The western slope of the Continental Divide is far more complicated than the eastern slope because of the vast array of mountains and plateaus found there. The Sierras, running along the eastern boundary of California, and the Cascades, running through central Oregon and Washington, present an almost impenetrable obstacle to waters flowing westward. The Wasatch Plateau, running through central Utah, and its natural extension into southern Nevada present an obstacle to any water flow southward. And the high country of southern Oregon and Idaho present an obstacle to any water flow northward. Thus, surface waters rising out of this central western region, roughly defined above, have no access to the Pacific Ocean; instead, these waters run into local sink holes where water either leaches into enormous ground-water reservoirs or is lost to evaporation. Sink holes are "wet" or "dry" depending on the relationship between evaporation and annual runoff. In any case, sink holes have high salt content because evaporation concentrates natural salts over time. The Great Salt Lake is a classic "wet" sink hole; Carson Sink is a classic "dry" sink hole. As a whole, the region described here is the Great Basin. It is by no means geologically homogenous; it is, instead, a complex of mountains, plateaus, river drainages, and high-elevation meadows, brought together within the single characteristic that none of the surface water flows outside of its boundaries. An equally important shared characteristic of the Basin is, of course, its semi-arid climate. Please see map of the hydrographically defined Great Basin (after D'Azevedo, "Introduction", fig. 2, 7).
The Great Basin Study Region, as defined in the Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 11 (Smithsonian Institution, 1986) is a somewhat larger geographical area, centered on the Great Basin but including some territories lying outside of the Basin itself. This was done in order to include, in this study region, all of the indigenous people whose lifeways are most closely related and conform most closely to the general ecological features of the Basin. The Great Basin Region includes all of the northern tributaries to the Colorado River system and the whole of the Snake River system up to the northeastern corner of Oregon. This region includes three very large families of indigenous people --- the Shoshone, the Paiute, and the Ute. In addition, there are three small groups --- the Washoe, the Kawaiisu, and the Bannock. Finally, note the map of the Great Basin Study Region (after Sturtevant, William C. (Gen. Ed.) And Warren L. D'Azevedo (vol. Ed.). Handbook . . ., vol. 11, ix).
To European explorers and even Americans, later on, the Great Basin remained unknown well into the 19th Century. Not even the Spanish, who occupied the Southwest from the 16th Century onward, had ventured into the Great Basin until the late 18th Century, seeking connecting routes to Alta California. The first significant explorations by Anglo Europeans were in the late 1820s through the early 1840s. The first American settlers in the Basin were the Mormons, in 1847, who had been significantly persecuted for their cultural beliefs and practices and had moved into the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake. Then, the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the discovery of the Comstock Mines, in Nevada, somewhat later, brought thousands of people across the Basin, on their way to become rich, as they thought. Some of these remained in the Basin itself and others followed quickly. After mining, ranching and agriculture followed. These early years in the Basinare illustrated in the accompanying map. (See chapter on "Post-Columbian History".)
Indigenous life in the Great Basin continued into the second half of the 19th Century; however, while it was one of the last regions of the Continental United States to be intruded upon, it was also one of the most quickly destroyed, being a very fragile ecological balance of living systems. Indigenous lifeways in the Basin required intensive, timely utilization of all the scarce naturally available resources. But Euro-American techniques of agriculture and ranching quickly devastated the region's natural resources, replacing these with privately owned domestic property, useless to indigenous lifeways. American attitudes toward indigenous people, everywhere in the United States and its territories, classified them as heathen primitives, leaving them protected by only Christian charity or simple pity. In the context of these attitudes, indigenous people of the Basin made out even worse than others since their archaic lifeways, semi-nomadic habitation patterns, and low-density populations made them appear more "primitive" than any other Indians that Americans had encountered.
Typical of American attitudes is Mark Twain's characterization of the Gosiute Western Shoshone, in his book Roughing It. "It was along in this wild country somewhere . . . that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent." Twain continued, "Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything covertly, like all the other "Noble Red Men" that we (do not) read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless, like all other Indians; prideless beggars . . ; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline." Twain's tirades and dark comparisons went on and on; yet the chapter ended, remarkably, by calling the Gosiutes "a class who have a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the Rocky Mountains . . ! If we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in God's name let us at least not throw mud at them." (Twain, 144-147) Thus, Twain's pronouncements captured even the mood of reform in the last quarter of the 19th Century.
While Americans did violence to the natural environment, they also frequently did violence to indigenous people themselves. By 1873, the indigenous population of the Basin was already in decline. Estimated at 21,500, in 1873, it had dropped to 12,000 by 1930. Disease, murder, and loss of natural habitat combined to destroy indigenous peoples and their cultures. (d'Azevedo, "Introduction," HNAI, 11, pp. 1-4)
The Great Basin is an interesting and productive model for any study of indigenous people. Twain was right; life was not easy in the "deserts [west] of the Rocky Mountains." The fact that people could live in such a region and, indeed, develop complex and interesting cultures is a commentary on what can be achieved when the natural world is understood and when human lifeways are contained within an ecological balance. In contrast, Euro-American lifeways are understood in a new light when we see the possibilities of human life within an environment that they treated with disdain and could only think of altering to their own purposes.
