The First People of Indian Wells Valley
Near Ridgecrest, California
Long before the Navy or the town, this basin, called the Indian Wells Valley, was a crossroads for Native peoples who read the desert like a map. No single tribe owned it outright. Instead, several Numic speaking peoples moved through it with the seasons.
From the southwest came the Kawaiisu, who call themselves the Nuwa, the People. Their homeland lay in the southern Sierra Nevada near Walker Pass, but they ranged far east across the Mojave to gather food. From the ranges to the north and east came the Coso people and the Panamint Shoshone, also known today as the Timbisha.
These families kept winter villages of sixty to a hundred people, then scattered into small bands in the warm months to hunt and to harvest, above all the fatty, nourishing nut of the pinyon pine, gathered each autumn in the surrounding mountains. The Timbisha Shoshone won federal recognition in the early nineteen eighties, yet received no land at first. Only in the year two thousand did Congress finally grant them a homeland, including a parcel at Furnace Creek inside Death Valley National Park, the first national park to host a reservation within its borders.
