The Ruby Valley Treaty and the Western Shoshone

The Treaty of Ruby Valley, signed on October first, eighteen sixty-three, is one of the most disputed documents in Nevada history. On that day, representatives of the Western Shoshone Nation and the United States signed an agreement in the Ruby Valley, a fertile drainage southeast of what is now Elko. The United States understood the treaty as extinguishing Western Shoshone land title across much of Nevada. The Shoshone signatories understood it as a peace agreement and a right-of-way grant permitting American emigrants, miners, and telegraph lines to cross their lands, not a surrender of those lands.

The Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians, whose tribal headquarters sits near Elko, is among the descendants of the people who signed that treaty. For most of the twentieth century, the federal government maintained that the treaty had ceded Shoshone title to the land. In the nineteen seventies, sisters Mary and Carrie Dann of the Western Shoshone refused to pay federal grazing fees on land they considered their ancestral territory and were sued for trespassing. Their case moved through American courts and reached international human rights bodies over the following decades, drawing international attention to the unresolved land question.

In nineteen seventy-nine, Congress appropriated twenty-six million dollars as payment for the Western Shoshone lands. Many Western Shoshone refused the money, and it was left with the government, whose acceptance the courts later treated as payment. The debate over what the Ruby Valley Treaty actually meant, and what it actually conveyed, remains unresolved. The land question, at its core, was never about money.