The silver and the pine nuts

1. Before

The pine-nut mountains

The Northern Paiute country runs along the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada: dry valleys, lakes full of fish, and low mountains covered in piñon pine. The nuts of the piñon were the food that got people through the winter. Sarah Winnemucca, who grew up there in the 1840s and 1850s, wrote that her people were sometimes called Pine-nut eaters, for we are the only tribe that lives in the country where Pine-nuts grow.

A government report of 1883 described the harvest as a newspaper writer had seen it. In the autumn, before the first frosts touched the pines, the women pulled the green, tight-closed cones from the trees and spread them in layers on the ground. The pitch-smeared husks burned hotly when a few embers were thrown among them, and the roasted nuts rattled out freely as the women struck the opening burs sharply with stones. At the round dance, people sang to ask for a good crop of pine nuts, or success in hunting and fishing.

When the federal agent in Nevada listed what the Paiute lived on in 1864, he put it in order: the pine-nuts being the first in importance—the fish next.

The country around the Comstock

It was never an easy country. In January 1859, months before the strike, the agent in Carson Valley found the Paiute and Washoe hungry: the pine-nut crop had failed that year, and emigrants were already in the valleys. But the land was theirs, and it fed them in most years. As even the historian of the mines put it in 1883, their homes would have been secure from intrusion to this day had it not been for the discovery of the treasures hoarded up in the barren ridges and canons.

Sources: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. IV · Lord 1883, pp. 4, 6–7 · Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1864, p. 142 · Frederick Dodge, report of 4 January 1859, reprinted in Davis 1913, pp. 118–121

2. 1859 and 1860

The strike

In 1859 prospectors working the hills above the Carson River found the Comstock Lode, one of the richest bodies of silver ore ever found. Within a few years Virginia City stood on the mountain. It was then our Pine-nut mountains, Sarah Winnemucca wrote of the place where her family had wintered as a child.

The miners needed fuel for their boilers and mills, and timber to hold up their tunnels. The first wood they reached was the piñon. For a time the stunted growth of nut-pines and cedar in the neighboring ravines could be used as fuel, the historian of the mines wrote, but it was soon requisite to drag the firewood from distant points. The agent in Nevada saw the same thing happen wherever silver was found:

These miners drive away the game and cut down the pine-nut trees, upon which the Indians subsist.

Cattle came with the miners. By the spring of 1860, the same history records from what Sarah Winnemucca and her brother Natchez told its author, the Paiute fish-preserves had been pre-empted by squatters and their pastures about Pyramid Lake eaten bare by intruding cattle. That May came the Pyramid Lake war. His story tells how it began.

The Comstock country on the government’s maps, 1883

Sources: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. III · Lord 1883, pp. 70, 116 · Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1864, p. 142

3. 1860 to 1863

“The Indian’s orchards”

The Paiute protested. Twenty years later, Paiute men who had been at the great council of April 1860 told a writer, through an interpreter, what had been said there: the whites were rapidly encroaching upon their lands; killing their game; and cutting down their orchards. By orchards they meant the pine-nut trees.

On 13 October 1863 the Paiute leader Numaga came to the mining camp of Como, in what is now Lyon County, and made a formal protest to its leading men. A journalist who was there wrote it down. Numaga said his people depended on the nuts for food, and that the pine nut groves were the Indian’s orchards, which the whites must not destroy. They were welcome to the fallen and dead wood, he said, but not to the trees that fed his people.

This warning was not heeded, the record goes on. The cutting went on. Numaga, whose name, the same history says, means the giver of food, had warned his own people in 1860 against a war they could not win. As the old men remembered his words:

The white men are like the stars over your heads. You have wrongs, great wrongs, that rise up like those mountains before you; but can you, from the mountain tops, reach and blot out those stars?

Sources: Angel 1881, pp. 150–151, 169, from the journal of Alf Doten and interviews with Paiute veterans in 1880

4. The 1860s and 1870s

The tomb of the forests

When the piñon near the mines was gone, the companies went up into the Sierra. Dan De Quille, a Virginia City newspaperman, wrote in 1876:

The Comstock lode may truthfully be said to be the tomb of the forests of the Sierras. Millions on millions of feet of lumber are annually buried in the mines, nevermore to be resurrected.

For fifty or sixty miles, he wrote, the eastern slopes had been to a great extent denuded of trees of every kind. Long wooden flumes carried the logs and firewood down from the mountains, and every season 80,000 to 100,000 cords of wood were floated down the Carson River. Two of the richest mine owners, Mackay and Fair, owned twelve thousand acres of the forest themselves and ran a flume more than twenty miles long to bring it down. Paiute men were among those hired to drive the wood down the river.

De Quille saw what it did to the water. Already, one bad effect of this denudation is seen in the summer failure of the water in the Carson River. With the trees gone, the snow melted all at once in spring and the river ran low in summer. The Carson was a river the Paiute fished and farmed downstream.

By 1880, the government's historian of the mines reckoned, fully 600,000,000 feet of timbers have been buried in the mines, enough to build a town for 150,000 people, and more than two million cords of wood have been consumed as fuel.

Wood and water for the mines

Sources: De Quille 1876, pp. 238, 243, 244–245 · Lord 1883, p. 351

5. 1864 to 1868

What the agents saw

The government's own agents in Nevada wrote it down, year after year, in their reports to Washington. In 1864, from Humboldt County: The pine-nut trees are rapidly being cut down and used for building purposes or fuel. The grass whose seed the Paiute ate was being eaten off by cattle as fast as it grew, so that the means of subsistence for the Indians of this section for the past year, and for the whole future, have been greatly impaired if not completely destroyed.

In 1866 the superintendent, H. G. Parker:

Their country is rapidly passing from them. Every garden spot and tillable acre of land is now being sought out and occupied by white men. Their groves of piñon are disappearing before the strokes of his axe, their grass-seed is consumed by his herds, the antelope and mountain sheep are killed or driven away.

And in 1867: The streams which formerly afforded them a plentiful supply of fish are now invaded by the miner for milling purposes; the pineries, which formerly afforded them an annual crop of nuts, have been squatted on and are fast giving way before the woodman’s axe. In fact the means of subsistence for this people, which were always scanty, are now almost completely shut off.

That autumn sickness came. The agent at Walker River reported that between 75 and 100 deaths occurred in the months of August, September, and October of 1867. Families who had gone to gather pine nuts were frightened off and left most of their winter food behind, and many of the sick camps could not get to the pine-nut country in time at all; they wintered near Virginia City instead.

Sources: Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1864, p. 145 · 1866, p. 116 · 1867, p. 170 · 1868, pp. 146–147

6. 1860 to 1880

Who got the silver

By 1880 the mining companies had paid their shareholders about $116 million in dividends. The prospectors who first staked the lode, the historian of the mines noted, had sold their claims for less than $200,000. The Paiute, on whose land it lay, got none of it.

The mines and mills

What the government spent on them was a rounding error. In a report printed in 1867, the year the Comstock yielded $13.7 million, the superintendent in Nevada complained that the whole appropriation for at least 10,000 persons, in this superintendency, is but $25,000. The next year it was $20,000 for 12,000 people: an equal distribution of less than $1 to each person would not benefit them materially.

Even what was built for them was taken back. A sawmill put up on the Pyramid Lake reservation for the benefit of the Indians, at a cost the government put at about $25,000, was sold in 1865 by the superintendent to a man from Gold Hill, a Comstock town, with the logs now cut upon the Indian reservation and the right to cut timber on the reservation for ten years. In Washington the Commissioner of Indian Affairs saw it as little more than giving Mr. Leet the mill, with timber of immense value with which to run it for ten years. He disapproved the contract, called for steps to prevent a gross injustice, and ordered the mill and logs taken back. Sarah Winnemucca wrote that her people never saw the mill.

The settlers had their own verdict. The Piutes and Shoshones have lost nothing by the coming among them of the whites, De Quille wrote in 1876. By 1869 the superintendent who had described their country rapidly passing from them had come round to the same view: the reservations, he wrote, were of no use or value to them whatever. It would benefit them vastly more if they were abandoned and allowed to be settled by the whites.

Sources: Lord 1883, pp. 353, 416–417 · Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1865, pp. 16, 141–142 · 1867, pp. 169–170 · 1868, p. 144 · 1869, p. 202 · Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. V · De Quille 1876, p. 264

7. After

The woodcutter

Wovoka was born near the Walker River around 1856, three years before the strike, and grew up in the country the Comstock was emptying. Like many young Paiute men he earned his living cutting wood. Andy Vidovich, who married into his family, said he cut wood for the mines and the mills, because the power was made by wood. Paiute elders in Yerington explained his name, Wovoka, as cutting something into many pieces, like wood.

The wood Paiute men were hired to cut was often the piñon and juniper: the same groves that fed their families, which belonged to families and were harvested with ceremony. The historian Michael Hittman asks, without being able to answer, whether older Paiute resented young men like Wovoka for felling the groves for the mines, and whether it troubled him.

In 1870 and 1871 a drought entirely cut off the supply of bunch-grass, the agent at Walker River reported, and the supply of pine-nuts has shared the same fate. That was when an earlier Paiute prophet's dance spread through the valleys. The agent heard it promised that God would come with plenty for all and transform the sterility of Nevada to the fertility and beauty of Eden. Eighteen years later, Wovoka had his own vision. His story tells what he saw.

Sources: Hittman 1990, pp. 48–52 · Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1871, p. 558

About these sources

Whose words these are

Almost every account of the Comstock that survives from the time was written by white men: miners, newspapermen, and the government's own agents. Some wrote about the Paiute with contempt; we quote them for what they saw and leave the rest. Numaga’s words come to us through an interpreter and a journalist, and his 1860 speech through the memory of old men twenty years on. Sarah Winnemucca wrote her own. All the sources here are public domain, except Hittman, and each has an entry under Read more.

In their own words: the printed pages