Fort McDermitt: A Reservation Built from a Military Ruin

The Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe occupies a reservation straddling the Nevada-Oregon line along US Ninety-Five, on the same ground where the United States Army built a military post in eighteen sixty-five. The fort was established during the Snake War, a conflict in the region, to protect the stagecoach and wagon road through the Quinn River Valley. When the Army abandoned Fort McDermitt in eighteen eighty-nine, the land was set aside as a reservation for the Paiute and Shoshone families who had gathered there.

Today the reservation covers roughly thirty-five thousand acres in the high desert along the Quinn River valley. The tribal population is small, several hundred enrolled members, and the community sits in one of the most remote stretches of the US Ninety-Five corridor, far from any large town. The post was established on August fourteenth, eighteen sixty-five, on the site of a stagecoach stop, and named for Lieutenant Colonel Charles McDermit, who was killed in a skirmish in the area that year. It also guarded the stagecoach road from Virginia City through Winnemucca to Silver City in Idaho Territory. Sarah Winnemucca worked here from eighteen sixty-eight to eighteen seventy-three as an interpreter, scout, and hospital matron. The tribe organized under the Indian Reorganization Act of nineteen thirty-four, and its constitution was approved on May sixth, nineteen thirty-six, by fifty-four of sixty-five available voters. The reservation began with about sixteen thousand acres in Nevada and nineteen thousand in Oregon, and in twenty sixteen about nineteen thousand more acres of federal land in Nevada were placed in trust for the tribe. The lithium deposits discovered in volcanic clay beneath Thacker Pass, roughly forty miles away, have drawn international attention to this corner of Nevada in recent years.