CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE RED PROPRIETORS.
As we have now been a long time among the mines, the reader will probably not object to a little more information concerning the Indians of the country, before making another plunge into the “lower levels” of the Comstock lode.
The Piute Indians were formerly the owners of all that region in which the Comstock mines are situated; also, of nearly all of the western part of the State of Nevada, though the Washoe Indians held Carson, Eagle, Steamboat, and Washoe Valley, the Truckee Meadows and the country in the neighborhood of Lake Tahoe. The Shoshones owned what is now Eastern Nevada, and they still live in that region.
The Piutes range nearly up to Oregon, and far south toward Arizona. They have always been great travelers, and as early as in the days of the “Mission Fathers,” were in the habit of crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains and visiting the Pacific seaboard every summer; a journey still taken by many of them each year, as not a few Piute women are married to Spaniards who own large ranches in the vicinity of Santa Cruz and other towns in the southern part of California.
Originally, it is said, the Piutes, the Utes, the Pitt River Indians, the Queen’s River Indians, and some other small bands, were all Shoshones, but the tribe multiplied rapidly, and at last was spread over such a vast extent of country that one chief could not govern all. They then broke up into large bands that took the names which now distinguish them as tribes.
The Piutes belonged to the Ute band at the time that the original Shoshone tribe broke up through its own weight and unwieldy size. They settled about the lakes—Humboldt, Pyramid, Carson, and Walker—and were therefore called Pah-Utes; that is, water Utes, “pah” being the word that signifies water among all the Indians of the Great Basin region, Finally, the Utes and Pah-Utes, or “Piutes”—as the name is now generally, though improperly, written—became separate tribes.
The language of all the tribes in the Great Basin region and far to the northward still retains a sufficient number of the words of the original Shoshone tongue to enable members of any one of the present tribes to make themselves understood by their neighbors. When pressed to go far back into the dim and distant past, beyond the time when they were all Shoshones, the Piutes have a legend according to which they owe their origin to the marriage of a white wolf and a woman. The white wolf came from the far north, and the woman, who was the daughter of a great chief, came from the south.
The Piutes, according to the legend, are the descendants of this strange pair.
Away north, on the summit of a high bluff on Pitt River, is to be seen a huge white rock which, when viewed from certain points, bears a striking resemblance to a wolf in a recumbent position. To this day, many of the Piutes point to this rock and say that it is their great father—the father of all the Piutes—that he never died, but was changed into this rock, in which he still lives. I once told this story to an old and very intelligent Piute, and asked him what he thought about it. He said: “Who told you this story, Tom or Natchez?” referring to two of the sons of old Winnemucca, the head chief.