The People of the Basin, Numa, Newe, Nuwuvi, and Washeshu

Ten thousand years before any prospector raised a pick to this ground, four peoples had already mapped every spring, every pinyon grove, every seasonal corridor across the Great Basin. They knew this land in a language English has never had words for. The Northern Paiute called themselves the Numa, meaning simply the People.

They ranged across the high desert valleys of western and central Nevada, following the rhythms of rabbit and antelope, pine nut and cattail. Their territory wrapped around Pyramid Lake, Walker Lake, and the reaches of the Humboldt River, waterways that sustained life across an otherwise merciless landscape. To the east and southeast, the Western Shoshone, who knew themselves as Newe, also the People, moved in small family bands across a vast interior, the Ruby Valley corridor, the Snake Range, the long alkaline flats of eastern Nevada.

The Southern Paiute, the Nuwuvi, held the Colorado Plateau rim and the springs of the Mojave approach, peoples of red canyon country and desert mathematics. Near the Sierra Nevada, the Washoe, the Washeshu, occupied one of the most resource-rich homelands on the continent. Lake Tahoe in summer for spawning fish.

Pine nuts in autumn. Mountain valleys in spring. The Washoe word for the lake was Da'ow.

The state's name, Nevada, is Spanish and means snowcapped, a word for the Sierra's white crest, not the desert below it. The arrival of wagon trains in the eighteen forties and the silver rush in eighteen fifty-nine compressed what had been a workable world into a decade of catastrophic change. Hunting grounds became mine claims.

Fish-rich streams were dammed or fouled by hydraulic tailings. Pinyon forests were felled for charcoal to feed the reduction mills at Virginia City. By eighteen sixty, open warfare had begun at Pyramid Lake.

Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Paiute woman born around eighteen forty-four, watched the transformation from childhood. She learned English, served as an army scout and interpreter, lectured to audiences in Boston and Washington, and in eighteen eighty-three published Life Among the Piutes, the first autobiography by a Native American woman to receive United States copyright. She named what was happening with precision: the systematic breaking of every promise ever made.

Nevada's deep history begins with these four peoples. Their nations are still here.