This is not to say that people of the Great Basin remained naive to what was happening all around them. Trade relations between the Basin and the Plains, the Southwest, and California had existed for centuries; consequently, people of the Basin could not avoid some contact with the impact of Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American settlement. Perhaps one of the most significant and direct effects, however, was the adoption of horses by some of the Shoshones and Utes. This had two significant effects. First, it carried those people culturally away from the Archaic Basin cultures and toward the buffalo-hunting cultures of the Plains Indians. Second, it strongly tipped the balance of power so that the more mobile, affluent, and powerful Shoshone and Utes could raid other Basin people, like the Northern Paiutes, for food or slaves.
The key factors in Great Basin history were California and, indirectly, Texas. By the 1840s, Mexico was having difficulty retaining authority in both territories. Anglo-American interests were aggressively intruding and were anxious to annex both territories to the United States. While the ultimate battles of the Mexican War were mostly fought in Texas and Mexico, California became the scene of military skirmishes as well. The Great Basin was in the direct path of Anglo-Americans wishing to reach California and the West Coast by land. Indeed, the east-west running Humbolt River, in north-central Nevada, proved to be a thoroughfare for people headed to California. The whole region had been mapped thoroughly by European and American fur traders and explorers from the 1820s onward so there was an abundance of guides anxious to lead settlers through the Basin to the far West.
The Mexican War ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Mexico ceded all of her territories outside of what had been traditionally New Spain to the United States. This included the Great Basin even though neither Spanish nor Mexicans had ever occupied it. The United States was left with a clear claim over the whole of what is now the American West. In only one year, the Great Basin became a thoroughfare for one of the greatest land migrations ever, the Rush for California's Gold.
In 1847 Mormons, who had been persecuted by Americans in Illinois and elsewhere, moved to the Great Basin and settled in Salt Lake Valley which was a transitional territory between the Utes and the Western Shoshones. While neither Utes nor Shoshones were initially pleased by the intrusion of the Mormons, they had worked out a somewhat stable equilibrium by the early 1850s. For the Mormons, peaceful life with the Natives was a necessity since life with the Anglo-Americans had not worked. The Mormon utopia was to be found in the promised land of Utah's fertile valleys --- but only with gentle persuasion of its indigenous inhabitants. (Malouf and Findlay, 508-510)
In fact, the Mormons were the least of the problems presented to the Shoshone and the Northern Paiute throughout the 1850s. It was inevitable that the traffic to California would eventually lead to settlement throughout the northern Great Basin. Settlement came in the form of ranching and this quickly led to degradation of the ecological system to which indigenous people were intimate partners. Ranches were established in the fertile bottom lands where ranchers dammed up the streams and rivers. Cattle quickly ranged across the natural grasslands, trampling down the native grasses on which indigenous culture depended. Ranchers also prevented natives from burning off the large meadows --- a practice that produced a strong annual growth of fresh grass and, hence, good hunting --- which eventually led to the development of large expanses of sagebrush --- of little value as food or as an attraction to game animals. Archaic material culture was extremely fragile, built as it was on a very delicate balance of sparse resources; survival of indigenous people would be possible only by adaptation of some kind to the ways in which Anglo-Americans were reshaping the Great Basin's environment. (Malouf and Findlay, 510-511)
All of this, in retrospect, must seem mild in comparison to the shock that Washoe and Northern Paiutes of western Nevada were to receive at the hands of mining. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the Comstock Lode was developed and Virginia City was built (literally) on top of it. The Comstock was one of the largest single silver strikes in the world and western Nevada became a beehive of activity. Not only did thousands of miners pour into the region but so did all the other entrepreneurs necessary for sustaining a great mining camp in all its elements --- ranchers and farmers to provide foods, bankers, assayers, officials, lawyers, physicians, merchants, inn keepers, saloon keepers, and (yes) prostitutes. The ecology of the region was torn apart. Indigenous people could survive only by becaming intimately involved in every aspect of the new Anglo culture. But this was no Mormon settlement. In absolute contrast to the Mormon settlements in the eastern Great Basin, the Comstock mining towns were oriented toward one thing only --- profit, indeed, quick profit. Miners did not intend to stay in western Nevada and, consequently, they cared little about what they did to the region. If Indians were a problem, then the Federal troops could be called in to deal with them; there was no need to make peace with them or seek common goals. (Malouf and Findlay, 511-516)
Certainly, the Federal Government had its hands full through the first half of the 1860s, fighting the Confederacy. But after 1865, Federal attention turned to the West and Federal troops, once occupied with the Southerners, now turned to controlling unruly Indians. Most Anglo-Americans were so completely unconscious of the enormous damage they wrecked upon indigenous environments that they interpreted Indian resistance and reaction as "savage hostility" and looked to Washington for help. The next thirty years would be a traumatic and destructive period of war with the Western Indians. Indeed, all Native Americans had been thrust into an uncomfortable "melting pot" of indigenous people centering around the so-called Indian Territory (someday to become Oklahoma) but spreading throughout the Western United States. The "Manifest Destiny" was saturation of this entire area by American settlers; but the age of "removal" as the solution for unhappy Indians was long gone. With no place offering itself as the target for removal, the only remaining solution was the reservation --- literally penning Indians up in small enclaves with the desperate hope that they might become assimilated into mainstream Anglo culture as farmers and ranchers
Oregon had been established as a United States Territory as early as 1839, well before the Mexican War. After 1848 the remainder of the Great Basin was divided up into territories and the Federal government took responsibility for relations with indigenous people. Both the U. S. Military and the Bureau of Indian Affairs were involved. Since the Great Basin, as well as the Southwest and California, was claimed by Mexico and gained through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, all indigenous people were, technically speaking, Mexican citizens whose citizenship the United States was treatied to respect. In fact, this citizenship right was respected only for the Southwestern pueblos, and few indigenous people in California, none in the Great Basin, even knew anything about it. Meanwhile, Great Basin Territories gradually moved toward statehood. California officially became a state in 1850; Oregon was a state by 1859; Nevada was in by 1864; Colorado was 1876; and Utah was a state by 1896. Statehood always complicated things for indigenous people since it increased the number of agencies involved, made the powers of the Federal Government more ambiguous, and cemented local interests --- almost always contrary to Indian welfare. The case of California, of course, is notorious!
Reservations were established by treaties --- something that sounds easy but was truly difficult in the extreme to achieve. One should first ask whether those making the "treaty" agreement were empowered to act for their respective communities. Anglo-Americans frequently misunderstood the scope of powers wielded by individual Natives and treatied with individual small bands under the assumption that they were dealing with whole tribes. Indigenous people made similar mistakes about Anglos. Especially confusing were the conflicting powers and policies of the U. S. Military and the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. But the worst barrier to communication between the two was the Constitutional requirement of ratification. To a Native, an agreement made eye-to-eye and in good faith was a firm agreement; to an American, ratification in distant Washington was the only practical act with force. Out of thirty nine treaties or agreements struck with Great Basin peoples, between 1846 and 1906, fourteen went unratified (all in the first twenty years). In 1871, a law was enacted making "agreements" the official mode of dealing with Western Indians. (Clemmer and Stewart, 526-527)
Between 1855 and 1875, fifteen reservations were established by treaty or agreement. Ten of these were with Utes and Shoshones in the eastern Basin; only five were with Northern Paiutes, even though they had suffered the greatest disturbance in their lifeways. Of greatest importance in the western Basin were the reservations are Walker River (1859), Pyramid Lake (1859), and Malheur, Oregon (1873-1882). About 2.6 millions acres was involved; but about 23 million acres went to Utes and Shoshones over the same time period.
The single largest reservation created during this period was the 14.7 million acre Ute reservation of western Colorado (1863). Second largest was the 2.8 million acre Eastern Shoshone reservation at Wind River, Wyoming (1868). Because the lifeways of the Eastern Shoshone and Utes had moved out of the archaic and merged with Plains culture, they represented more formidable adversaries and, consequently, the Federal Government was more prepared to give them territory. The Eastern Shoshone were, in fact, quite amenable to cooperation with Americans and aided them in several military campaigns against their Indian enemies. Hence, the Wind River Reservation was selected out of good land --- the upper reaches of the Big Horn River --- and the Shoshone were able to pursue their traditional lifeway for many years. Nevertheless, even Wind River came to disappointment; the buffalo herds disappeared throughout the Plains and the Federal Government, with their predictable blindness, decided to settle a band of Northern Arapahoes (traditional enemies of the Shoshone) there.
Overall, the only reservation treaty that involved the Washoe was a small reserve of land on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, supposedly selected as pinyon nut harvesting country for Washoe and Northern Paiute, a little over 20,500 acres. The scenario for this reserve was typical of practically all reservation deals. Before arrangements were even completed, a comercial logging operation moved in, logged out the reserve, and then sold out for $30,000, not a penny of which ever went to the Washoe, the Paiute, or the BIA.
Owens Valley Paiute had a somewhat different experience with Anglo appropriation. Mining did not get underway rapidly in Owens Valley, but the abundant water supply provided by the Sierras did make it a more than likely target for farming and ranching. Farmers and ranchers from the Los Angeles area began moving into the Valley and had pushed to the point of hostile resistance by 1862. Federal Military moved in to protect the settlers, establishing Fort Independence and then Bishop. Ultimately, the pressure was too great for Paiute resistance and the Paiute gradually settled for small reservations throughout the Valley --- Bishop (1913), Independence (1915), Big Pine (1922), and Lone Pine (1939). Ironically, the City of Los Angeles itself proved to be a greater threat to settlement of the Valley than the Paiute, and most farmers and ranchers had been driven out by the City's "water war" by the time the first reservation appeared. Indeed, it was really the City that made peace with the Indians and treatied reservations and governing structures for the Owens Valley Paiute as "payment" for the water that they were, by that time, mainlining to their growing metropolis in such great quantities that enormous Owens Lake had already gone dry. (Clemmer and Stewart, 532-538)
Americans were well aware of the fact that indigenous people could not survive on reserved lands through traditional lifeways. Virtually all treaties and agreements incorporated payments and supplies into the plans. But supplies for what? The obvious vision was that indigenous people must assimilate to the Anglo-American economy; in fact, they must become farmers and ranchers who can sell excess food and stock for cash so as to care for their non-food needs. The assimilation movement was founded in the assumption (realistic perhaps) that indigenous people must learn to live in Anglo-American lifeways. But it was also founded in a deep-seated Christian abhorence for "the primitive" and "the pagan." The last quarter of the Nineteenth Century saw the creation of Indian schools throughout the West and, while some of these were secular creations of territorial or state governments, most were quite intentionally Christian missionary schools. There is even substantial evidence to the effect that Protestants and Catholics were in direct, active competition for the souls of the West's indigenous "heathens." (Prucha) In many respects, the remainder of Indian relations, from 1875 onward, is a sad confusion of crass and noble motives in which the name of assimilation was used for diverse ends by all sides. Not infrequently, the best of intentions came to the worst of consequences.
Perhaps the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 is one of the most spectacular examples of this. Set out on the supposedly noble path of dividing reservation land into Anglo-style sections of farm or ranch land, distributed to qualifying resident Native Americans, what the Act actually achieved was separation out of reservation holdings of undistributable lands, mostly alienated from Native Americans in favor of big land holders (like railroads) or crowds of American homesteaders. Millions of acres of reservation lands were alienated in this process.
Henry L. Dawes, senator from Massachusetts, prided himself as a "caring" assimilationist. In 1899, he wrote, "It was this condition which forced on the nation its present Indian policy. It was born of sheer necessity. Inasmuch as the Indian refused to fade out, but multiplied under the sheltering care of reservation life, and the reservation itself was slipping away from him, there was but one alternative: either he must be endured as a lawless savage, a constant menace to civilized life, or he must be fitted to become a part of that life and be absorbed into it." (Dawes, 1899, 281 (emphasis added)) Dawes continued, "The home, no less in savage civilized life, is the centre of the influencesthat shape and determine character. Neglect of it is neglect of the future. Soon after the beginning of appropriations for Indian schools, congress, in what is called the Severalty Act, provided for every Indian capable of appreciating its value, and who chose to take it, a homestead of one hundred and sixty acres to heads of families . . . inalienable and untaxable for twenty-five years, to be selected by him on the reservation of his tribe. . . Thus every door of opportunity is thrown wide open to every adult Indian, as well as to those of the next generation." (Ibid.)
What Dawes did not discuss in this idealistic vision of the Indian policy that he had helped mold was the provision that the federal government could sell reservation lands not allotted to Indians to any settlers whatsoever. Simple calculations, subtracting the total acreage committed to tribal populations from total reservation acreages, would indicate that most reservations would have a great deal of "surplus land." Thus, reservation lands dropped from 155,632,312 acres in 1881 to 104,319,349 acres in 1890 and to 77,865,373 acres in 1900 by a process of selling off "surplus land" to white settlers. (Olson & Wilson, 73) The greatest boondoggle of all, perhaps, was Harrison's opening of "vacant land" in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) to white settlers, beginning in 1889. (Olson & Wilson, 70)
Peyote cults and the Ghost Dance
The "Indian New Deal"
Post-War Indian movements