The Treaty of Ruby Valley, The Land That Was Never Sold

October first, eighteen sixty-three. Near a spring in central Nevada, government commissioners representing the United States and leaders of the Western Shoshone Nation signed a document called the Treaty of Ruby Valley. The treaty ran several pages. It covered telegraph and stage lines, railroad rights-of-way, military posts, mining permissions, and the transit of settlers across Newe territory. What it did not include, by the interpretation the Western Shoshone have maintained ever since, was a sale or cession of the land itself.

The Newe, 'the people,' had occupied the Great Basin for thousands of years. Their traditional territory, as defined by the treaty's geographic language, covered about forty thousand square miles across what became Nevada, California, Idaho, and Utah. They were a mobile people, moving seasonally between valley floors and mountain ranges, following pinyon harvests in autumn and winter camps near spring water.

The federal government read the treaty differently. Over the following century, it treated the land as public domain available for mining, ranching, and settlement. The Indian Claims Commission, established after World War Two to settle outstanding Indigenous land claims for a flat payment, eventually awarded twenty-six million dollars to the Western Shoshone in nineteen seventy-nine for lands the commission considered taken. The money was authorized. The Shoshone refused it.

Many Western Shoshone rejected it. They argued that accepting the payment would validate the fiction that the land had been ceded, and they did not believe it had been. The money sat in a federal account, drawing interest, for decades.

The refusal created one of the more unusual situations in federal-Indian relations: the United States formally compensating a people for land it considered already taken, and that people refusing the compensation as a form of continuing protest. The legal question of what the Treaty of Ruby Valley actually transferred has never been fully resolved in the Western Shoshone's favor by any American court. But neither have the Shoshone accepted the government's conclusion. The springs and mountains you are driving through right now are, in the Newe view of the record, still Newe land.