Western Shoshone: The First People of the Amargosa
Near Beatty, Nevada
Long before gold prospectors walked these desert hills, the Amargosa Valley was home to groups of the Western Shoshone, who had lived in the Great Basin for thousands of years. The desert country around what is now Beatty was part of their traditional territory, and they moved through it seasonally, hunting game and gathering the plants that the desert and its scattered springs made available.
The land does not look generous, but the Shoshone understood it in ways that took newcomers centuries to learn. The Amargosa River, intermittent and often invisible, flows underground through much of its course and surfaces at springs and seeps that the Shoshone knew and tracked. The oasis at what became the Beatty townsite was one such place, a reliable source of water in a landscape where water was the difference between survival and disaster.
European contact and then American expansion shrank the Shoshone world dramatically. By the middle of the nineteenth century, diseases had reduced the population severely, and incursions by settlers and miners disrupted the patterns of seasonal movement that the traditional economy depended on. An estimate from around eighteen seventy-five counted only six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty, with a total population of twenty-nine people.
Descendants of those communities continued to live in and near Beatty into the twentieth century, though most were displaced to reservations elsewhere. The Shoshone presence in this valley predates every road, every mine, and every railroad by thousands of years.
