American West had a large floating population of single males whose primary goal was to be the first to discover a gold strike, make a quick fortune, retire from the western lands to an urban area, and there spend the rest of their lives as leisured millionaires. These men, with their hopes and dreams, migrated from one mining camp to another, prospecting, searching, and rushing after rumors of rich ores. A few at a time, disappointed gold-seekers persistently crossed from California into Nevada, reasoning that if the western slopes of the Sierras were so rich in mineral deposits, then their eastern flanks should be too. In 1850 one such prospector found small quantities of gold about 40 miles east of the California line, in what is now called Gold Canyon. Between 1850 and 1859, the Gold Canyon area supported between 100 and 200 miners, and over that period produced approximately a half million dollars worth of gold. [p. 35] Encouraged, these men continued prospecting, ever seeking richer deposits. They spread out in all directions through Western Nevada, not only in the hills around the original strike but also as far afield as Black Rock Desert. In January of 1859, gold was discovered at Gold Hill near Virginia City, and a few months later, silver was found nearby. In June the rich deposits of Six Mile Canyon were found. Before fall, some California miners were already arriving at the new diggings, and the following year this immigration became a flood, as word spread of the Comstock Lode. By the end of the summer of 1860, there were 6,000 miners in the vicinity of Virginia City.
In a manner of a few months the white population in Nevada had jumped from a tiny minority of 200 among far more numerous Indians, to an overwhelming majority. Despite the initial trickle of transients, this dominance was sudden, complete, and irreversible. The opportunity for natives to respond and resist was nearly gone before they could even comprehend the threat. The rapidity of this development produced a contact history virtually unique in North America.
In order to understand the effects of the Comstock discovery on the subsequent history of the Northern Paiute-White relations, it is necessary to know something of the mining enterprises at the time, of which there were basically two kinds. Initially the work was by individual prospectors. With a gold pan, a shovel, and a mule, these men wandered the hills singly, or in groups of two or three, making exploratory trenches and panning the washes, looking for "color."Once they made a discovery and filed claims, the nature of the enterprise changed dramatically.
Unlike the placer deposits of California, most of the mining areas in Nevada consisted of bedrock ledges having very rich mineral infusions. It required a great amount of equipment to follow these ledges deep into the earth, shore up the rock sides of the shafts with massive timbers, and remove large quantities of rock for smelting. Such enterprise was far beyond the means of the prospector, who usually sold out to banks, financiers from California and New York, and the rapidly formed mining corporations. These large-scale investments led to stable population centers such as Virginia City, with newspapers, banks, wooden buildings, and gambling halls, in marked contrast to the prospectors' tent cities.
Despite the development of established mining centers, individual prospecting continued in the surrounding countryside throughout the nineteenth century. Prospectors scattered widely across the landscape, unguarded either by the presence of other white men or by the military. Despite their vulnerability, whites insisted upon the safety of these prospectors, for they carried the potential future of all miners with them. The mining community developed no means of protecting its own members, and yet irrationally insisted on the ability of individual operators to wander at random through territory another people still believed to be their own. There was massive outrage in the mining towns whenever a prospector was killed either by whites with competing interests or, as was more often charged, by Indians. Then, the white community lashed out violently against the nearest Indian encampment.
Another source of trouble between the Indians and whites was resource competition. Unlike the early trappers, miners were not self-supporting. They did not depend on wild foods, but preferred imported products like bacon and flour. Thus it might appear that there would be minimal competition between native and mining populations for the resources of the area, but this was not so. Piñon trees, virtually the only large trees growing near the Comstock, were selectively cut to provide timbers for mine shoring, as well as for building and cook fires. The areas around mining towns were soon stripped bare of all piñon trees, thus effectively removing for non-food purposes one of the major Indian food resources.
In addition to destructive harvesting of piñon, the mining economy also confiscated other resources. As soon as gold-seekers flocked to the Comstock, cattlemen drove their herds from California to feed miners too busy seeking their fortunes to feed themselves. Stockmen rapidly commandeered any available grasslands within easy marketing distance of the Virginia City mines, especially in the Tahoe, Truckee, and Carson valleys. Livestock ate the same grasses that had previously provided a major part of the Indian's subsistence.
Water, too, was expropriated, as stockmen claimed springs for their cattle. Miners diverted nearby streams for flumes and stamp mills. [p, 47] Prospectors camped on springs throughout native gathering territories and chased Indians away for fear of theft of their personal possessions. Eventually fences to control cattle and Anglo concepts of private ownership of land further restricted both Indian access to water sources and the mobility on which their indigenous economy had depended. [This doesn't assess the pollution issues.KR]
Thus the enterprises which accompanied Comstock mining increased the ecological competition with Indian groups of the area. Since miners sought out the largest stands of timber and cattlemen wanted the best pastures, whites absorbed the richest productive areas of this region, and they backed up their claims with guns. As a result, nearby Indian populations were put into a position of dependency during at least a part of their annual cycle. Although they much resented this seizure of their land, Indians could respond in only two ways. Some withdrew, as they had from wagon trains; those in the mining areas simply retreated to remote areas, However, because of the nature of prospecting and because of the very rapid development of white industries supporting mining, there were fewer and fewer areas to which they could flee. Regions which had once been isolated, such as Pyramid Lake, were rapidly brought under Anglo-American control. While a few native groups survived by this tactic into the twentieth century in areas devoid of mineral-bearing bedrock, it soon became an impractical alternative for most groups.
The other choice for Indians was to accept the presence of whites and to treat the white developments themselves as productive resources. From even the earliest records of mining towns in Nevada, there were constant references to Indians in the streets. Very soon, Indians began working for white men in exchange for cast-off clothing, food, and other material benefits. Such work was rarely, if ever, in the mines, the major profitable economic activity in these towns. Rather, Indians found work in menial support services, such as timbering, cattle-tending, loading and unloading wagons. When they failed to find work, they begged. Indian women found work even more easily than their men in those women-short frontier towns, where they washed clothes, cleaned houses and served as prostitutes. Despite living in towns, these Indians continued to utilize whatever native resources were unwanted by whites, and they replaced those expropriations [p. 48] of their annual cycle with periods spent in the mining towns. The importance of wage labor and town residence varied from group to group, some depending on it more completely than others.
In addition to their patterns of resource use, the white population had other characteristics bound to generate conflict with Indians. Although differing from East Coat culture of the time in its technological and social simplicity, the frontier culture encompassed most of the beliefs and values of the original Anglo-European heritage. Some of these basic cultural assumptions, forming the unconscious motivation of white actors in Nevada history, are very much part of the setting for the events soon to begin at Pyramid Lake.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, American society was very self-conscious. It was convinced of its cultural superiority, and this ethnocentrism often took on racial overtones. Americans viewed Chinese in California, European ethnics in New York, but preeminently, native Indians, as underdeveloped and needing to progress and assimilate into the welcoming melting-pot of civilization. The Eastern American way of life saw itself as intrinsically desirable. All people, it thought, should aspire to its heights, and if a "savage" should spurn the gift of participating in this culture, he would be acting in a most "ungrateful" manner. Indians were criticized as being nomadic, individually indistinguishable, and unable to speak the English language. However, these were superficial criticisms camouflaging a more basic set of evaluations.
Some of these underlying assumptions cropped up through belief in Manifest Destiny, that United States hegemony would inevitably spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific. On both the level of political rhetoric and of popular culture, Americans maintained that they had a right to control this territory and that their settlement should fill up the "vacant" land of the Western Wilderness.
That this land could still be defined as vacant, despite numerous wars with native residents throughout the white-occupied sections of the country, was the result of another cultural definition. This assumption stated that if the land were not "used," it was vacant. "Use" was defined to be "best use," which consisted only of intensive, sedentary agriculture, specifically the production of cash crops. During the frontier period, white settlers, government agents, and military men universally [p. 49] expressed this opinion. In the minds of Anglo-Europeans, who saw themselves as fleeing the overcrowding first of Europe and then of the East Coast. there could be no allowance for the native pattern of extensive and transient use of natural resources. Because they perceived their flight as just and their culture superior, Americans assumed that they must and should dominate the West. An early Indian agent in Nevada, Major Henry Douglas, recorded that during the negotiation with Paiutes on the Walker River Reservation, he warned them, "For when white men come in-fill up the country, you will have no country of your own. Whites will get it all." Such beliefs, stated as unquestionable truths, reveal the strong American faith that white domination of the area was inevitable. For Douglas and others the question was not if whites would fill up the land, but when." [Some of the White uses involved transitional rights, such as grazing or mining . . . KR]
Whites were selectively interested in a narrow range of productive resources, ones which they could exploit by methods familiar to their own culture . . .
Another aspect of this cultural definition of proper use was the concept of monetary value . . . The idea of marketable products from the land, products with familiar values which could be measured in dollars and cents, was vey much involved in the white perception [p. 50] of proper use. This was also a very effective argument in securing aid from the government, since such productive lands would be taxable and would validate the expense of military protection.
Driven by their quest for land, local settlers believed that any area reserved for Indians to the exclusion of whites were a direct blocking of their individual freedom . . . [p. 51]
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. . . Not only did Indians recalcitrantly refuse the proffered Anglo civilization, but whites found it inconvenient to coexist with hunting and gathering societies. They found that native groups crossed and recrossed the sedentary white settlements in pursuit of their subsistence, Indians believed that land was a common value whose products should be used by those in need. Whites, on the other hand, believed in private land "holdings;" a piece of land belonged to the man who held legal title and made "improvements" on it, and then he had exclusive right to its possession and products. Anyone else found on the land was trespassing. Whether or not theft and danger were actually involved, frontier whites feared that some of their private property might be purloined by passing Indians, and found their presence a constant and irritating "annoyance." [These conflicts arise in grazing rights in public land; or mineral rights separated from homesteading . . . KR]
. . . Through a curious mixture of condescension, ignorance and prejudice, Anglos depicted Indians as lacking the traits which they valued and therefore [the Indians] had no culture at all . . .
[p. 52] . . .
. . . Some newspapers argued [the Indian tribes, Paiutes and Shoshones] have lost nothing by the coming of the whites among them, and they may have fared better than in the old days . . . the domination by the whites was believed to be inevitable and combined with the idea that the whites added to it the benefits of civilization. Progress was considered to exist. [The civilization of the whites represented that progress.] The agricultural and industrial way of life brought by Anglo-Americans was Progress. Therefore, it was inherently superior to the hunting and gathering existence of the Indians. Such superiority gave it a right to displace the native life-way. American's were "civilized" in contrast to the nomadic Indians, and Civilization like Progress was an "Absolute" good.
The American cultural concepts which were to generate conflict with Indians not only concerned the evaluation of land use and of lifestyles, but also involved assumptions about the very nature of human society. White Americans believed that all societies were arranged hierarchically like their own, and so lay ultimately under the control of a leader in one form or another . . .
[p. 53] . . . Whites demanded that these designated chiefs control or deliver to them any Indians found offending white property and personal rights. Thus the new chiefs were made personally responsible for the behavior of the collective Indian population, over whom they had had no real power in aboriginal times. Chiefs were thus cast into a role as representatives, a role totally alien to the system of individualistic democracy which had previously been sufficient to meet private needs for intra-social peace and extra tribal contact.
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The existence of a chief was convenient for the whites, but it was a new role conflicting with traditional values of the small scattered native groups. Whites created chiefs in the Great Basin by insisting that they did exist. Whites behaved as if headmen were chiefs, chastising and punishing them for the actions of others. And there were Indians willing to assume this role thrust upon them . . . [p. 54] . . . Throughout the nineteenth century, the morally based leadership of the elders and shamans continued to parallel the titular power of the newly created chiefs so necessary in the new social conditions thrust upon the Paiutes.
One of the outstanding characteristics of the American western frontier period was its propensity for and admiration of personal individual violence. The self-image of rugged individual violence. The self-image of rugged individuals competitively seeking their private fortunes and standing up against any opposition which sought to block these desires was the ideal of western American manhood . . .
When the white settlers had first entered the Great Basin and had been a tiny minority, they had depended on Indian friendship. During this very early period, their records described Paiutes as "friendly," "fine Indians" and "very much inclined to labor." . . .
However, all this was to change dramatically after the influx of miners to the Comstock Lode, made safe by the military defeat of the Paiutes in 1860. Indians no longer formed the majority of the population in Western Nevada. They need no longer be feared militarily, since they have been proven vulnerable to Western technology. The characterization of Indians in white writings changed: "The only tribe of importance being the Pi-Utes--a lazy, ignorant, predatory band of irresponsible savages, subsisting chiefly upon herbs, and such wild animals as they could kill with their primitive weapons . . .
The Anglo propensity for personal violence was a characteristic of the western frontier which was well documented . . . Because of the rapid flood of nearly 6,000 miners into the Comstock area within a few months. it is understandable that there was little established law. All men were interested in getting rich quick and none wanted to work for the low wages of a sheriff. The first law in Nevada was miner's law, which involved simply the enforcement of contracts, claims, and legal titles. Criminal law grew slowly. For many years a man's only defense against personal or property assault by other whites was his own ability to threaten retaliation. This led to a high homicide rate . . .
[p. 56] . . .
There was an attitude of Indian-hating pervading all Nevada which turned the American propensity for violence directly against Paiutes . . .
A similar Machiavellian attitude was held by many Nevadans, if more temperately expressed. With laudable understatement, one historian, in attempting to sum up a history of violence in the 1860's on the part of a paramilitary group of volunteers, said, " Of course one much realize that the average Nevadan was violently anti-Indian, and many openly advocated their complete annihilation. . . .
[p, 57] . . .
Another clear illustration was purportedly from William Stewart, later an important US Senator from Nevada, recounting his early pioneer days in or about 1860. The story is told of how he "cleaned up a party of marauding Indians." Stewart was attacked by Indians when prospecting alone one day, but he managed to get away on a mule. He sought the help of a local white man from whom he borrowed a rifle, having been prospecting in this dangerous, savage-ridden hinterland alone with only a Derringer for snakes. . . . [p. 58] he collected 20 men in Nevada City . . . he attacked and forced out of the territory a band of Indians and hanged the leader of the Indians . . .
Another similar event took place in Paradise Valley in 1865. Five or six members of the California Volunteers were guarding government stock in the valley when 50 Indians appeared. The Indians raised a white flag, inviting a parley, laying down their arms. [p. 59] The whites called in reinforcements and shot the unarmed Indians. The local newspaper man called the Indians "treacherous savages, red devils and miscreant dogs, and the whites, good citizens and noble. This the editor of the Humboldt Register:
"No prisoners were taken, in this fight. It was conducted on the system proved by the history of all our border troubles to be the only correct method of quieting Indians-killing them as fast as you can lay hands on them. The Indian nature, as developed on the frontier, is devoid of gratitude, and of all susceptibility to humanizing influences. Be kind to them and they think you fear them; and they grow insolent in proportion as you treat them well. Shoot them down, scourge them with saber and brand, till they cringe and beg for their lives, -and you . . . may get along with him."
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Not all Nevadans were paranoid bigots. Some refused to believe that the so-called Indian difficulties on the frontier war solely the biologically determined product of innate Indian hostility., In fact [p. 60] some believe that the American culture's acceptance of individual violence was itself partly to blame. Thus in 1852, one touring government agent wrote:
It is my painful duty to report to you, that from all of the information I can get, from Whites and Indians, the great, almost the sole cause of the difficulties -the destruction of life and property on this [the Humboldt] route, is owing to the bad conduct of the whites, who were the first to commence it-and in many instances the whites are the sole depredators of it, they manage to have it charged to the Indians . . .
This continued violence resulted in the frontier authorities believing that the only way to stop the violence was to physically separate the groups . . . [p. 61] [Reservations] ideally suited the desires of the Nevadan settlers, for it would free the land for their use which they considered a natural result of the rightful westward migration of white Americans according to Manifest Destiny . . .
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[p. 62] Why did whites need simultaneously these contradictory images of Indians? The answer to the paradox is not long to be sought. Indians were praised in direct relation to their willingness to do menial labor for whites, to work on farms plowing and harvesting, to to timber cutting [p. 63] and road construction, to herd livestock. For this they are paid wages in food, cast-off clothing, or even a little cash. In a mining area where all white men were avidly seeking their own fortunes and were unwilling to work for wages, Indians provided a labor pool in a labor-short, expansionist economy. As such, they were useful to their white neighbors. Then their seasonable labor was not needed, they did not have to be kept on wage, for unlike Anglo hired help, they could be turned loose to support themselves by traditional hunting and gathering, In this way, a symbiotic relationship was established between some Paiutes and particular ranchers and other landholders throughout the valleys of Nevada . . .
The events which were soon to begin at Pyramid Lake, and which form the substance of this history, were small but in no way exceptional manifestations of the great tradition of European imperialism . . . Rushing to the Great Basin, trappers, immigrants and miners brought with them a freight of colonialist ideas which found their American expression in concept of Manifest Destiny. Assured of the moral correctness of their occupation of the land because of the "progressiveness" of their civilization, they freely applied their own ideas of proper and exclusive land use. The American movement west featured settlement and intensive mining capitalism, and had no interest in permitting a self-sustaining native population . . . Displacement was a key element in Great Basin policy . . .
(Back to 1850-1860)