Shoshone-Paiute “Pakkiata” in the Great Basin
Robert McCarl, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology
Boise State University
bmccarl@boisestate.edu
Ranching is a rich part of Shoshone-Paiute culture and tradition, yet the tribes' contributions to the economic development of Southeast Idaho and Northern Nevada have been largely overlooked through history.
Men and women. Old and young. Black and white. Cowboys … and Indians. Like many pairings in our language, these last two suggest not just difference, but opposition. This history of ranching and buckarooing on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation is not only about how Shoshone and Paiute people became ranchers, but perhaps more importantly, why the contributions of native and Hispanic people to this central western occupation are largely
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unrecognized, despite the fact that they were the original cowboys.1 A basic premise of this analysis is to challenge the inaccurate and ethnocentric assumption that these native people simply adopted the lifeways of the dominant culture. Through cultural, economic, political and even linguistic means, the adoption of ranching and buckarooing in Duck Valley provided tribal members with an opportunity for survival within, and resistance against, outside influence.
Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod writes that all cultural experience is fragmented and heterogeneous, rather than clearly bounded and homogeneous. Citing her own mixed Middle Eastern background, she explores the many populations around the world that mix ethnic, religious and generational identities.2 Abu-Lughod suggests that we continue to revise our notion of culture to better fit this more pluralistic view. She also asserts that this can best be accomplished through focused cultural histories that replace a homogeneous view of culture with concrete, personalized experiences.
The native people of North America not only recognized this diversity, they embraced it. Trade languages, seasonal gatherings, adoptions and captures, and the vast pre-contact networks of jade and obsidian, suggest that North American people were clearly aware of and in contact with each other for hundreds of years.3 This cultural blending and borrowing continues today in pow wows, fandangos, intermarriage between tribes and non-Indians, and spiritual observances such as Sun Dancing and Ghost Dancing rituals.4 As outsiders, our relationships with native people have been naïve and stereotypical, demanding “authenticity” and purity in tribal identity expressed through dance, dress or language. The reality is that these identities exist within complex cultural assemblages that increasingly borrow from each other to comprise first family and later regional and tribal identity. Indian music, dance and literature clearly exhibited this syncretic mixing through extensive diffusion long before European contact.5
Adapting new ways
Michael Taussig suggests that history, particularly the cultural history of indigenous people, is often a misunderstanding of the relationship between cultural imitation (mimesis) and its antithesis, alterity. In the Americas, this process is readily illustrated by the various ways native people adapted the technology, social organization and belief systems of Europeans (Spanish, French, English and American) to fit their own needs and cultural perspectives. At the same time, forces within the colonialist structure continually seek to objectify, make-different and “alter” the indigenous population.6 When we apply this model to ranching and buckarooing among Shoshone and Paiute people in the Great Basin, we find that Indian ranching has direct antecedents both in its connection to the Spanish ranchero and the mestizo vaquero in Mexico, and to its elaboration of collective hunting and political activities that preceded European contact.7 Yet even a cursory knowledge of ranching culture and history in the West reveals that this significant history is overwhelmed by our preoccupation with native people as exotic representations of the “Other”— a putative primitive who manages to barely sustain himself in an industrial economy. Consider the popular view of Indians via media representations from John Wayne, Wild Bill Hickock, Davey Crockett, Andrew Jackson and George Armstrong Custer. Not only has our study of native culture romanticized and reified the Other, it has denied native people any recognition for their ability to use European methods without losing their own cultural beliefs. In short, they have been rendered as the ultimate alter in our midst as we rely on stereotypes lodged firmly in our collective consciousness.8
In order to better understand how native people resisted and adapted to European incursions, it is necessary to look at the Shoshone and Paiute cultures prior to and during contact with Europeans. Even though they shared a similar environmental region, the gathering and hunting bands of the Great Basin ranged over thousands of miles seeking animal and plant resources that changed with the seasons. The more westerly Shoshones relied heavily on salmon, big horned sheep and (after the introduction of the horse) seasonal buffalo hunts, while the more easterly Paiutes depended heavily upon piñon pine nuts, antelope and rabbit drives.9 Many of the regional bands were named on the basis on their primary food: for example, rabbit eaters, fish eaters, sheep eaters. Linguistically, the Shoshone and the Paiute are a Numic people with direct linkages to the Comanche and Utes (Uto-Aztecan) to the south, to the Bannock to the east and to the western Nevada and northern California Paiutes. The Western Shoshone (the Newe) and the Northern Paiute (Numa) often had contact with each other and established cordial respect for each other’s language and culture prior to European contact.10
Seasonal gatherings
Both the Newe and the Numa existed in extended-family band units that periodically joined together in seasonal harvests of salmon and collective hunts for rabbits or antelope.11 Like many gathering-hunting people around the world, this mode of production created highly democratic and fluid social organizations that privileged individual autonomy and personal choice over individual leadership and stratification.12
Sarah Winnemucca-Hopkins describes such a hunt in the following account:
The antelopes move in herds in the winter, and as late in the spring as April. At this time there was said to be a large herd in a certain place, and my father told all his people to come together in ten days to go with him in his hunt ... The people who were with him in the camp then made another circle east of the one where their wigwams were, and made six mounds of sage-brush and stones on the sides of it with a space of a hundred yards or more from one mound to the next one, but no fence between the mounds. These mounds were made high, so that they could be seen from far off. The women and boys and old men in the camp who were working on the mounds were told ... not to have any accident, but to do everything perfectly and to keep thinking about the antelopes all the time ... It took five days to charm the antelopes ... After that ... two men who were messengers went out to see the antelopes. They carried their torches in their right hands, and one of them carried a pipe in his left hand ... One went around the circle to the right and another went to the left until they met ... On the fifth day the antelopes were charmed and the whole herd followed the tracks of my people and entered the circle where the mounds were ... bowing and tossing their heads and looking sleepy and under a powerful spell ... (T)hey stayed there until my people killed every one. But if anybody had dropped anything, or had stumbled and had not told about it, then when the antelopes came to the place where he had done that, they threw of the spell and rushed wildly out of the circle at that place. My brother can charm horses in the same way. 13
This account by Winnemucca-Hopkins illustrates not only the importance of periodic cooperation during the seasonal hunt, it also reflects the familiarity of Great Basin people with large herbivores prior to European contact. Their profound knowledge of the land and animal behavior, coupled with a belief system tied directly to interaction with this environment, provided the people of this region with a pre-disposition to the demands of transhumance, pastoralist activities associated with ranching. At the same time, the social organization — the coordination of family bands into larger work units that then dispersed during more stressful times of the year — presaged a seasonal division of labor and yearly cycle among Shoshone and Paiute ranching families that continues to this day.
The oral traditions of the Numa and Newe also contain premonitions and anticipation of the coming of the whites. Long before the incursion of vast numbers of settlers crossing the Oregon and California trails in the mid-1840s seeking their fortunes in the gold fields of the West, the Uto-Aztecan speaking people of North America learned about European conquests of the Aztec nation through the diaspora of Indian and mission escapees from Spanish colonial rule. Linked by language and trade to the Comanche and the Utes, the Shoshone and later the northern Paiute were among the first northern tribes to benefit from the adoption of the horse. Shimkin states that:
By the end of the eighteenth century, a series of equestrian Numic peoples having a variety of contacts and interactions extended from the Comanche on the High Plains, through the Shoshone to the Northern Paiute in the Great Basin, and by 1830 horses and horsemanship had spread in the Basin to all ecologically possible areas. The factors that brought about this situation were the conclusion of peace between the Spaniards and the Comanche in 1786, the westward movement of the Plains Shoshone and the attendant development of extensive trade networks, military pressure from mounted Plateau tribes of the Columbia River, the opening of the southeastern Great Basin by the Escalante Dominguez (expedition), and the Spanish colonization of California after 1769. A distant consequence of the conclusion of peace with the Comanche was the re-establishment of at least intermittent Spanish trade contacts as far north as the Shoshone bands on the Snake River in Idaho….14
Of particular interest to this discussion, Shimkin’s linkage of the horse with the increasing influence of Spanish and Mexican cultures on first the Newe and later the Numa people provides an important background for understanding Shoshone and Paiute ranching traditions.
The Pakkiata
The Spanish influence on the Great Basin Shoshone and Paiute is an important part of the various strands of cultural tradition that have resulted in the “Pakkiata,” the Indian buckaroo of the interior high desert. In his classic book on the relationship between the native people of our continent and the impact of the horse upon their traditional ways of life, The Indian and the Horse, Frank Gilbert Roe provides the following explanation of how early Indian conscripts to the mission and ranchero modes of production became vaqueros:
Close on the trail of the exploring conquistadores came the padres, establishing missions ... gardens were planted and horses brought in. A difficulty arose at once. Who were to be the vaqueros? Since there were not enough Spaniards to be cowboys, the only course was for the padres to teach the natives. Thus in the missions we have the first and primary source though which natives learned horsemanship and obtained mounts. As the missions grew, so did the number of native vaqueros increase. Some would rebel from time to time and run off to their tribes with stolen horses and cattle. With these as teachers, the rest of the tribe required little time to become equestrian, and soon they were slipping down to the missions to steal more horses. The civil government foresaw the dangers in the revolts of Indian vaqueros and the stealing of the mission animals and so forbade the padres to have natives as vaqueros. However, the fathers had no choice, since food was essential for their rancherias and there were no white men available for the work.15
The Comanche, related linguistically and through trade to the Shoshones and the Utes, are well known for their horsemanship and their aggressive raiding of Spanish settlements as early as 1700. The route followed by horses and ranching expertise is perhaps not as important as the impact of this culture on the early Shoshone and Paiute residents of Duck Valley.16 Roe provides the following philological link to stress the continued impact of the Spanish rancheria and vaquero culture on contemporary North American ranching:
A philological investigation of the horse terminology of the Southeast in general might possibly throw some light upon the chronology and direction (or directions) of any influx of Spanish or Hispano-Indian horses into the region ... We have “cinch” (cinch-girth), “hackamore” (haquima or jaquima), “lariat” and “lasso” (reata de lazar, or la reata — the rope), whence our term “roping” and occasionally “lassoing.” I have never yet heard the last term used as a noun or verb on the range itself from any true Westerner in the Northern Plains area. There are also “latigo” (el latigo — the straps that “cinch ’em up tight”), the popular “rodeo” (rodear — to round up), and “cavvy yard” (caballada — herd of horses). To these may be added the picturesque — but highly practical — “chaps (chapparreras, chaparajos, chaparejos). I myself fifty years ago heard the word “buckayro” (commonly “buckaroo” in print) from the lips of a Northern friend whose mother tongue was Cree. This could be nothing else except the Spanish vaquero (b=v), and used in that precise sense of “cowman” …17
Borrowed terms in Shoshone and Paiute at Duck Valley today reflect the power of this influence:
pakkiata~pakkatuuh [-a] buckaroo, cowboy
Muttsatteh Name (man’s) Muchacho
Amputih Name Hombre
kuuhkinka TV lasso
pikappeh N [-a] buckskin (Spanish : badana)
pisenteki N [-a] pacer horse (Spanish: paso)
riatta
chaps
tahippa N [-‘a] tapaderas
hackamore
fandango 18
Perhaps the most telling legacy of Mexican heritage in the ranching culture of Duck Valley is the esprit de corps and pride of the Indian buckaroo. Arnold Rojas, in his book The Vaquero, describes the advent and the expansion of the Indian buckaroo from the earliest days of the Spanish and later California land grants:
When a vaquero was especially skilled, and he was asked how he had reached such a degree of proficiency, his answer would invariably be: “Me crie entre los Indios” — “I was raised among the Indians.” Or when some vaquero had performed his work with great skill, the other men would look at each other, smile approvingly, and say, “Se crio entre los Indios pues” — “Well, he was brought up among the Indians.” ... The vaquero or buckaroo who herded cattle on the ranches of California was sometimes a Cahuilla, a Piute, a Mission Indian or a member of one of the numerous tribes that populated California. …The rider was called a “vaquero,” a word derived from vaca or cow. He was never called a “cowboy.” ... In fact ... the riders from …. California, Nevada and Oregon so disliked the word “cowboy” that he coined the term “buckaroo” from vaquero, and by this he was known … The Indian vaquero was sparing in speech and serene under all circumstances. He was pithy in all his expressions and often spoke in metaphor or ironically. One would have to be well acquainted with him to know his meanings. He had a knack for giving names that never failed to correspond to something risible in their owners. There was a man in Bakersfield who every year managed the Frontier Days parade. He had a long, thin, straight nose and little blue eyes. He would have filled the description of Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Agustin Hinio named him El Parajo Carpintero, the Woodpecker.19
Erickson “Lom” Hooper, a well-known buckaroo and rancher in Duck Valley, reinforces the power of this cultural influence in the following story:
Ranchers like both Mexican and Indian cowboys because they know they can get a good days work out ‘em. When guys like that first start working together they watch each other to see how the other guy is doing it. They’ll tell you things like, “from this point, we’ll go straight away. See that point? That’s where we’re gonna meet.” You gotta watch…they are gonna drive cattle down to you ... Almost all of the Indian cowboys from here learned here first ... I knew this old Mexican guy who came from Mexico ... he told me that Poncho Villa had branded him when he was 10 years old. His name was Tess and he is buried at Battle Mountain. He knew lots of Indians ... He came here (Duck Valley) one time when he was pretty old, about 70. A lot of people did not know he was not Indian. He was a tall man, quiet. He told stories and shared tricks. He taught me how horses think.”20
Traditional ways
In addition to these traditions, Duck Valley buckaroos prefer local saddles made by Indian saddle makers and raw hiders like Spider Teller and Robert Crutcher; they continue to use the traditional rawhide rope, the riatta; wear the wide chaps and protect their stirrups with leather tapaderas. To witness a local buckaroo riding across through Owyhee with his (or her) flat Petan hat, long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck, kerchief tightly knotted and his hands holding the reins within locally made buckskin gloves, is to bear witness to the strength of a people who have successfully adapted traditions and technologies from a number of cultural influences to their own advantage. At the same time, that rancher might drive a new diesel pick-up with a two-horse trailer; harvest his hay using a state-of–the-art tractor or enjoy a football game on his cable television set. As described below, the conscious use of a particular repertoire of cultural tools for a specific context does not preclude participation in a variety of other arenas of human interaction common to the mainstream American experience.
Once the westward expansion began, the initial cooperation and accommodation accorded the settlers by Great Basin people gave way to frustration and increasing anger over the wanton destruction of their land, animals and, eventually, their way of life. In 1878, this frustration led Buffalo Horn and his Bannock followers to wage war against the United States in hopes of securing camas prairie land in southern Idaho that had been promised to his people in the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868.21 Yet even before this ill-fated resistance, the native people of the region marked their cultural response to the white incursion in oral tradition. In a coyote story collected by Lowie in 1909, the relationship between whites and native people in the Basin were explicitly detailed from the native point of view in the following:
Coyote walking along. A white trickster was riding about on horseback and rode over Coyote, who transformed himself into an Indian. The White man told him he was looking for Coyote, the Indian trickster; he had heard that Coyote was nearby. Coyote said he had seen him (i.e., himself) on the other side of the hill. “Let me have your horse and I will bring him to you immediately.” The White man agreed. Coyote rode away, but returned after a short while.
He said the horse had refused to go on, because it did not see the shadow of the White man’s gun. The White man gave Coyote his gun and Coyote departed. After a while, he came back, saying that the horse had turned around, because it was used to seeing the White man’s hat. The White man gave Coyote his hat and Coyote rode away. He came back once more, because the horse was used to feeling the weight of the White man’s coat. Then the White man gave Coyote all he had; he was stark naked now. Coyote kicked up his horse and said, “You wanted to fool me, but I have fooled you, the White trickster.” The White trickster began to cry.22
Yet not everything turned out that well for the Newe and the Numa. Many of the indigenous people of the Boise Valley and southern Idaho were force-marched to Fort Simco in Washington and later Fort Hall in eastern Idaho. The treaty process established by Congress and the executive branch did not work well in the Great Basin. The more sedentary tribes east of the Mississippi who had recognized spokespersons and leaders for villages or even regional confederations were non-existent in the extended family bands of the Intermountain West. Therefore, following a long series of negotiations that culminated in bringing many of the dispersed Shoshone bands under the “protection” of the Treaty of Ruby Valley in 1869, a large number of non-treaty Shoshones and northern Paiutes were excluded. Many of these bands eventually were recognized as residents of Indian “colonies” with minimal federal support. In May 1886, Chief Paddy Cap’s band of northern Paiutes was allotted a northern section of what is today the Duck Valley Indian Reservation.23
McKinney provides a sketch of early reservation life in the following:
During the year 1900, a census of the Duck Valley Reservation showed the population of the tribes to be 224 Shoshone and 226 Paiutes — a total of 450. Some of the Indians lived off of the reservation in order to find work from ranchers and in the mining camps, for there was not enough work on the reservation. Land was still a large concern for the tribes; the land was available, but the problem was water. Pleas to the government were not heeded. Duck Valley still did not get its storage reservoir for irrigation.24
A new way
In addition to concerns about water, health and education, the people of Duck Valley were undergoing the difficult transition from a full-time, gathering hunting society to a sedentary, agricultural subsistence. One of the most important aspects of the Duck Valley story is the way in which the Shoshone and Paiute people adapted to these changes. In his article “The White Knife Shoshoni of Nevada,” Jack Harris states that the process of cultural change and adaptation (“acculturation”) can be summarized in Duck Valley as proceeding from initial contact (1825-40) made up of early trappers who made a negligible impact; the decade of the emigrant trains (1840-50) that had a bit greater impact and witnessed the introduction of the horse to the Shoshones, initially as a food source; the devastating third period following the gold rush which greatly impacted both the ecology and the social organization of the Shoshones, creating a more concentrated emphasis upon smaller bands and band-style leadership; and finally, a fourth period (1860-77) of forced relocation and cultural change.25 In the fifth stage — that of reservation life and acculturation — Harris states that
… after long centuries of cultural accommodation to the harsh demands of their environment, White contact operated to disturb the economy and to upset the balance between the culture elements. Customs, beliefs and practices that had been meaningful in relation to the simple hunting and gathering life were now rendered anomalous … During the period between the breakdown of the loose band organization and the establishment of the reservation, most of the Shoshoni had alternated between the aboriginal hunting-gathering life and some forms of labor that the Whites introduced. For most of the White Knives, this was farming. For ten years before the reservation was established most of them had worked on farms for wages, so that the agriculture that was encouraged on the reservation was not a strange technique. The government furnished most of the implements and the seed, and driven now by a desire to become self-supporting and independent, most of the natives worked industriously to make the land yield.
The transition from a food-gathering economy to agriculture, and later to herding, was accomplished with relatively little difficulty … It was but natural that the organization of the White Knives when they first arrived upon the reservation would have been that to which they had grown accustomed. They settled along the fertile banks of the Owyhee in communities of between ten and twenty families, each resolving itself into camp units of the same composition as in aboriginal times. This clustering was reminiscent of both the aboriginal winter community and the recent band organization. The first census of the reservation, taken in 1882, shows the population split into two large communities, each under the leadership of a “captain,” who was recognized by the agency as “chief” of the group. These “captains,” of course, were the former headmen of the short-lived bands.
There were no individual or family land grants. Each community appropriated as much of the land as it was able to cultivate. Under this arrangement, the two aboriginal patterns of production and distribution coexisted. The camps worked cooperatively in the community fields, and each was expected to contribute as much labor as possible. No camp was allowed to suffer by gain of another and the products of this communal labor were equitably divided among the entire group, as they had been in the communal antelope or rabbit hunt. On the other hand, each camp continued to hunt and gather seeds and roots during short and infrequent portions of the year as individual units, and the products of these efforts were distributed only within the camp itself as in former times. In each case, ownership of property continued to be based on production.26
A hard life
Harris’s analysis should not suggest that the early residents of Duck Valley had an easy time of it. Difficulties in obtaining water and good stock, the effort to turn a desert into productive farmland, the lack of support from state and local agencies in Idaho and Nevada, the isolation and weather extremes in the area, and the need to resist the continual attempts by the federal government to remove, assimilate, partition and even eradicate the Shoshone and Paiute people made their work increasingly difficult. Families from the three primary groups — Northern Paiute in the northern or Miller Creek section of the reservation; Shoshone groups in the south or Chinatown section of the reservation; and central, mixed families in the Blue Creek/Pleasant Valley area (later called the Boney Lane area of the reservation) — worked cooperatively to increase their cattle holdings while struggling to dig new irrigation ditches and create more space for grazing. An early report by Indian Field Service representative E.E. McNeilly, describes the ranching situation in Duck Valley in 1930:
The acreage on the reservation actually used for grazing purposes is 272,000 acres.
The Western Shoshone Livestock Association was organized in 1922. There are 125 families owning some cattle or sheep. The Association is officered and managed very largely by the Indians and any Indian having five head of stock may be a member.
About the year 1924 the number of stock permitted on the reservation was increased by 1,000 head. About the same time a series of dry years set in and it has seemed to me that during much of the time since then our range has been overstocked. The plan, so far as the interest of the Indians are concerned, which would seem most ideal would be to construct the proposed reservoir and greatly increase the Indian holdings until they could use all of the summer grazing area. Under these conditions, they would produce sufficient hay to winter six or seven thousand head of cattle and the summer range would very nicely take care of this number. We have recently disposed of 423 head of surplus horses off the range and by the development of water, proper location of salt and some drifting of cattle during the grazing season, will probably be beneficial also. Because of the lack of irrigation water and the inability of the Indians to produce sufficient hay to winter a large number of stock, they are unable to see very much future for their industry. It is, therefore, necessary for many of them to spend much of their time both winter and summer away from home to secure labor to support themselves and families.27
One of the early difficulties faced by the Shoshones and Paiutes of Duck Valley was their initial preference for horses over cattle. Delbert Jim states that “the people of Duck Valley are really into horses. At one time maybe ten thousand horses to five hundred cows.”28 Reggie Sope describes the area around the Blue Creek corrals:
These corrals were used for horse roundups and sorting out their stock in my grandfather’s day (early 1900s). They had an area over here where they sorted them out and then at night they would play evening games — stick games, hand games. The old-timers used to gather here for two weeks. My Dad used to tell me about some of the rough old guys who would bring horses in — pretty forked guys — good riders who would take bets about who could ride the best stock ... They used to use one wall of the corral for the horses and the rest of the area was filled with arbors and teepees ... I’ve heard of up to four or five hundred head of horses in here. They had so many horses that they had to split some off to one side while they were working the other bunch.29
Building cattle herds
Realizing that this large number of horses was using feed and grazing that could be better invested in cattle, many of the early Shoshone and Paiute ranchers began to sell off their horses to surrounding ranchers. They slowly began to build up their own herds of cattle using cash from their labor as freighters, buckaroos and domestic workers, and the sale of surplus hay and vegetables. Art Manning and Carl Dick describe these early days:
Most of what people learned they picked up on their own. When the government first established the ranches on the reservation they gave each rancher seed, a cow and, later, an agricultural agent to work with to learn how to do it ... The canals were all dug by hand, the brush cleared by hand or horse power ... Everything was horse drawn — you used to let your horse graze all night and catch it in the morning to get working ... We used to break all of our own horses and for work horses we used to put a young and an old horse together so the one could teach the other.
The first few winters in Owyhee were very bad. Many people went hungry and the government wanted to move a lot of people to Fort Hall ... 1935, Wild horse Dam was built and that created irrigation water for the tribe. They began the Western Shoshone Livestock Association to buy registered bulls and to finance and build a bull herd. They built their herd of bulls and each rancher within the association owned their own livestock and grazing lands on tribal assignment. The livestock association began a program of mixed breeds: beefstakes, angus, shorthorn, even Brahma — there are so many different colored breeds that it looks like a herd of horses when they are coming in off of the hills. Before Wildhorse was established, a lot of families had barely enough to keep them going due to a lack of feed ... What also makes it difficult is that Owyhee only has a ninety-day growing season.30
Minnie Dick, who grew up in northeastern Nevada around Austin, recalls these early days based on accounts told to her by her grandparents:
They worked around the ranch ... the rancher had stuff — he killed the cows. Had lots of cows and sheep. Any harvesting comes, then they help with the ranch. And the ladies plant potatoes and the garden. And they had orchards too — we used to sneak back there when the apples got ripe. We had some too — but the boys seen us — and they go after us. And when we stopped to throw the apples in the bushes, they find them all. (Laughs)
Interviewer: How did you store food?
Minnie: I don’t know. Just anyway I guess. We didn’t store anything. If we get deer we make jerky. Mostly they lived on the rabbit and the wild stuff.31
Today, the primary work in Duck Valley is cattle ranching, although this is changing as the tribe diversifies its economy through tribal economic projects like the new shopping center, tourism, fishing and (for some) traditional arts. The raising of range cattle requires a yearly schedule of seasonal change linked to specific ranching tasks: in summer, driving cattle to the upper reaches of the reservation for summer grazing; in fall, driving cattle into lower pastures as the weather cools, also branding and castration of calves; in winter, feeding of cattle by throwing out hay; and in spring and early summer, gathering, branding and cutting hay. As with other aspects of Duck Valley life, the labor of ranching is shared within the family and within loosely bound cattle associations that divide the reservation into three main districts.
Gathering together
In addition to traditional forms of horse breaking and doctoring, the use of riattas and other traditional vaquero gear, the mixture of Shoshone and Paiute place names and narratives with Spanish terms and ranching techniques of the ranchero, the Newe and Numa people of Duck Valley also continue to practice the traditional gatherings that were such an important part of their pre-contact lives.
When they first arrived in Duck Valley, the Shoshone and later the Paiutes were told that they could not hold their traditional seasonal gatherings. At the same time, they were encouraged to participate in “American” customs and holidays like the Fourth of July. As further evidence of their ability to adapt to outside pressure without abandoning traditional practices, the people of Duck Valley combined two celebrations, sometimes concealing ritual activities within the various activities of the Fourth of July gathering or “fandango.” Today, the Fourth of July Fandango and Owyhee Rodeo also includes a pow wow, an Indian rodeo, a large gathering of Shoshone and Paiute families from throughout the region and traditional stick games and singing that go on late into the night. In an early account, an extension agent, Charles S. Spencer, describes a typical fandango during the 1930’s:
The week of the Fourth of July, the entire family, bag and baggage, are loaded into the family wagons and are moved to a selected spot in the river bottom. Here they pitch camp under the direction of a camp foreman who arranges the tepees in a semi-circular formation with the opening to the East. This particular arrangement is to permit the Sun, their ancient deity, to enter their encampment each morning and watch over them throughout the day. During the daytime, horse racing, bucking horses, calf roping, and other games of skill are featured. With the approach of night all families return to their camps to cook and eat their evening meal. After darkness has overtaken the camp, everyone joins in the many forms of recreation enjoyed by their forefathers. The children gather in the darkness and amuse themselves with childish pranks. The young people collect in the center of the campgrounds where they enjoy old tribal dances accompanied by the rhythm of the tom-tom. The older folks sit in sociable groups and play the ancient stick game until the wee hours of the morning. After a week of this type of recreation, the Indian again returns to the white man’s customs of abode and earning a living.32
In spite of the prosaic language (which reflects a great deal of the Westerner’s romantic objectification of Indian people), Spencer’s account illustrates that this celebration contains a wide variety of opportunities for cultural reaffirmation. The traditional dancing and singing associated with seasonal gatherings is also coupled with buckarooing traditions, the rodeo and the traditional gear associated with ranching. The stick games, traditional foods and the pow wow also provide a wide variety of opportunities to express and confirm individual, family, tribal and generational identities. Not everything is highly reflective of cultural symbolism, but from the entry of the veterans into the pow wow and the rodeo grounds to the singing of “the flag song” in Paiute and the various give-aways and honor songs performed to recognize both the living and the dead, the fandango continues to operate as a powerful engine of cultural reaffirmation.33
Cultural strength
Which brings us to some preliminary conclusions regarding ways in which the ranching culture of Duck Valley illustrates significant avenues of cultural strength and resistance among the Shoshone and Paiute people of northern Nevada and southern Idaho. Returning to Taussig’s model mentioned above, the history of Numic people has been closely tied to first managing game in organized hunts and later using horses for both hunting and domestic livestock management. These cultural traditions, which draw upon both indigenous and colonial customs, illustrate a mimetic logic that accepts and replicates skills, techniques and modes of subsistence by reinforcing rather than destroying or supplanting traditional technologies. A Numic work saddle, for example, differs from the work saddle of an Anglo buckaroo only in its applied design, which might include rose or geometric motifs common in many Shoshone and Paiute items of material culture, such as cradleboards and beaded flat work. The significant aspect of this process, however, is how the Indian rancher and buckaroo, like the wider Indian population in the Great Basin, continues to be stigmatized as an “alter,” or “other.” A closer reading of cultural history indicates that far from being an imitator of European agricultural traditions, the Shoshone and Paiute rancher is actually a more direct descendant of a Great Basin adaptation. That adaptation is directly linked to trade networks for the horse and a diffusion of ranching skills from the Spanish ranchero tradition, as well as from mestizo vaqueros in Mexico. Seen from this perspective, the seasonal band organization, the ranching and buckarooing skills of the modern cowboy, much of the gear, technology and language of the culture, and even the continued perpetuation of traditional horsemanship and healing originated with the Indian buckaroo.
As members of mainstream Anglo society, we tend to think of history and culture as a continuum flowing from one incident or occurrence to the next. Looking at Shoshone and Paiute ranchers and buckaroos, we begin to better understand that at each stage of their interaction with Anglos they have had to redefine and reconstitute mechanisms for survival in a social and political context that has been hostile to their very existence. A closer examination of contemporary ranching tradition might allow us to better appreciate how difficult it is for each generation of Indian youth to balance the old ways with the demands of a rapidly changing, post-industrial world. In his book on the Lumbee and their long-term fight for federal and cultural recognition, Gerald Sider writes:
… Native Americans have histories that characteristically are marked by continuing sudden and substantial changes in their circumstances and situation. Behind these continuing ruptures and breaks are often found long-term trends that have to do with how minority ethnic peoples are incorporated into and simultaneously marginalized by the larger society — for instance the violent confinement of Native Americans to reservations and subsequent brutal reduction of native social life on reservations ... From such continuing pressures, manifest in continuing imposed ruptures (and the internal divisiveness that constantly accompanies such events), vulnerable ethnic peoples are constantly forced to learn and relearn how to situate themselves historically across, rather than impossibly against, the breaks that power imposes.34
All cultures borrow from, imitate and in many cases objectify each other. We will never reach any level of cultural or social equality, however, if the only histories we learn are those maintained by the status quo. Culture is not a thing, it is a process and as a process it exists in constant tension as each new generation redefines its individual identity within its frame of reference. The next generation of buckaroos in Duck Valley may use different modes of transportation, GPS technology and state-of-the-art wonder drugs to keep their stock healthy. Yet it is important that they also know they are representatives of a cultural tradition that extends back to the Spanish conquest and beyond. They are not imitators, but survivors. Adios Duke, hola pakkiata!
Endnotes:
1. Iverson 1994.
2. Abu-Lughod 1991: 137-140.
3. Kehoe 1992: 115-117; Hughes and Bennyhoff 1986:
23-255.
4. Crum 1994: 95-96; Mattern 1999: 132-139.
5. Thompson 1929; Nettl 1954.
6. Taussig 1993: xiii-xix; 250-255.
7. Shimkin 1986: 517-524.
8. Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988): 195-202. Also, the plural for both tribes is Numa and Newe.
9. Walker 1982: 25-35; Liljeblad 1959: 29-59.
10. Crum 1994:2; Miller 1986: 98-106.
11. McKinney 1983: 1-9: Fowler 1982: 121-138.
12. Lee 1984.
13. Winnemucca-Hopkins (1883) 1969: 55-57.
14. Shimkin 1986: 519.
15. Roe 1951: 74.
16. Roe 1951: 74-82.
17. Roe 1951: 70-71.
18. Crum and Dayley 1993: 263-295.
19. Rojas 1964: 24-28.
20. Interview with Emerson Lom Hooper, Winona Manning and Robert McCarl, July 14, 1994, Western Folklife Center.
21. Crum 28-29.
22. Lowie 1909: 278-279.
23. McKinney 1983: 71-78; Crumb 1994: 59-84.
24. McKinney 1983: 95.
25. Harris1940: 87.
26. Harris 1940: 89-90.
27. Report by E.E. McNeilly, Superintendent, Indian Field Service, United States Department of the Interior, November 10, 1930 to Mr. Lee Muck, Associate Forester, Spokane, Wash., with appended report from the Western Shoshone Agency. National Archives-Pacific NW Region, Record Group 75 BIA, Portland Area Office, Box #1253: Fdr.: Statistical Reservation Data-Grazing, pages 2-4.
28. Delbert Jim interview with Robert McCarl and Lindsey Manning for the Duck Valley Ranching Heritage Project, June13, 1997.
29. Interview with Reggie Scope by Robert McCarl, July 15, 1994, for the Western Folklife Center.
30. Interview with Art Manning and Carl Dick by Robert McCarl, July 13, 1994, for the Western Folklife Center.
31. Interview with Minnie Dick by Owyhee High School students directed by Teola Manning, Spring 1995-96. Tapes housed in the Elko Museum, Elko, Nev.
32. Charles R. Spencer, “Reversion to Old Tradition,” Annual Extension Report, 1936, np. Richard Hart Collection, Marriott Library and Archives, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, Box 65, Folder 9.
33. Crum 1994: 60-63.
34. Sider 1994: 284.
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