Honoring Native Land

Recent discoveries in New Mexico indicate the ancestors of Native Americans walked upon North American soil at least 23,000 years ago. Direct archaeological dating places date on these indigenous ancestors to 9,000+ years for artifacts and material culture, and 14,000+ years for petroglyphs dated within the Winnemucca Valley region. When the first Americans inhabited western Nevada, they lived concurrently with relic Pleistocene animals and thrived on the resources associated with massive Lake Lahontan, which covered more than 8,000 square miles of western Nevada. During this time, the Stillwater Range would have risen high above Lake Lahontan and supported flora and fauna quite different from today. The ancestral Native Americans would have utilized the resource of the early Holocene Stillwater Range as well as the lakeshore resources. Numunaa Nobe may well be one of the oldest continually occupied Native American homelands in North America.

The ancestors of the Nuumu and Newe people lived along the shore of ancient Lake Lahanton for countless generations and watched as the climate shifted and brought new opportunities for living and thriving in the region. As Lake Lahontan dried into marsh lands, marsh resources became increasing important for these early people, as did the upland resources offered by the Stillwater Range. What did not change for countless generations were the features of the Stillwater Range itself. The ancestors of the Nuumu and Newe people wrote their collective history, cosmologies, and the stories of the changes of the climates upon the enduring Stillwater Mountains, which, like the people, endured the changes of the shifting climate over millennia.

Countless Nuumu and Newe cultural stories and cosmologies are written across the geographical locations of the Stillwater Range: Weasel’s Trail is associated with the geology of the hills above White Cloud Canyon; Wolf’s Battleground is located on the east-side of the range; and Fox Peak (called Job Peak by the EuroAmericans) is recognized by many of the Nuumu and Newe people as their cultural center. Ethnographic information suggests that the area was called Fox Peak because people always saw the red foxes there when camping or hunting. But more than just an area for resource provisioning, Nuumu and Newe cosmologies place Fox Peak as the location where “Old Man Father” and “Old Woman Mother” dispersed their four children to start different human populations. The Stillwater group of Paiute people have always been held in reverence by most of the Numu and Newe people because of their proximity to this sacred cultural location. Fox Peak is the site of the creation of people, the location of Numunaa Nobe (lit. “First Parent’s Home”); the point from which people were sent away by their parents to found tribes. The Mother Stone and Father Stone atop Fox Peak embodied the essence of the Numunaa Nobe. These stones were defaced and destroyed by US Navy pilots in the mid 20th century who use them for gunnery and bombing practice.

As immigrants poured-over the Stillwater Range in search for minerals, wealth, and profit, the Native American cultural significance and connection with the area was severed by Western industrial activity, exacerbated by conflicts between EuroAmericans and indigenous people, the forced removal of the indigenous people to reservations, and buried beneath an avalanche of EuroAmerican geographical place names. The creation of the Numunaa Nobe National Conservation Area (NCA) is a positive first-step to reconnect the Stillwater Range to the traditional lifeways and cultural landscape of the Nuumu and Newe people and to their “First Parent’s Home.”

History

The earliest explorer to document the Stillwater Range was E. M. Kern with the Fremont 1845 expedition followed by Captain J. H. Simpson, who passed to the south of the range via Sand Pass on June 4th & 5th, 1859 while exploring for a shorter wagon route across Nevada from Utah to California. EuroAmerican mining began in the Stillwater range in 1860 and led to the creation of the Mining Camp of La Plata, which served as the county seat of Churchill County from 1864 through 1868. Mining production throughout the Stillwater Range was limited and intermittent for 120 years and never reached a very lucrative level.

By the end of 1860, the Pony Express Route was moved north into the southern Stillwater Range, which was determined to be a safer route during the EuroAmerican conflicts with the Paiute people. The Pony Express continued to use this “Stillwater Dogleg” until its demise in October of 1861. The Overland Mail Company stage and telegraph continued to use the “Stillwater Dogleg” route for several more years. Part of the “Stillwater Dogleg” route forms the southern boundary of the Numunaa Nobe NCA.

In her 1985 book, Magee Station and the Churchill Chronicles, Childers summarizes the attitudes of the EuroAmerican invaders toward the people they displaced: "[b]y 1863... rich farmland along the Carson [River] and around Stillwater - a traditional indian [sic] campsite - was claimed and opened." Colonialism and manifest destiny are written all over that sentiment. The Dawes Act of 1877 legitimized colonialism by allowing the U.S. government to break up existing reservations into individual allotments for individual Native Americans. The primary purpose of the Act was to force EuroAmerican ideals of private property ownership upon Native American peoples, remove indigenous people from their traditional lands, collapse their traditional cultures and traditional life-ways, and "open" the land for EuroAmerican colonization. Between 1890 and 1893 nearly 200 allotments of their traditional lands were “given” to the Toi Ticutta band of the Northern Paiutes in the Stillwater area. In 1906, the Fallon Reservation was established, but with the development of the Newlands Irrigation Project and demands for by EuroAmericans for agricultural water, water rights for the reservation were cancelled and the reservation was greatly reduced in size. Most of the Fallon Reservation was flooded in 1907 when a dam broke.

For more information about the History of the Stillwater Range, see the Additional Resources Tab on the left.