Timeline

Before the silver rush

1. 1833
   Paiute

   Fur trappers under Joseph Walker kill 39 people at the Humboldt Sink. In Paiute tradition, the people had come out to greet the strangers as hosts. Afterwards they keep away from the Humboldt in summer and lose its seed harvests.

   Source: Knack and Stewart 1984, pp. 33–38
2. 1830s–1840s
   Paiute

   The trade in Paiute children peaks. Mounted Ute raiders seize children, most of them girls, from Southern Paiute and other Great Basin peoples and sell them in New Mexico, where they are baptized, renamed and made servants. Of 87 captives in New Mexico records whose people are named, 69 are Paiute. Caravans on the new Old Spanish Trail, opened in 1829, graze out the rivers and waterholes the Southern Paiute live by.

   Source: Blackhawk 2006, pp. 69–78, 131–142
3. About 1844
   Paiute

   White emigrants begin crossing Northern Paiute country. Sarah Winnemucca's grandfather, the leader Truckee, rides out near Humboldt Lake to welcome the first party, throwing down his robe to show he carries no weapons. They keep him at a distance.

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. I
4. Mid-1840s
   Paiute Land

   White men approach a Paiute camp on the Humboldt River. Sarah's mother and aunt bury her and a small cousin in the ground, hidden under sage bushes, for a whole day. While the people hide, the whites burn the food stored for winter. Her father calls it the first wrong done by the "white brothers".

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. I
5. Late 1840s
   Paiute

   Emigrants fire on Paiute men fishing on the Humboldt River. One of Sarah's uncles is killed and five of the wounded die later. Truckee will not let his people take revenge on whites who were not the killers.

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. I
6. 1850s
   Paiute

   Back from California, Truckee's family hears that "almost all the tribe had died off" after drinking from the Humboldt River. The people believe it was poisoned; Truckee says it must be an unknown disease. Sarah's mother loses two sisters and their families.

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. I
7. About 1856
   Paiute Ghost Dance

   Wovoka is born in the Smith Valley and Mason Valley country of western Nevada, near the Walker River. His name is translated "the Cutter". Records and recollections give his birth year as anything from 1856 to 1863.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 764, 771; Hittman 1990, ch. 2

Silver, war and reservations, 1859 to 1870

1. 1859
   Land

   Silver is found on the Comstock Lode. Virginia City rises on the mountain where, Sarah Winnemucca writes, her family had wintered: "It was then our Pine-nut mountains." Miners and mills cut the piñon groves for fuel.

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. III; Reid and James 2004, p. 13
2. 1859
   Land

   Land around Walker Lake, Agai Pahnunadu, is set aside for "Indian purposes". The reservation is not formally created until 1874.

   Source: Walker River Paiute Tribe
3. 1859–60
   Paiute Land

   White ranchers run about 3,000 cattle on the Pyramid Lake grass on a promise to pay the Paiute leader Winnemucca for herding them. They then refuse to pay, and accuse the Paiute of stealing cattle.

   Source: Knack and Stewart 1984, pp. 65–66, 149
4. 1860
   Paiute

   Two Paiute girls are found tied and gagged under a trap door at the Williams brothers' trading post on the Carson River. Their kin kill the brothers. Volunteers under Major Ormsby march on Pyramid Lake "without asking or listening to any explanation" and are defeated; a larger force returns. Wovoka, about four, later used this war to work out his own age.

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. IV; Mooney 1896, p. 771
5. 1860
   Land

   Pyramid Lake Reservation is promised to the Paiute with large supplies. Over the next 23 years and 13 agents, Sarah Winnemucca writes, she "never knew of any issue after that first year." Whites later irrigate with the ditch the Paiute dug.

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, chs. IV–V
6. 29 January 1863
   Land Government

   Bear River. California Volunteers under Colonel Patrick Connor attack a Shoshone winter camp on the Bear River, on the Idaho–Utah line. They burn more than seventy lodges and destroy the people's wheat and food stores in midwinter. Connor reports: "It was not my intention to take any prisoners."

   Source: Blackhawk 2006, p. 262
7. 1863
   Land Government

   The Western Shoshone sign the Ruby Valley Treaty in Nevada. It sets aside no reservation and pays nothing, and once ratified it is forgotten.

   Source: Blackhawk 2006, pp. 267–268
8. About 1864
   Paiute

   Food is scarce. Paiute families working for the rancher David Wilson in Mason Valley bring their children to his ranch to be fed, and Wovoka, about eight, starts playing with the Wilson boys. Every morning after breakfast Wilson reads the Bible aloud.

   Source: Hittman 1990, pp. 53, 55
9. 1864–65
   Land

   White men from Virginia City fish on the Pyramid Lake reservation. Governor Nye sends soldiers to drive them off; Sarah names him the only governor who ever protected her people.

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. V
10. March 1865
    Paiute

    Soldiers under Captain Wells fire into a Paiute camp at Mud Lake (she calls it Muddy Lake), where people were living and fishing, and kill almost everyone there: old men, women and children. Her baby brother is among them. "It is a fearful thing to tell, but it must be told."

    Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. V
11. 1867
    Land

    The railroad comes through. "The white people have taken all the best part of the reservation from us, and one of the lakes also."

    Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. V
12. 1867–68
    Land

    The Comstock mines and mills burn some 568 cords of firewood a day. By 1868 the piñon near the mines, the trees whose nuts the Paiute lived on through the winter, is "entirely exhausted". The Paiute leader Numaga: "Pine nut groves were the Indian's orchards and they must not be destroyed by the whites."

    Source: Hittman 1990, p. 51
13. 1868
    Government Lakota

    A treaty sets aside all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri for the Sioux, "for their absolute and undisturbed use and occupation".

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 824–825
14. About 1869–72
    Ghost Dance Paiute

    A Paiute prophet near Walker Lake preaches that the dead will return and teaches a new dance, the movement later called the first Ghost Dance. Mooney names him Tävibo and dates it variously from 1869 to 1872; later scholars identify the 1870 prophet as Wodziwob, a different man.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 701–703; Du Bois 1939; Hittman 1990, p. 29
15. About 1870
    Paiute

    The Wilsons call the boy Jack Wilson. Mooney was told that Wovoka's father died about this time, when the boy was about fourteen, and that David Wilson took him into his family. Paiute elders remembered it differently: his father, Numu-tibo'o, known in English as Buckskin, lived until about 1914, and one elder said Wovoka was raised by his own parents, not by the Wilsons. Hittman's 1997 edition calls the orphan story wrong: hospital records show his mother was still alive in 1898.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 764–765, 771; Hittman 1990, pp. 29–33, 293; Hittman 1997, pp. 201, 212, 224 n1

The land taken apart, 1870 to 1888

1. 1874
   Land

   President Grant signs the executive order that formally creates the Walker River Reservation, on 19 March.

   Source: Walker River Paiute Tribe
2. 1876
   Government Lakota

   After the Black Hills gold rush and the war of 1876, a new agreement takes a third of the Sioux reservation, including the Black Hills.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 825, 828
3. 1876–78
   Paiute Land

   At the Malheur reservation in Oregon, a new agent tells the Paiute the land is "government land", stops rations and claims their wheat. In 1878 he drives the starving people off the agency.

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, chs. VI–VII
4. Winter 1878–79
   Paiute

   After the Bannock War, the Malheur Paiute, about 500 people, many of whom never fought, are marched across the Columbia to the Yakima reservation in snow. An old man freezes in a wagon; "in five days three more children were frozen to death".

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. VIII
5. January 1879
   Paiute Land

   Troops evict a commercial fishing fleet of about 75 white men and 45 boats from Pyramid Lake. Nine fishermen are convicted; the next year the President pardons them.

   Source: Knack and Stewart 1984, pp. 167–172
6. 1880
   Paiute Land

   Asked for a railroad right-of-way across the Walker River reservation, the Paiute bargain for free rides and free shipping of their fish, game and produce. In 1889 they sell some 20,000 pounds of fish.

   Source: Warren 2017, pp. 82–86
7. 1882
   Land

   Records begin of Walker Lake's decline. Upstream diversions from the Walker River will lower it by nearly 160 feet.

   Source: US Geological Survey
8. 1883
   Paiute

   Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins publishes Life Among the Piutes and petitions Congress for the return of the Malheur reservation. She describes her people as reduced "to one-third of its original number".

   Source: Winnemucca Hopkins 1883, ch. VIII
9. 1886–89
   Government Lakota

   Beef rations at Pine Ridge are cut from 8,125,000 pounds in 1886 to 4,000,000 in 1889, while disease kills Sioux cattle.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 826, 845
10. About 1887–88
    Ghost Dance Paiute

    Wovoka begins teaching the dance to his people. A Paiute named Josephus later remembers his first experience: cutting wood in the mountains for the Wilsons, Wovoka heard a great noise above him, fell down as if dead, and was taken to heaven.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 771–772
11. 1888 or 1889
    Paiute Land

    Drought threatens the crops on the Walker River reservation. The police captain Josephus goes to ask Wovoka for rain. Wovoka sits all evening with his head bowed and says nothing; in the morning he says the rain will come on the third day. The river floods, and Josephus becomes a believer. Hittman dates this to the winter of 1888–89; Warren to the late summer of 1889.

    Source: Hittman 1990, p. 9; Warren 2017, pp. 109–111

1889: the vision

1. 1 January 1889
   Ghost Dance Paiute

   A total eclipse of the sun crosses Nevada. Wovoka, sick with fever, says that "when the sun died" he was taken up to the other world, saw God and the dead, and was sent back with a message of peace and a dance. Mooney judged this eclipse the best fit for Wovoka's account, though he could not settle the date for certain. Yerington Paiute elders interviewed in the 1980s did not link the vision to the eclipse.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 764, 771–774; Hittman 1990, p. 65
2. 1889
   Land

   William Hornaday of the Smithsonian publishes his census of the American bison. Of herds that had numbered in the tens of millions, he counts 1,091 left alive.

   Source: Hornaday 1889
3. January 1889
   Ghost Dance Paiute

   The first Ghost Dance on the Walker Lake reservation is held about a mile above the railroad bridge near the agency. A second large dance soon after draws Ute from Utah.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 802, 806
4. Early 1889
   Ghost Dance

   Bannock, Shoshone, Gosiute and Ute take up the dance almost at once. A Bannock carries the news to the Shoshone and Arapaho at Wind River, Wyoming.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 805, 807
5. Spring or summer 1889
   Ghost Dance

   Shoshone delegates and the Arapaho Nakash visit Wovoka. He tells them they will meet their dead in two years, "at the turning of the leaves".

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 807–808, 817
6. 1889
   Government Lakota

   The Crook commission takes about half of what remains of the Sioux lands, some 11 million acres, and splits the Great Sioux Reservation into five. Families kept at the agency for the commission lose their crops. Sitting Bull, on hearing it had passed: "There are no Indians left now but me."

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 826, 839–841, 861
7. 1889–90
   Lakota

   Measles, then grippe and whooping cough, kill many Sioux.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 826, 830, 840–841
8. Late 1889
   Ghost Dance Lakota

   A council at Pine Ridge sends delegates west, among them Good Thunder, Short Bull and Kicking Bear. With the Cheyenne Porcupine and the Arapaho Sitting Bull they travel by rail to Nevada.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 793, 817, 820

1890: the dance spreads, Wounded Knee

1. Winter 1889–90
   Ghost Dance

   The delegates meet Wovoka at a large dance near Walker Lake. Porcupine: "I had always thought the Great Father was a white man, but this man looked like an Indian."

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 795–796
2. 1889–1890
   Ghost Dance Paiute

   Letters start arriving for Wovoka from Cheyenne and Arapaho in Oklahoma, calling him "Father". He cannot read, so a young Yerington grocer, Ed Dyer, reads them to him in a back room and writes his answers. Soon visitors follow, asking for red paint and feathers.

   Source: Hittman 1997, pp. 256–257
3. February 1890
   Ghost Dance Paiute

   Wovoka visits the Walker River reservation. At least two hundred men turn out in a driving snowstorm to hear him and take up a collection of $25. He asks to farm there.

   Source: Johnson 1975, p. 48
4. Spring 1890
   Ghost Dance

   Porcupine reports to the northern Cheyenne at Tongue River, Montana, talking for five days; they begin to dance. Black Coyote holds the first Ghost Dance in the south, among the Arapaho.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 818–819, 894–895
5. April 1890
   Ghost Dance Lakota

   The Lakota delegates report at Pine Ridge. The agent arrests Good Thunder and two others. The dance begins on White Clay Creek. That month the beef issue is 205,000 pounds against the 470,400 the treaty calls for.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 820–821, 845
6. June 1890
   Ghost Dance Lakota

   At a great dance on White Clay Creek, ghost shirts are worn, probably for the first time. Wovoka later disclaimed them; they were no part of the dance in Mason Valley.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 791, 846
7. Summer 1890
   Ghost Dance

   The southern Cheyenne, Kiowa and Apache take up the dance in Oklahoma. In September about 3,000 people dance on the South Canadian River.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 895, 898, 907–909
8. August 1890
   Lakota Government

   Congress cuts the Sioux subsistence money to $950,000, $50,000 less than before, and the crops fail in a drought.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 827, 830, 846–847
9. Summer 1890
   Paiute Ghost Dance

   A census agent, John Mayhugh, finds the prophet in Mason Valley and writes the first official description: a Paiute of about 35, called "Captain Jack Wilson" by whites, who preaches peace and tells Indians not to disturb whites. He advises leaving them alone.

   Source: Warren 2017, p. 55
10. October 1890
    Lakota

    The new Pine Ridge agent, whom the Lakota call "Young-man-afraid-of-Indians", reports that half his people are dancing and asks for troops.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 846, 848
11. Late October 1890
    Lakota Government

    The Chicago Tribune prints a war "sermon" attributed to Short Bull, telling dancers to wear holy shirts against the soldiers. It is quoted for a century; Warren finds no original in the government's files and judges it probably invented.

    Source: Warren 2017, pp. 186–188
12. 11 November 1890
    Lakota

    Ration day at Pine Ridge. Police try to arrest a man for killing a cow and about 200 Ghost Dancers surround them. American Horse calms the crowd: killing the police would bring the soldiers and the end of their families.

    Source: Warren 2017, pp. 247–248
13. 17–19 November 1890
    Lakota Government

    Troops are ordered onto the Lakota reservations; the first reach Pine Ridge on 19 November. Soon nearly 3,000 soldiers are in the field. American Horse: "The commission made us believe that we would get full sacks if we signed the bill, but instead of that our sacks are empty."

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 840, 849–852
14. 4 December 1890
    Ghost Dance Paiute

    The army scout Arthur Chapman, sent to find the "messiah", interviews Wovoka at a ranch house in Smith Valley: the first recorded interview. Wovoka says he has told every headman who came to him to go home and tell his people to keep the peace. Asked whether he promised to protect the Indians from the whites: "That was my dream. It has not come to pass yet."

    Source: Hittman 1990, pp. 7–12
15. 15 December 1890
    Lakota

    Indian police sent to arrest Sitting Bull on Grand River kill him in the fight at his cabin. Eight of his people die, among them his seventeen-year-old son Crow Foot, and six police.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 857–860
16. 17 December 1890
    Government Paiute

    The Stewart Indian School opens in Carson City for Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone children.

    Source: Stewart Indian School
17. 21–28 December 1890
    Lakota

    Big Foot takes in Sitting Bull's fleeing people, who "had come to his people hungry, footsore, and almost naked". His band sets out for Pine Ridge. On 28 December the cavalry intercepts them and camps them at Wounded Knee Creek.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 864–867
18. 29 December 1890
    Lakota

    Wounded Knee. While the Seventh Cavalry disarms the men, a deaf man, Black Coyote, refuses to give up his rifle unless he is paid for it; as soldiers seize him it goes off into the air; the soldiers fire into the warriors and the Hotchkiss guns open on the camp. Mooney puts the Lakota dead at "very nearly 300" (the army counted 128), most of them women and children. Thirty-one soldiers are killed.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 868–871; Warren 2017, pp. 286–289
19. 1 January 1891
    Lakota

    After a blizzard, a burial party buries the dead in one long trench. Four babies are found alive beside their mothers; one, a girl, survives.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 876–879

After Wounded Knee

1. 16 January 1891
   Lakota

   About 4,000 Lakota surrender at Pine Ridge. Kicking Bear and Short Bull are sent to Fort Sheridan as hostages.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 887–888
2. 11 February 1891
   Lakota

   In Washington, American Horse, Turning Hawk and others give the Lakota account of Wounded Knee. "Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing."

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 884–885
3. Early 1891
   Ghost Dance

   The Kiowa Apiatan travels to Nevada hoping to see his dead child. Wovoka tells him "there were no spirits there to be seen" and to go home and tell his people to quit. Apiatan denounces him at home, but pilgrims keep coming to Mason Valley.

   Source: Warren 2017, pp. 297, 306
4. August 1891
   Ghost Dance

   Arapaho and Cheyenne delegates visit Wovoka. Casper Edson writes down his message, the Messiah Letter: "You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always."

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 780–781
5. 28 October 1891
   Paiute

   The Walker River farmer reports that men from Wadsworth are said to be coming to kill "Jack Wilson, the Messiah". Captain Josephus asks the agent to stop them.

   Source: Hittman 1997, p. 292
6. 1891
   Paiute Government

   A new Nevada law stops carriers shipping trout for half the year. The Pyramid Lake Paiute, who had been selling up to 100,000 pounds of fish a year, see that income fall from more than $8,000 to nothing in 1892.

   Source: Knack and Stewart 1984, pp. 301–303
7. 1 January 1892
   Ghost Dance Paiute

   James Mooney, guided by Wovoka's uncle Charley Sheep, finds his camp on the East Walker River in deep snow. With the grocer Ed Dyer interpreting, they talk for hours at a neighbouring rancher's house. Wovoka says he preached peace and that the whites had lied about him.

   Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 768–775; Hittman 1997, pp. 196–198, 258
8. October 1892
   Ghost Dance

   Arapaho visitors report that Wovoka is tired of visitors and tells them to stop dancing. Most refuse to accept the message as his.

   Source: Mooney 1896, p. 901
9. 1893
   Paiute

   One of the Wilson sons gets government permission to take Wovoka to the Chicago World's Fair as an attraction. A month before they are due to leave, Wovoka goes into the hills and stays there eight weeks, until the plan is dropped.

   Source: Dangberg 1957, p. 284
10. 1894–96
    Ghost Dance

    The Kiowa revive the dance with thousands present. By 1896 it is part of tribal life among the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Caddo, Wichita, Pawnee and Oto.

    Source: Mooney 1896, pp. 914, 927
11. 1902
    Ghost Dance

    The Lakota leader Kicking Bear, one of the delegates of 1889–90, visits Wovoka again, then teaches the Ghost Dance to young Assiniboine men at Fort Peck, Montana.

    Source: Dangberg 1957, pp. 286, 288
12. 1905
    Land

    The federal government finishes Derby Dam on the Truckee River, ten miles above the Pyramid Lake reservation. It sends about half the river to farms in the Carson valley. No one asks the tribe. Over the next eighty years the lake falls about 100 feet.

    Source: Knack and Stewart 1984, pp. 269–272, 342–343
13. 1906
    Paiute Land Government

    The Walker River reservation is opened to white settlers. The People give up about 268,000 acres, Walker Lake included, for 20-acre allotments and about $30,000 in all; each family head sees $25 of it in cash. Families who had worked land in the canyons and at the south end have to leave it.

    Source: Johnson 1975, pp. 99–112
14. 1908–1911
    Ghost Dance

    Letters from people of other nations are still reaching Jack Wilson. The twenty-one that survive come from Assiniboine, Lakota, Yankton and Arapaho writers in Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming and Saskatchewan, asking for his prayers and for medicine for the sick. He sends back sacred red paint from near Mount Grant, feathers and medicines. A woman of the Wilson family reads the letters to him and writes his answers, and he insists every reply say there is plenty of rain in Nevada and his people are well and happy.

    Source: Dangberg 1957, pp. 284–296
15. January 1909
    Ghost Dance

    Fred Robinson, an Assiniboine taught by Kicking Bear, has carried Wovoka's message north to Saskatchewan. He writes: "I am telling them about the good road and good life."

    Source: Dangberg 1957, p. 288
16. January 1910
    Ghost Dance Lakota

    Bear Comes Out writes from Pine Ridge that his people are afraid of the star in the sky, and asks Wovoka what it means: "The star we afraid what he doing Let me knowed." It is Halley's Comet.

    Source: Dangberg 1957, p. 291
17. 26 February 1911

    At Clover Valley near Winnemucca, Nevada, a posse kills the adults of a small Shoshone band that had lived outside the reservations, after four ranchers were killed. The historian Ned Blackhawk calls it the last documented massacre of Great Basin Indians.

    Source: Blackhawk 2006, pp. 283–284
18. December 1911
    Ghost Dance Lakota

    Cloud Horse, a Lakota delegate to Wovoka in 1890, is still writing from Pine Ridge: "all the Indians out here make fun of me but I allways think dear Father that around me you would give me strength."

    Source: Dangberg 1957, p. 293
19. 1912
    Paiute Land Government

    Wovoka leads thirty Mason Valley Paiute to the Walker River reservation to look at land. The superintendent has written that he will make Wovoka "a power for good" or show his people he has no power; when Wovoka will not cooperate, an apparent offer of land is withdrawn.

    Source: Hittman 1990, pp. 149–150
20. August 1912
    Paiute Government

    The superintendent stops the Indian dance planned for Yerington's Labor Day and threatens to arrest its leaders. Washington backs him, against gatherings that keep up "ancient and barbarous customs". He accuses Wovoka of telling his people they are "the same as in jail".

    Source: Hittman 1997, pp. 217–219, 292–294
21. 1916
    Paiute Land

    Wovoka complains to the agency that a new ranch manager has fenced him off land in Mason Valley that he says the Wilsons deeded to him, and which he had spent $475 improving.

    Source: Hittman 1990, pp. 150–151, 245–248
22. December 1916
    Government

    Washington warns the Stewart Indian School that "Jack Wilson, The Messiah" may be spreading peyote. The rumour was unfounded; his son-in-law remembered him warning people against it.

    Source: Hittman 1997, pp. 219, 294, 349
23. 1919
    Paiute Land

    A federal court decree, in a case the tribe was not part of, gives the Walker River reservation a share of the river so small that it runs dry by July. Upstream, irrigated land has nearly doubled in ten years, and Walker Lake is shrinking.

    Source: Johnson 1975, pp. 126–129
24. 1920
    Paiute

    The Nevada historian Grace Dangberg asks Wovoka about his religion. He agrees to tell her at sunset three days later. At dusk he strides across the yard, draws himself up and says only "No!"

    Source: Dangberg 1957, pp. 286–287
25. 1922
    Paiute Land

    The Pyramid Lake elder Dave Numana tells the agent: "This lake is my meat."

    Source: Knack and Stewart 1984, p. 273
26. November 1922
    Paiute Government

    The agency refuses Wovoka a railroad pass because he is "not on our Roll", though his wife holds an allotment at Walker River.

    Source: Hittman 1997, pp. 294–295
27. About 1929
    Land

    Below Derby Dam the Truckee's delta at Pyramid Lake is now so exposed that the trout and cui-ui can no longer get up the river to spawn.

    Source: Knack and Stewart 1984, p. 279
28. 29 September 1932
    Paiute

    Wovoka dies at the Yerington Indian Colony, a month after his wife Mary. The date is his death certificate's; some later accounts give 20 September. He is buried in the Paiute cemetery at Schurz, on the Walker River reservation.

    Source: Hittman 1990, pp. 37, 168–171

Since

1. December 1932
   Paiute

   About three months after Wovoka's death a powerful earthquake shakes Nevada. He had told his followers that when he died he would shake the earth to show he had reached heaven.

   Source: Warren 2017, p. 399; Hittman 1990, pp. 172–173
2. 1933–1935
   Paiute Land

   Weber Dam is built on the reservation, with no fish ladder. The great Walker Lake trout can no longer reach the river to spawn.

   Source: Johnson 1975, pp. 136, 152
3. 1936
   Paiute Land

   The Paiute of Mason and Smith Valleys get farm land of their own for the first time. The Yerington Paiute Tribe's first chairman is Wovoka's grandson, Dennis Bender.

   Source: Hittman 1990, pp. 42, 55
4. 1962
   Land Government

   The Indian Claims Commission rules that the Western Shoshone's title to their land "was extinguished by the gradual encroachment by whites." Shoshone leaders dispute it.

   Source: Blackhawk 2006, p. 267
5. 1975
   Paiute

   The Yerington Paiute Tribe puts up a memorial marker to Wovoka at the Yerington Indian Colony.

   Source: Hittman 1990, pp. 170–172
6. 1986–1989
   Paiute

   The Yerington Paiute Tribe launches a Wovoka Project, commissions his biography, and in August 1989 holds a centennial celebration on its Campbell Ranch land for the hundredth year of his revelation.

   Source: Hittman 1990, p. xi; Hittman 1997, preface
7. 1990
   Government Lakota

   On the centenary, Congress passes a resolution expressing its deep regret for Wounded Knee to the Lakota people.

   Source: S. Con. Res. 153; Green 1994
8. 2006
   Paiute Ghost Dance Land

   The Walker River Paiute Tribe revives the Ghost Dance, partly to heal the land harmed by the river's diversion and the decline of Walker Lake.

   Source: Warren 2017, p. 372
9. 2009
   Land

   The last Lahontan cutthroat trout is reported caught in Walker Lake.

   Source: US Geological Survey
10. 2019
    Land Government

    Water bought back from upstream rights reaches Walker Lake. California's governor formally apologises for the state's genocide of its Native peoples.

    Source: Walker Basin Conservancy; Executive Order N-15-19
11. 2024
    Government

    The Department of the Interior's investigation counts at least 973 children who died at federal Indian boarding schools, and calls the count incomplete.

    Source: US Department of the Interior
12. September 2025
    Government Lakota

    The Secretary of Defense decides that the Medals of Honor given to soldiers for Wounded Knee, about twenty, will not be withdrawn.

    Source: Military Times 2025

So far this timeline draws mainly on four books read in full, plus the Walker River Paiute Tribe's own 1975 history, a history of Pyramid Lake, and the surviving letters written to Wovoka in 1908 to 1911: James Mooney's 1896 report, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's 1883 book, Michael Hittman's biography, written for the Yerington Paiute Tribe (the 1990 text and the chapter and documents added in 1997), and Louis Warren's 2017 history, God's Red Son. Entries from the other books under Read more are being added as they are read. Dates are as precise as the sources allow.