The Washoe and the Paiute, The First People of the Truckee

The river at the center of this city has been a human place for far longer than the city itself. The Washoe people have lived along the Truckee River, around Lake Tahoe, and through the Carson Valley for at least six thousand years, and possibly much longer. They called themselves Wa She Shu, the people. The Truckee Meadows, where Reno now sits, served as a winter encampment, a place to shelter in the cottonwood groves after the summer seasons spent at high elevation around Lake Tahoe.

The Northern Paiute, whose territory extended through much of the Great Basin to the north and east, also moved through these valleys. Pyramid Lake, forty miles north of Reno, was the center of the Kuyuidökadö band's territory. They fished the cui-ui, a sucker fish found nowhere else on earth, from waters fed by the Truckee River flowing out of Lake Tahoe.

European and American contact came hard and fast after eighteen forty-four, when explorer John Fremont and scout Kit Carson passed through the region, named Pyramid Lake, and mapped routes that would soon bring thousands of emigrants along the Overland Trail. By eighteen sixty, violence between settlers and Northern Paiute fighters had broken into open warfare at what became known as the Pyramid Lake War, fought near the southern end of Pyramid Lake.

When Reno was founded in eighteen sixty-eight, many Washoe and Paiute families who had lived along the Truckee River for generations were displaced from the land itself, though they continued to live on its edges, working for wages in the new city and keeping traditional practices where they could. In nineteen seventeen, the federal government purchased twenty acres near downtown Reno for what became the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, a small urban tribal territory that today represents members of the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe nations, three distinct peoples, sharing ground beside the same river their ancestors knew long before anyone thought to auction it.