Ruby Lake: A Marsh in the High Desert

In the Ruby Valley, between the Ruby Mountains to the west and the East Humboldt Range to the east, springs and seeps maintain a permanent wetland in the middle of the high desert. This is Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most productive waterbird habitats in the Great Basin and one of the more unexpected landscapes in Nevada. Greater sandhill cranes and trumpeter swans stop here during migration. Canvasbacks and ruddy ducks nest in the marsh grasses. The refuge encompasses close to forty thousand acres of wetland, upland, and open water in a basin that would otherwise be dry sage flat.

The wetland exists because the Ruby Valley catches enough water from the surrounding mountains to maintain surface moisture year-round, a rarity in the Great Basin where most water disappears underground or evaporates before it can pool. The springs and seeps that feed Ruby Lake are part of the same hydrological system that made the valley a gathering place for Western Shoshone bands for centuries and a recognized stopping point for emigrant parties crossing the continent in the eighteen forties and fifties.

This was also the valley where the United States and Western Shoshone leaders signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley on October first, eighteen sixty-three. The Western Shoshone understood the treaty as a peace agreement permitting Americans to cross their lands. The United States later asserted it had extinguished Shoshone title to most of Nevada. The gap between those two understandings became the foundation of one of the longest-running indigenous land rights disputes in the American West.