CHAPTER 3
THE BIRTH OF THE PROPHET
WOVOKA WAS BORN IN 1856 NEAR THE BANKS OF THE WALKER River in what is now western Nevada. His parents were Northern Paiutes, who call themselves Numu, the People. Paiute origin stories teach that the first Numu, “Our Father,” emerged when this land was covered by a giant lake and the mountain peaks were like islands, and that Paiutes acquired fire on the island that is now the summit of Mount Grant. Indeed, archaeologists believe that this land first began to be occupied as Lake Lahontan was receding. When people arrived is a matter of some debate, but it may be that their original homeland was in Death Valley and that these forebears spoke what is termed a Shoshonean or Numic language (ancestor to the language still spoken by some Numu).1
As the landscape dried the people dispersed. As early as 4,000 years ago, and certainly by 1,000 years ago, they were spreading eastward across the desert to avoid exhausting its diminishing water and the ever-scarcer plants, game, and fish. Thus, the people of this region have always been not only few in number but far-flung. The desert slopes of western Nevada are crisscrossed with drive fences for the hunting of antelope, ornamented with petroglyphs on basalt boulders, and sprinkled with detritus from the manufacture of knives, spear points, and arrowheads. These flakes of stone glitter in the afternoon sun, silent witnesses to millennia of work and family.2
In time some of these Numic-speakers left the Great Basin and had the tribal identities imposed upon them that appear in history books. From eastern Nevada up into Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming, some became the nomadic hunters and fishers called Shoshones. After Shoshones acquired horses from Spanish herds to the south, they became formidable horsemen and expanded their territory onto the Northern Plains. The Numic-speaking Utes also hunted and gathered and took to horseback, venturing east into today’s Utah and out of the Great Basin into Colorado. Other Numic-speakers joined forces with Shoshones in southern Idaho and became known as the Bannock. One group of Numic-speakers broke away from the Shoshones to venture south and still farther east, leaving the Great Basin to become lords of the Southern Plains, the Comanches.
Though sometimes allied, these peoples also sometimes made war against one another. Utes contested Comanche dominance on the southern buffalo grounds, and they also abducted Paiutes for sale in the slave markets of Santa Fe. Nonetheless, the Paiutes and their Numic kin spread their beliefs and religious practices over one of the largest regions controlled by any single language group in the future United States. With their common origins and common language, many of these groups could speak to one another despite vernacular differences. The so-called Numic conquest of the Great Basin and adjoining areas is one of the most significant developments in the history of Indian America. When the 1890 Ghost Dance first began to spread, it moved eastward among Numic-speakers, from its origins on Walker River to the lands of the Bannock, Shoshone, and Ute, and eventually even to the Comanche living, by that time, on a reservation in Oklahoma.3
All the Numic peoples were nomadic, and the mounted Great Plains peoples inspired some admiration among Americans. In contrast, those who remained in the Great Basin became targets of derision, and even today most Americans know little or nothing about them. Where buffalo hunters on horseback seemed picturesque, Paiutes seldom hunted big game—it was scarce in the deserts—and they had few horses because there was too little grass to feed them. Because their survival in the desert required a stripped-down material culture, with few belongings, many white observers concluded that the Paiutes were intellectually inferior not only to Americans but even to other Indians. In reality, the peoples of the Great Basin were tremendously innovative, conjuring not only survival but often abundance from the most nutritionally desolate landscape in North America.
JUST AS JACK WILSON RETURNED TO THE RIVER AFTER HIS NIGHT in the cave, so Northern Paiutes continually returned to the rivers and lakes across western Nevada. The name “Paiute,” bestowed on them by neighbors, comes from pah, the Shoshonean word for “water”; “Pah-Utes” were the Water Utes. Even now the map is sprinkled with the names of the streams or seeping springs where they gathered: Tonopah, Ivanpah, Pahranagat, Pahrump.4
However far afield Numu ventured for bunch grass or antelope, home was near the river and its terminal lake or marsh. Along the Walker River and the shores of Walker Lake in, say, 1830, before the American arrival, Numu flourished with an economy that was small in scale and remarkably resilient. They lived much of the time in small kin groups—“dispersed in single families,” in Frémont’s words—that usually numbered no more than six people. A few kin groups had as many as twelve members but seldom more than that because larger groups found it harder to gather enough food from the arid surroundings. Annual festivals and communal rabbit hunts or celebrations might draw more people together temporarily, but small communities were the order of the day. Family relations created the bonds between many of these otherwise dispersed people, and so anthropologists speak less in terms of Paiute “bands” or “villages” than of extended families, or “outfits.” Each outfit was led by a senior man, and there was no central chiefdom. Making their own decisions and congregating or dispersing as the occasion demanded, Paiute outfits were a supple form of social organization, capable of relocating as needed in response to food shortage or abundance, war, or drought.5
As late as 1890, at least three distinctive Paiute communities, comprising a number of outfits, made their homes on Walker River. Each community was named after a major source of their food, not to point to differences between their diet and that of others (it is fair to say all ate similar food), but rather to distinguish one group from another according to slight regional variations in food. At the south end of Walker Lake lived the Pugwi Dicutta, the Fish Eaters. At the north end of the lake, where the river mouth emptied into Walker Lake, were the Agai Dicutta, the Trout Eaters. And upriver from them, where the river curved north through Smith and Mason Valleys before heading south to the lake, were the people of Jack Wilson, the Taboose Dicutta, the Grass Bulb Eaters.6
One reason for the rise of the Ghost Dance was the failure of the old ways—on which centuries of Paiute autonomy before the American conquest had been based—to provide a living for the outfits in the American age. In the middle of the nineteenth century, before the digging of hundreds of ditches to divert the waters of Walker River to fields and pastures, the crystalline blue of Walker Lake covered 69,000 acres, more than twice its size today, and the lake was 140 feet higher too. As a remnant of long-vanished Lake Lahontan, it was home to creatures that evolved there, notably the Lahontan cutthroat trout. Paiutes called the lake Agai Pah, or Trout Water, after the large schools of trout that made their way out of the lake and 100 miles up the Walker River to spawn each spring in the sweet streams of the Sierra Nevada, like salmon leaving a desert sea.7
The Numu year began in January and February when small numbers of fish began the journey up the river. Using weirs and fishing platforms they had built from willow, Paiute men hooked and netted the trout, some of them four feet long, hauling them onto the riverbanks where their spotted red sides writhed and glistened in the sun. In mid-February, Numu caught ground squirrels by smoking them out from their burrows, then roasted them on beds of hot coals. As the season warmed in March great flocks of Canada geese, mallards, pintails, and canvasbacks returned to Walker Lake from points south. Men and boys hunted waterfowl along the shore, collected eggs from nests, and netted ducks and mudhens, while women and other children gathered up desert candle and the carved-seed plants from the land that, having soaked up the snowmelt and winter rain, was now turning a bright, evanescent shade of green.8
By May, the primary trout run was on as thousands of trout made their way from the lake into the river. Paiutes gathered along the banks, catching the fish, roasting and drying their flesh, and meeting for the great feast that punctuated this happy season.
In June, women ventured out to gather various seeds ripening in the desert. Stripping the heads of wild grass between two sticks tied together like scissors, they threw the seed over their heads into winnowing baskets on their backs. The women gathered mustard and mentzelia, and some walked as far as fifty miles to glean the berries of the desert-thorn. In this season, men trapped squirrels or birds for meat.9
Like hunters and gatherers the world over, Paiute people shaped the landscape to produce what they needed. Their practice of burning old stands of brush to encourage new growth and broadcasting seed on the burned-over lands to boost food supplies made Walker River into more of a garden than a wilderness. These communal efforts even extended to irrigation projects. The Taboose Dicutta diverted streams into meadows to enhance wild plant growth, excavating communal ditches two and three miles long to water stands of taboose (nut grass, a kind of lily sometimes called earth almond), pozeeda (wild clover, eaten raw or boiled), and mahaveeta (an oval-shaped wild onion the size of a cherry that tastes like yam when roasted and whose spears of grass taste like a mild, nutty garlic).10
Tending these semi-domesticated patches of seeds and food was part of the seasonal round. In July, the Indian rice grass ripened, and the golden pollen of cattails could be baked into cakes. In August, families hid from the scorching sun in the shade of the buckberry groves in the river bottoms, where women thumped bright red berries into their winnowing baskets with long poles and men and boys hunted the robins and cottontails that fluttered and rustled in the brush.
But perhaps the most important of the wild foods was the pine nut, which fattened in the cones of the piñon tree and drew Paiutes upriver to the mountains as summer ended. After scouts had located the most productive groves in August, the whole community started moving slowly up the mountain slopes to gather cones when the pine nuts were ready—about the time the wild rose hips turned red. While some of the men hunted for squirrels and sage hens, the Numu carried the cones back to camp, cleaned out the nuts, and sometimes roasted them and ground them to a buttery paste.11
In November, the men might leave the mountains for the rabbit drive. The rabbit hunt captain selected a campsite in the lowlands and built a large fire for several nights in a row to call the dispersed hunters. Between bushes and forked sticks, men strung lengthy rabbit nets, three feet high and often fifty yards long, made of two-inch-mesh yucca fiber. Then they formed a moving line and drove the rabbits ahead of them into the net. The older men stood at the nets to kill and remove the trapped rabbits and to restring the nets as the rabbits pushed them over. After the rabbits were clubbed and skinned and the meat and pelts distributed among the participating families, the people returned to the mountains for the last of the nut gathering.12
When the first snow fell, the people returned to the lowlands, where they gathered the tiny seeds of nut grass. In a good season each family might have over 1,000 pounds of pine nuts, in which case they would camp close to the nut cache at the base of the mountains. They set aside bundles of yucca fiber for making twine and rabbit skins for weaving blankets—two activities for the long winter nights. The elevation along the Sierra front was high—over 5,000 feet—and blizzards and severe temperatures as low as 30 degrees below zero were not uncommon. As winter storms dumped snow across the landscape families drew close around the fires in their huts, or kanas; with rabbit-skin blankets pulled over their shoulders, they savored pine nuts and smoked rabbit meat and told stories of the making of First Man and First Woman and the creator-destroyer Coyote.13
Hunting and gathering in this manner, year after year, required labor, the manufacture and maintenance of tools, and a great deal of mutual cooperation to make the desert produce goods. To look at Paiute tools is to ponder the intimate linkages between people and land, passed from one generation to the next through careful lessons in craftsmanship and the ethic of frequent, dedicated work: fish weirs woven from willow branches, themselves cut with knives carved from rock; tule boats bundled and shaped from wild grass stems in the marshes; rabbit nets woven from the yucca fiber pounded and stripped from yucca leaves with tools made from stone; grass seed gathered in baskets closely woven from the stems of other grasses; bows, arrows, spears, and fishhooks all bent and carved and assembled from wood, horn, stone, gut, and feathers; hunter’s arrows tipped with obsidian points that were dipped in poison extracted from rattlesnakes or red ants or derived from rotten meat; decoys made of duck skin stretched over tule rushes; and snares of twine and stone and brush. With their carefully crafted tools and vast knowledge about animals, plants, seasons, soil, weather, and water, Paiutes manufactured abundance, not so much finding it as coaxing it out of the desert.14
For Paiutes, flourishing in the desert, in every season, depended not only on tools, knowledge, and cooperative work but also on the favor of spirits to provide booha—the Numu word for the force that clings to life and animates all living things. To them, the basin was no wasteland of absences but a place crowded with powerful spirits—of animals, the wind, insects, even stones and mountains, and of course people. All Numus possessed at least some booha, which came and went depending on one’s ability to manage relations with spirits. Any spirit could bring booha to a person, and any spirit could take it away. Booha manifested itself for people in the form of good luck. Having booha enabled one to produce many children, enticed animals to give up their bodies, led one to nourishing food plants, and persuaded the heavens to open and water the desert.15
Thus, the good life had to be conjured as well as crafted. A person survived partly through skill and fortitude, but booha moved through the sky and air like water, and keeping self and family alive required magic to capture it or direct it into one’s body. Because it was so easily lost, booha had to be cultivated and protected. One kept an eye out for dreams in which spirits might offer new power (and spurning such an offer was a grave offense to the spirits, who might take one’s booha away). In a seemingly empty landscape, the spectral presences gathered around, watching, and all of them had to be appeased to ensure survival. For every Paiute, finding booha and keeping it was the prime spiritual requirement of daily life.16
Of course, booha was particularly plentiful near sources of good water. The tallest mountain peaks were especially powerful places infused with booha, as was evident in their mantles of snow that remained all summer, filling springs and rivers in the driest time of year, creating places below where people could gather in an otherwise inhospitable terrain. As one Southern Paiute man explained, booha “flows into and down the sides of mountains.”17
Booha expressed moral and ethical balance, not only among the living but between the living and the dead. Key to maintaining that balance were rituals to give thanks to the spirits and ensure their favor. Every antelope drive, rabbit drive, or fish harvest began with a Round Dance, a gathering of the often far-flung family in which they held hands in a circle and turned clockwise as they sang in prayer for plenty, health, and well-being and gave thanks to the spirits of antelope, rabbit, trout, or others.18
ELSEWHERE ACROSS THE REGION, PAIUTE OUTFITS LIVED BY MEANS similar to those of the people of Walker River, but by the first half of the nineteenth century many had gathered into larger bands to defend themselves, first from slavers and then from violent Americans, whose arrival signaled great change and new hardships to come. The mountain man Joseph Reddeford Walker, in a futile search for valuable sources of beaver, sallied through the valley of the river that eventually carried his name in 1833. With Zenas Leonard and other trappers, he slaughtered dozens of Paiutes in a series of skirmishes and massacres orchestrated to terrorize the Indians.19
Almost immediately afterward, in the mid-1830s, westward-bound overland emigrants began to trickle through the region. These Americans were crossing northern Nevada on their way to the contested region of the Oregon Country or Mexico’s Pacific province of California. Paiutes, apparently hoping that these people would prove to be trading partners and allies, generally avoided fighting them. But they could not ignore what these migrants and their animals were doing to the desert. By 1868 hundreds of thousands of California-bound migrants and their draft animals had made their way through the Numu homelands over two sets of overland trails cutting through the center of Nevada. One trail ran southwest along the Humboldt River and connected with the Carson River, and the other went across central Nevada, also to link up with the Carson. These were the very rivers on which many Numu relied for sustenance, and now they found themselves in an unprecedented competition for scarce resources. American oxen, mules, and horses depleted the wild grasses, and the migrants themselves consumed large quantities of perpetually scarce game and firewood. For overlanders, the Great Basin sections of the trail were fraught with peril as water, food, range, and firewood ran low or ran out. For Indians, the migrants were often belligerent and best avoided. In an effort to make up for the food and resources that were lost to the foreigners, a few Paiutes took to selling them firewood or offering their services as livestock guards or trail guides.20
With this heavy stream of migrants along the Carson and Humboldt Rivers, many Paiutes were displaced. Some of these (perhaps most) went to the Walker River, the next valley to the south.21
In contrast to the Carson and Humboldt Rivers, for a time the Walker River remained relatively protected because it lay twenty miles or more to the south of the main trail, with a forbidding stretch of high desert separating it from the flood of California-bound emigrants. Using the skills they had acquired over the millennia, Paiutes along the Walker River continued to draw sustenance from the desert. But soon Americans began to covet the Walker River country for something more than an emigrant trail. In 1859, the U.S. government set aside a reservation at Walker Lake where they intended Numus to gather that same year. California ranchers seeking new pastures for their herds colonized the river and took a battering ram to the Numu economy. Colonel T. B. Rickey began carving out a 42,000-acre domain for his Antelope Land and Cattle Company near the Walker River headwaters, while a short distance downriver H. N. A. “Hock” Mason claimed what became known as Mason Valley and turned his cattle herds loose along the riverbanks. Soon after, two other Californians, R. B. Smith and Timothy B. Smith, drove herds into what became known as Smith Valley and took up permanent residence.22
At the very same time, in 1859, prospectors discovered rich veins of silver and gold ore at Sun Mountain near the Carson River, a short distance to the north. By 1860, there were 7,000 European immigrants and Euro-Americans working the slopes of what soon became known as Mount Davidson, clustered around an urban core of explosive growth that came to be called Virginia City.23
Wovoka was three years old the year the Walker River was occupied and Virginia City began to boom; the key context for his childhood, as well as for the development of the Ghost Dance, was colonization. The boy’s given name, apparently, was Wovoka. His father Numu Taivo was a minor leader, or capita, and a shaman who had powerful visions and was said to be invulnerable to gunfire and to have control over the weather. The boy’s mother Tiya remains a mystery. Her origins are unknown, and her name has no known translation. She came from a distant community; except for her own children, she had no kin along the Walker River and remained an outsider.24
The Walker River and every one of the scarce rivers and streams of northern Nevada were soon swallowed in an emigrant rush that sprouted ranches and towns. Dispossessed, Paiutes united with Bannocks from Fort Hall, Idaho, and rose up against the Americans in 1860. There are hints that Numu Taivo fought in this conflict, or perhaps a later one. The translation of his name, “Northern Paiute White Man,” suggests that Wovoka’s father was one of the group of Northern Paiute warriors who were kept prisoner among the Americans for some years after the fighting ended. Indians won the biggest battles of the Paiute War, once even cutting down dozens of American militiamen in a running fight along the Truckee River. But in this as in subsequent conflicts across the region—in Owens Valley in 1862, and farther east in Nevada and Utah through the mid-1860s—Indian victories proved fleeting. Despite some remarkable triumphs, the Paiute warriors could not dislodge the newcomers from their armed settlements along the watercourses.25
So Paiutes had to accommodate themselves to the new American order. That regime was marked by ecological change and dispossession that increasingly pushed Indians out of their traditional work, which they had controlled themselves, and into modern wage labor, a tedious, exacting, and exhausting activity over which they had comparatively little control.
Nowhere was this process more evident than in what was then Nevada’s largest city and the countryside surrounding it. Today much of Virginia City is abandoned, and the desert wind whistles through its ruins with a lonely wail that makes it all too easy to forget its former influence and power. Shortly before the Paiute War, prospectors realized that Mount Davidson harbored not only gold but silver beyond the dreams of men. In 1864, the year Nevada achieved statehood, the booming mines of the Comstock Lode drew over 60,000 settlers. By 1875, the conjoined towns of Virginia City and Gold Hill, with 25,000 residents, had become one of the largest settlements west of the Mississippi, and the Comstock mines among the largest and deepest mines in the history of the United States. The concentrated industrial and economic power produced on the dry slopes of the river valley immediately north of Walker River seemed to come from another world, as if a vast futuristic social machine had burst into the ancient desert through a crack in time.26
Except for a few brief years in the early 1860s, this was no rustic miners’ camp with small pick-and-pan outfits scratching color from the dirt and grizzled pioneers yelling “Eureka!” The Comstock was more like a factory built into solid rock with dynamite, blood, German engineering, and forests of wood. Reaching the quartz-encased silver required 3,000-foot-deep tunnels, explosives by the ton, and armies of wage-earning miners to wrench treasure from the depths. Comstock workers loaded their haul into iron railcars that traveled via elevators up the shafts to the mine entrances. From there the ore was ferried to round-the-clock mills where other workers crushed it beneath steam-driven stamps that rose and fell like pistons, then poured the pulverized rock into solutions of mercury to separate the silver ore from the worthless granite. Virginia City whistled, roared, stamped, rumbled, and belched smoke twenty-four hours a day.27
In ways that have been too long overlooked, this urban indusrevolution in the lands of the Numu provided a vital context for the cycles of Indian prophecy that birthed the Ghost Dance. Aside from the relentlessly mobile overlanders, the money-hungry, cosmopolitan people of Virginia City and its outlying settlements comprised the first substantial American society to which Nevada Indians were exposed. This contact would reconfigure not only their societies but their sense of earthly possibility and torment.
VIRGINIA CITY WAS LIKE A VOLCANO THAT ERUPTED AND consumed much of the countryside’s scarce resources, scattering smaller mining towns across the region like so many embers. In the subsequent experience of Wovoka’s people along the Walker River, we can trace the dynamics that remade the Numu world during the prophet’s childhood years and drove the Ghost Dance movement. The city’s rise asserted a new division of Paiute homelands into market center and resource hinterland, urban center and rural space. Where the desert’s scarce resources had compelled the dispersion of peoples, the city’s market sucked wood, water, and food into its maw like a vortex, and the Comstock Lode and the markets that fueled it hammered away at the old hunting and gathering networks for vast distances.
Starting in the 1860s, the mining boom took a severe toll on Nevada’s mountain woodlands. “The great development of the mining interests of Nevada has already nearly exterminated its scanty and stunted forests,” reported one forester in 1880. One Indian agent noted the hardships that befell Indians as a result: “Where in former times they obtained Pine Nutts [sic] the discovery of the mines has brought the wood into demand and where the forests of that kind of wood grew five years ago nothing but stumps are left.” Pine nut harvests continued to vary from one year to the next, but the documentary record suggests that pine nuts were generally becoming scarcer. At the same time, with the spread of ranching, cattle and sheep consumed much of the remaining landscape on which Paiute autonomy depended. The animals devoured native bunchgrasses—whose seeds were a critical source of Paiute food—and over decades of heavy grazing not only did bunchgrass disappear, but the seeds that remained in the soil had few chances to germinate. Unable to endure heavy grazing and trampling, bunchgrasses soon gave way to woody brush.28
The nascent cattle industry along the Walker River would grow by leaps and bounds as it supplied beef and hides to miners at Dogtown, Monoville, and Aurora, which sprang up south of the river in the late 1850s and 1860s, and at the gold-mining town of Bodie, founded near the headwaters in 1877. Ranches expanded across the state as demand for beef, leather, and alfalfa in the mining towns increased. By the 1870s, the high desert grasslands and meadows from the high Sierra down into the valleys of the Walker, the Carson, and the Truckee teemed with cattle.29
The cattle devastated the nut grass and wild clover meadows maintained by Paiutes with their communal ditches. In 1859, when Timothy Smith’s cattle first overran the pozeeda meadows along Desert Creek, a Paiute leader named Horseman led his enraged people in confronting the rancher and demanding that he leave the valley. But in this and similar face-offs, the Paiutes acquiesced to gifts of cattle. Until other options appeared, they settled for stealing more of them to make up for the food that the animals and their owners had taken. Other biotic communities that provided Paiute food fared no better than the nut grass. Livestock grazing and upriver diversions of water for irrigation caused serious declines in buckberry and grass bulbs—the very taboose from which the Taboose Dicutta drew sustenance and their community identity. When erosion from irrigation and grazing led to sedimentation of the river, freshwater mussels were suffocated and the Lahontan cutthroat trout debilitated. The large ranches at the headwaters of the Walker River diverted even more water over time, causing the lower reaches of the river to dry out completely in the fall of 1882 and destroying fish habitat.30
The traditional year had begun with trout, and the end of the traditional era would be marked by the near-destruction of fish in the Walker River. The 1860s saw a terrible drought, accompanied by trout die-offs in the river as ranchers diverted large volumes of water for irrigation. In 1868 and 1869, the trout migration was especially poor. Starvation loomed for Paiutes, and fast on its heels came a series of epidemics: typhoid fever and measles swept away at least 125 Walker River Paiutes over a two-year period. Those deaths were catastrophic for the outfits, which critically relied on family labor to gather the wild grass seeds that were a key traditional food source. Instead of going to the mountains for pine nuts, as they normally would have done, many Paiutes went to Virginia City to hustle and scrape for cash and food to make it through the winter.31
In these ways, in urban space and hinterland alike, environmental changes radically reoriented the Paiutes’ economy and shifted them away from hunting and gathering and into wage labor. In 1866, Nevada’s sole Indian agent, posted at Pyramid Lake Reservation, praised the work ethic of Nevada Paiutes: “Many of them are employed as laborers on the farms of white men in all seasons, but they are especially serviceable during the time of harvest and haymaking.” With their wages, they bought modern goods such as woolen clothes and horses, and by the 1870s Paiutes were largely dressed in Western clothing and many drove wagons. In subsequent decades, Paiute industriousness was often a subject among Nevada officials, one of whom estimated in 1870 that 12 percent of Paiute men labored for wages, a figure that is impressive but nonetheless probably low.32
About the time fish began to fail in the Walker River, Wovoka joined the workforce. By the age of eight, he was working for David Wilson, for whom his parents already labored and whose family arrived in Nevada from Missouri about 1864. The labor and social relations of Nevada were somewhat akin to those of the South: Indians worked and lived alongside white landowners, who simultaneously needed their labor and socially rejected them. And just as black and white children played together during and after slavery in the South, young Jack played marbles, swam and fished in the Walker River, climbed trees, and hunted for birds’ nests with the white Wilson boys, Billy and Joe. From Jack the Wilson boys learned to speak passable Paiute, and from the Wilsons Jack grew to understand English (although he was never comfortable speaking it). All three boys became practical jokers. (In later years, the Wilson brothers remained respectful of their boyhood friend and longtime employee, but like many of their contemporaries, they attributed Wovoka’s miraculous powers to his formidable skills as a prankster.)33
So it was that by 1880 much of the Nevada working class was Numus—along with Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Basques, and some others. The Indians’ willingness to work was widely praised, and contemporaries observed that without Paiute labor many business concerns could not have functioned. Rancher Timothy Smith—for whom Smith Valley was named—recalled that Paiutes initially ran off his livestock, “yet a few years later I do not see how we would have managed without their assistance in the harvesting of our large crops of hay as well as in some other lines of work.”34
The centralization of work in towns and ranches created a new geography of Paiute labor, and as the biggest settlement and the center of the regional economy, Virginia City was a frequent destination for Paiutes in need of employment and goods. The city’s vigorous newspapers (a young Mark Twain was employed by one of them) provide a glimpse of what Paiute urban work was like. Some Virginia City Paiutes were local, from the Carson River Valley, but others arrived from Walker River, Pyramid Lake, and other Paiute communities to find work when resources in their home communities became scarce. They joined a global wave of migrants from as far afield as Ireland, Germany, and China.35
Camped in small communities on the city fringes, Paiutes came to treat the city as part of their seasonal food-gathering round. Beginning at dawn, Paiute women walked the city streets with burlap sacks for collecting bits of firewood, merchants’ cast-off fruit and fish heads and tails, and even stray pieces of hay for their thin horses. At virtually any time of day their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons could be found on the steep streets of Virginia City sweating every kind of casual labor, from hauling firewood to raising buildings. In an urban, concentrated version of their customary practice of dispersed hunting and gathering, they survived on a mix of wages from work and food foraged in town dumps and alleyways. They scavenged firewood from broken timbers and from boxes outside dry goods stores. They bought beans, flour, and coffee with the cash they earned, but they also combed through refuse piles, butchered dead horses and oxen on the streets, begged from other residents, and accepted church charity.36
FIGURE 3.1. Living by the river of money: Northern Paiute family at home in Virginia City, ca. 1900. Among the first followers of the Ghost Dance religion were wage-laboring Northern Paiutes who had settled in Nevada cities and towns. Nevada Historical Society.
The number of Paiutes living in Virginia City itself seems always to have been small: the 1880 census counted 127 Paiutes, including 35 women and 44 children, residing there. But for surrounding bands and outfits the city became a central node for acquiring food and other necessities and for exchanging goods as well as ideas and news. Although Indians from different areas apparently lived in distinctive camps around the city, they worked many of the same jobs and congregated daily in vacant lots, storage yards, and streets to gamble and socialize. We cannot know what they said to one another. But given city newspaper accounts of assembled Paiutes talking, gesticulating, and laughing, we may presume that they exchanged news about work opportunities, family, and events in the hinterland.37
FIGURE 3.2. Gathering firewood in Nevada, ca. 1905. An Indian woman carries railroad ties. The destruction of Nevada forests, rivers, and grasslands drove many Indians into the towns and cities for food, firewood, and paying work. Nevada Historical Society.
The city was also a market, a focal point for those Numu who, compelled by their need for clothes and other goods, behaved like Americans and turned the desert into dollars. In 1887, Paiutes sold an estimated 75,000 pounds of pine nuts on Virginia City streets. Each year Pyramid Lake Numu also shipped between 40 and 100 tons of fish to city merchants. Paiute men arrived from the marshes of the Carson and the Humboldt to peddle game meat—rabbits, ducks, geese, even the odd rattlesnake. As wild species changed, Paiutes altered their habits. When white sportsmen introduced trout and catfish to local streams or released quail in adjacent areas for their own hunting enjoyment, they were distressed to find Paiute men industriously harvesting the animals. At least once, Paiutes transferred fish to the man-made pool at the mouth of the Sutro Tunnel, four miles southeast of Virginia City, to eat them later.38
Enthusiasm for the market made Paiutes entrepreneurial, and they pushed hard to open new markets for themselves. In 1880, Virginia City moguls William Sharon and Henry Yerington made an offer to the Indians of Walker River Reservation (which had been established by the US government near the river’s terminus at Walker Lake in 1859): give us an easement to build a railroad across the reservation, and we will let Indians ride the train for free. But Walker River Numu demanded more and got it: in exchange for the easement across the reservation, they secured not only free passage for themselves but free shipment of fish, game, and produce. Indeed, as one negotiator reported, the Indians were not just amenable to the easement, but “very anxious the road should be built.”39
By 1881, the Carson & Colorado Railroad line connected Walker Lake and its primary station at the town of Schurz on the reservation not only to the southern mining towns of the eastern Sierra Nevada but to the Virginia & Truckee Railroad and points north. Many of the trains that rumbled up the line from the south carrying ore and other goods all the way to Virginia City and beyond also carried Indian fishermen and their abundant hauls of trout. Railroad company negotiators had assumed that Indians would not have many goods to ship and that the deal would not cost the company very much. But in the first few years Paiutes shipped so many fish that railroad officials tried to renege on the deal, alleging that white men must be secretly running the business. In 1889 alone, Walker River Paiutes sold an estimated 20,000 pounds of fish in Virginia City and surrounding towns, flooding markets and undercutting their Pyramid Lake competitors by a significant margin.40
The success of Walker River fishermen in urban markets indicates the growing importance of money in the lives of Paiutes. Here and elsewhere, the relentless environmental change and chaotic mining economy advanced by the American ascendancy forced Paiutes more than ever to look to wages for survival, as observers frequently mentioned. Mining silver and gold was well paid and remained mostly the exclusive work of white men, but across the region Paiutes undertook almost every other kind of day labor, including borax mining, carpentry, construction, road grading, ranch work, and hauling goods. Partly because of the need to pursue work, by the late 1880s only one in every four Paiutes lived on a reservation.41
The “Water Utes” had customarily located along the Truckee, the Carson, the Walker, and other rivers and streams that linked the disparate resource zones of their homelands, but the Americans diverted and degraded those watercourses to create a radically new space. Although the geographical location of the Paiute homeland was unchanged—to the uninitiated, it might even have looked the same—within a very short period the resources for survival that Paiutes formerly gathered from the land could be reliably had only from butcher shops, grocers, and dealers in dry goods. In this strange new space, relations between plants, animals, people, and watercourses were almost unimaginably transformed, and to remain connected to the essentials of life—food, clothing, shelter—Paiutes increasingly were forced to relocate along a new kind of river, an abstracted flow that we might call the river of money.
MONEY MADE NEVADA GO. IN VIRGINIA CITY, IN THE settlements along the Walker River, and elsewhere in the state, with the exception of some livestock and hay, practically everything Americans consumed—from pencils to wagons and mining machinery—had to be bought in California or shipped from farther away. As Paiutes adjusted by becoming more market-oriented themselves, they moved from their natal places to join other Paiute outfits and work for money in more cosmopolitan places, not only in Virginia City but in mining camps, ranch outposts, and small towns.42
From the 1860s on, Wovoka’s family and other Paiutes survived through gathering, hunting, and foraging, engaging in wage labor, selling wild goods, and growing subsistence gardens. Near the headwaters of the Walker River a small colony of Paiutes settled beside the town of Bridgeport, and another colony settled farther along the river at Greenfield (soon to be called Yerington), where Jack Wilson’s family lived. Most Paiutes on the Walker River never lived at the Walker River Reservation, which was farther downriver. There several hundred Paiutes began digging their own irrigation system in the 1870s; these were the same people who had pushed hard to secure the Carson & Colorado Railroad line through their land in 1880. Soon the agricultural production of these reservation farmers was substantial. By 1890, they had constructed more than eight miles of primary ditch to water small vegetable patches and hundreds of acres of alfalfa and barley, much of which they transported to market on the railroad. The dependence of Paiutes on modern cash and commerce thus grew. Where one official had estimated that only about 12 percent of Paiutes had been wage workers in 1870, another held that 85 percent of Paiute subsistence at Walker River Reservation came from store-bought goods.43
Upriver Numus who lived off the reservation, like Jack Wilson, had less access to fish and no farmland. Their growing reliance on cash made them ever more dependent on wages as the century wore on and rapid environmental changes continued. Their customary activities and means of raising food or money became more difficult. We may surmise that gathering pine nuts and cutting wood became more challenging as the heavy use of wood for stoves, homes, and industry drove the forests into retreat from the American settlements (where Paiutes increasingly gathered). Instead of wintering near pine nut caches, as in the old days, Paiutes now used draft animals and wagons to haul the bounty to their homes near ranches and towns, and in any event, extended trips away would have cost them the chance to work for cash at other employment.44
Thus, the new economy of wage labor reoriented the Numu calendar. By 1890, workplace demands kept Paiutes on the ranches where they worked for all but two or three weeks of the year. There was less time to find productive pine groves and not much time to reach and pick the nuts that were available. Pine nutting was (and is) key to Paiute identity, economy, and religion, but by 1890 the nuts were harder to find and gather perhaps than ever before.45
The wage economy brought a host of other problems, starting with the sporadic nature of the work. This alone may have made it an inferior replacement for hunting and gathering. The traditional Paiute economy was broad-based, allowing Numus to switch to a new resource if one became scarce. Wage work turned this economy almost upside down. Work itself assumed the status of a resource that everyone needed, all the time—but it could not always be found. There was little work to be had in the winter, a particularly slow time in ranch country, since this was also the hardest time of year to gather and hunt. Numus felt the grip of poverty most keenly during the coldest time of year (which may explain why, in 1889, the Ghost Dance visions and rituals took hold in the winter).46
The seasonality of ranch labor, combined with the boom-and-bust cycles that typified extractive industry and Gilded Age capitalism, made wage work a perilously thin reed on which to base community survival. If it failed—and it failed often—there was not much else to fall back on.
All wage workers faced poverty, but Indians were especially vulnerable to it. The federal agents in charge of reservations were under strict orders to compel Indian work and subservience in exchange for assistance. Most of these agents were unreliable political appointees, however, and they frequently resigned, leaving their agencies unattended and assistance undistributed. In addition, most Paiutes could not even claim such support because they did not reside at a reservation.47
WAGES THUS BECAME THE PATH TO SURVIVAL, AND LIKE THE starving peasants of Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s or the starving Italians and Poles of the 1880s and 1890s, the Paiutes flocked to the American workplace. Although they remained closer to home than most of the new immigrants, their dispersal for work increasingly strained ties to band and family as the nineteenth century wore on. In older times, hunting and gathering had dispersed the Numus too, but these economic activities also allowed for periodic reunions of extended family as scattered outfits came together to drive rabbits or antelope. A bountiful harvest of taboose or a good fish run was cause for a multi-outfit celebration. Large gatherings at ritual events like the fall pine nut thanksgiving helped restore community ties after months of dispersal, with the communal prayer and song of the Round Dance helping to bridge divides between people.48
But wage work tied men, women, and children to rotating and often far-flung workplaces for all the warm months. By 1890, Paiutes were far more dependent on the river of money than on hunting and gathering. The smaller, non-reservation communities, like Jack Wilson’s at Yerington, had no fields of their own and thus no produce to sell. They were especially reliant on wage work and whatever they could scrape together from woodcutting, hunting, and fishing. Moving from workplace to workplace as opportunities arose further restricted their freedom, preventing them from gathering ever-scarcer wild resources that might have gained them at least some autonomy from employers. Bound to a rotation among scattered ranch sites many miles apart and in the towns sprinkled across the Nevada map, and with little time to hunt or gather, Indians found themselves curiously itinerant but no longer nomadic.
Over the course of the 1880s, a series of developments aggravated the difficulties brought on by dispersion. The arrival of the Carson & Colorado Railroad in 1881, with its station on the Walker River Reservation, connected Indians to the transcontinental line at Reno. As we have seen, the new line—which Paiutes rode for free—provided an outlet for cash sales of fish, and by the early 1890s they were shipping barley, wheat, and even some fresh vegetables and chickens to urban markets. But they also shipped their own bodies: Indians sat atop the cars in long rows, bound for hop-picking jobs as far away as Sonoma and Mendocino Counties in California. Walker River Paiutes began to hold annual fetes to honor these migrant workers as they headed off to the fields, not only to honor their economic contribution but to shore up community bonds with them.49
The arrival of the railroad thus contributed to the sense of community disintegration among Walker River Paiutes by expanding the range of migration for work. Family networks, already shriveled by disease and violence, now were also more dispersed, sometimes hundreds of miles across a strange, often hostile country. In addition, rail work and travel were extraordinarily dangerous, punctuated as they were by frequent derailures and crashes. In 1890, a sadly typical year, some 300 U.S. railroad passengers died in accidents and thousands of employees were killed and maimed. Journeys by rail were attended by fears that those who went away might not return.50
For all its drawbacks, wage work stood alone as the means to raise cash as other options vanished. Beginning in the 1870s, and with increasing force during the 1880s, the state of Nevada imposed conservation laws that restricted Indian fishing in a transparent effort to divert the state’s fishing economy to white men. In 1888, the state legislature, hoping to placate the owners of the Carson & Colorado Railroad and abrogate the railroad’s agreement with Paiute fishermen, demanded that Congress eliminate the Walker River Reservation. The threat did not materialize, but Walker River Paiutes cannot have remained ignorant of the proposal, which was vigorously opposed by both their own Indian agent and officials at the Office of Indian Affairs. Had it succeeded, it would have left many Paiutes landless, without farms or homes, and therefore even more dependent on wages.51
On top of all this, obstacles to ceremonial and social gatherings mounted as the century wore on. The large festivals that drew hundreds or thousands of Indians in urban locations had faced an uncertain future even in their heyday of the 1870s and 1880s. Indians were under constant pressure from employers and authorities to remain near work and abandon their old religion; festivals may not have been suppressed, but they were discouraged. The younger generation of Numu came of age without learning many of the hunting and gathering activities that the old blessing rituals supported, and the fact that many of them spoke more English than Paiute drove a wedge between the generations.52
By 1890, many could see that Paiute people were headed for a lonelier future in which ever more of them would be dispersed to far-flung work sites for most of the year. It is small wonder, then, that many would listen to the prophecies of a new era that began to circulate in these days of travail.