The thunder grew louder. Everything rumbling. A dust cloud billowed off the asphalt road that split the valley. Semi-trucks loaded with slag stampeded across the basin like an ancient herd. And then all went quiet. Only the sound of rain softly pelting the aluminum roof could be heard, forlorn.
It was all gone, the cattle, the horses. The livestock posts planted a decade ago had been ripped from the earth. The pickup truck now a rusting carcass. The apple trees were withered old bones. The windows on the homestead were aged and dirty. Inside, the table still set for supper. A spoon. A plate. A salt shaker. Unwashed dishes in the sink. Cornmeal in the cupboard. A blanket on the old yellow mattress. The damned death rattle of rain on the roof.
They killed us, the old Indian woman said, considering some old mail left on the countertop. Land is life.
I had met Carrie Dann ten years earlier during her range war with the U.S. government, and I had liked her very much. We set fencing poles and stretched barbed wire for her livestock. We ate wild rabbit stew with Wonder Bread and margarine. One evening, as the desert air began to cool and the grasshoppers came to life, she told me then that as far as indigenous people go, without the land the Shoshone people would cease to be.
She was near eighty now. Old but sturdy, five feet tall, gray hair, lined face, knotty hands hanging from a dirty canvas jacket. She had abandoned this eight-hundred-acre homestead a few years back after her sister Mary died in a ranching accident, heartbroken and unable to manage it alone. Her brother Clifford was of no use anymore. Unable to see or hear, he spent his days sitting in front of a television back in the village, near the county road that glittered with broken beer bottles.
Like Cliven Bundy, the Dann clan fought the federal government for decades over the right to freely graze their livestock on what the government claimed was public land. And like Bundy, the Danns claimed ancestral rights, the difference being that the Shoshone people had been there for a thousand years and their ancestral rights were prescribed in the Treaty of Ruby Valley. The treaty bequeathed eighty million acres to the tribe, about two-thirds of modern-day Nevada, plus parts of Utah and the watershed that provides the tap water to Southern California.
The agreement granted white settlers passage through Shoshone lands across the Great Basin—but no rights to settle it. Purely a peace and friendship deal. But the colonists and the government took the land anyway, and all the gold and silver and water beneath it.
In the late 1970s, a panel of federal bureaucrats acknowledged the treaty, but, citing a novel concept called “gradual encroachment,” they ruled that Nevada no longer belonged to the Shoshone and hadn’t since 1872. They awarded the tribe a settlement of fifteen cents an acre, an amount based on the land’s 1872 value.
The tribe refused the money, so the federal government accepted $26 million on the Shoshone’s behalf and put it in the bank to collect interest. The Danns fought this arrangement all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that since the federal government had accepted the money from the federal government on the Indians’ behalf, that constituted a settlement with the tribes, and thus the treaty was null and void.
Get off the land, red woman.
The Danns fought on. Not with guns, but with matchsticks and gasoline and sit-ins. Clifford was sent to prison for trying to light himself on fire. The elderly sisters tried to hide their horses in the back range, but federal agents swooped in with helicopters and assault rifles and cattle trucks. The livestock was taken away and auctioned to satisfy the Danns’ $5 million fine for unlawfully grazing on their ancestral lands.
No paramilitary came to help the Indians. No militia. No Booda. No white man in a fifth wheel. No cable TV reporters dressed in earth tones. Everyone’s got love for the indigenous peoples of America and their plight, until it comes time to pay up. That’s when the red romance gives way to the white realities of power. Bundy, remember, said he would consider handing his land back to the Indian, but he never actually did.
I guess we just weren’t sexy enough. The old woman cackled. Two old indigenous ladies. I’m not all that pretty, and I’m not white at all. But, you know, we’re not violent people anyway. You’re not supposed to take any life unless you’re gonna eat it. Oh well.
The Bureau of Land Management claimed the Dann sisters were destroying life on the range. Overgrazing it. Putting the natural order in jeopardy. One wonders if this was truly the reason for running them off, because just a few weeks after the Danns’ livestock was confiscated, one of the continent’s largest gold mines opened in the valley, near where the road elbows east and the asphalt becomes gravel. This mine uses cyanide and groundwater to separate gold particles from rock. The process is done in a gigantic open pit. The mine was owned by Barrick Gold, a powerful behemoth with financial and familial ties to . . . Senator Harry Reid.
Looking out now above Carrie Dann’s shoulder, to the west, where the sun was orange and fading, I could make out the peak of a foothill that had been sawed away by the gold miners. Dust rose from the grinding of the semi-trucks.
They fucked you, I said.
No, she corrected. They raped me.
It was an important distinction. Fucking implies you asked for it.
Months later, Cliven Bundy would be arrested in Oregon and charged with a raft of counts, including conspiracy, obstruction, and assault on a federal officer, for his role in the Bunkerville standoff. Booda would be exposed as a poseur and liar, a man whose only real service seems to have been at the self-serve lunch counter.
Clifford Dann would continue to spend his afternoons watching cartoons he could not see. And Carrie Dann, destitute and broken, would move into a drafty house behind an imposing wooden fence, just up the road from the gold mine.
And Harry? Well, Senator Reid, the country boy from a Nevada dirt patch called Searchlight, would sell his old family homestead and its fourteen ghost mines to another gold company for $1.7 million. And after fifty years as a public servant, he would step down from the U.S. Senate, move to Las Vegas, and retire a very wealthy man.
Harry wouldn’t talk to us. He wouldn’t return our calls. We were barred from his office in the Federal Building. His new Vegas address was unlisted. We had no time to wait for his Eminence to emerge from his upscale tortoise hole. The Texas border was being besieged by the poor and huddled masses yearning to be free.