It is not known what group of indigenous peoples built the Wyoming Medicine Wheel, located 60 miles outside of Sheridan, Wyoming in the Bighorn Mountains, or when they did so, but various Native American tribes have used the wheel as a sacred site for centuries. The Medicine Wheel is a circular pattern of stones surrounding a central stone cairn; twenty-eight stone pathways lead to smaller cairns as part of the wheel. Today, a six-foot-high barbed wire fence surrounds the wheel, placed by the Forest Service to protect the Medicine Wheel. Those indigenous people who consider the wheel a sacred sight view the Medicine Wheel as a holistic model for life. The different teachings of the Medicine Wheel help individuals learn to live in balance with the Creator and all of creation. A 2007 article in the newspaper Win Awenen Nisitotung described how tribes use the Medicine Wheel: “The medicine wheel is like a mirror in which everything about human condition is reflected back.” The Medicine Wheel assists people along their path of life. This sacred site is important to Indigenous people to continue their ceremonies using the Medicine Wheel. In 1970, the United States Forest Service designated the Medicine Wheel a National Historic Landmark. Tourists took to visiting the wheel, but the National Forest Service did not adequately provide protection for the site. Over the decades, some visitors removed rocks from the Wheel and vandalized the site with graffiti. In the early 1990s, tribes and coalitions fought to protect this land such damages and thefts. On June 9, 1993, tribes—including the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow, Navajo, Shoshone, Sioux, and Southern Ute—political coalitions, and the Forest Services reached an agreement on managing the site. The Memorandum of Agreement (National Historic Preservation Act) contained several steps to curtail damage caused by tourists. The agreement reads, “The programmatic agreement will require the Forest Service in consultation with the parties to the MOA, to develop and implement a long term management plan which specifies the preservation and continued use of the Medicine Wheel and vicinity as its management priority.” Under the terms of the memorandum, the Forest Service agreed to only open Medicine Wheel to tourists between July 1 and November 1. Visitors would have to park away from the wheel itself and walk one-and-a-half a miles to the site. The government agreed to involve tribal members in discussions about managing the sacred site. The Forest Service would also close the site to visitors for three days around each equinox and solstice to “allow native practitioners undisturbed use for traditional rites and ceremonies.” This agreement set an important precedent. The government acknowledges sacred sites and protects them for American Indians. Tribes have faced difficulties persuading the Forest Service to follow through with the National Historic Preservation Act. In May 1996, Diana Tillman Mitchell, a report for On Indian Land, revealed how the Forest Service failed to comply with the agreement. They were not including the elders from tribes in their consultations or management requirements. Mitchell wrote, “The guidance and policies should have active participation and notification to all Indian people involved! This is not happening.” The negotiations between Forest Service and the coalitions and tribes continued for a little over twenty years before reaching a final agreement. The updated agreement was implemented in September 1996 which issued the protocols the Forest Service must still follow followed today. The protocols designate 23,000 acres as sacred space to Native American and have provisions allowing Native American practitioners to use the site for ceremonies. In 2011, ethnographic discoveries about indigenous people’s cultural use of the surrounding landscape prompted the Forest Service to extend the boundaries of the Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark to include an additional 4,080 acres. With this expansion, the Service also changed the name of the landmark to Medicine Mountain. The steps taken in the 1990s to preserve the Medicine Wheel promoted a working relationship between Indigenous people and the United States government. Tribes and the federal government took steps to protect this special and sacred place. Still, the negotiated nature of this collaboration leaves some, including journalist Diana Tillman Mitchell, concerned that “the economics of a location may always outweigh Indigenous religious freedom.” Advocates like Chris Peters (Pohlik-lah/Karuk), an officer in Seventh Generation Fund, have insisted on their right to preserve sacred lands—“What’s more American: the right to drill for oil or the right to pray?—but when reviewing how the government has interacted with indigenous peoples in the past, it seems that if there is value to the land, the state will take it.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

Helper—situated between Castle Gate and Price in Castle Valley—is the product of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad’s search for coal in the late nineteenth century. Low-grade coal fueled the railroads, but until the 1880s no one had discovered a coal seam of sufficient quality in Utah to produce good “coke” for industrial smelting. This meant that metal mines in other parts of the state could not process low-grade copper and silver at a profitable rate. The D&RGW extended through Castle Valley in the early 1880s in its search for coal, and an engineer for the railroad discovered high quality coal in Castle Gate. The town’s name comes from the railroads; “helper” locomotives waited along that stretch of railway to tow trains up the steep grade.

The demand for Castle Valley’s coal meant that there was an increased demand for workers. Italians, Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbians immigrated to the area to work in the mines, adding to the mix of cultures where Chinese people had previously worked on the railroad. In 1894, Carbon County split from Emery County. By then, it had an industry and ethnic mix distinct from the Mormon homesteaders to the south. By 1900 there were sixteen different nationalities represented in Helper in a population of only 385 people. This would increase in 1903 and 1904, as a strike at Castle Gate prompted the mine’s owners to bring in Greek and Japanese workers as strikebreakers.

With its location at the center of several nearby coal mining camps and farms, Helper became a hub for commerce for the many different ethnic groups in the county. Immigrants in Helper worked as merchants and business owners. European and Asian immigrants operated saloons and coffee houses and otherwise provided services for nearby workers. As a steadily growing town—in contrast to the boom towns usually associated with mining in the West—community life for its diverse enclaves became a part of Helper’s story. By the 1910s, there was a Catholic church in Helper and a Greek Orthodox church in nearby Price. There were Italian, Croatian, and Slovenian lodges in the county, and a YMCA in Helper served as a general public meeting place. The influx of immigrants during this pivotal time in Utah’s history has left a lasting imprint on the culture of Helper as well as the state overall.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

For a thousand years, what is now Lincoln County in southeastern Nevada was dominated by the semi-nomadic Southern Paiute, who traveled with the seasons in localized areas to optimize use of scarce desert resources. In 1863 a Mormon missionary scouting the region for settlement sites met a Paiute who disclosed the location of silver ore deposits in the hills above the central Meadow Valley Wash. While some small-scale prospecting commenced, a “rush” to the site was delayed by several years due to poor relations with the natives, a lack of means to process the ore, and geographic remoteness. In 1869 the San Francisco-based financier François Pioche bought out the area’s claims and coordinated the infrastructure for large-scale mining. Workers from Nevada, California, and beyond poured into “Pioche’s City” as the great silver boom began.

The viability of the new settlement was strengthened by the presence of cheap ranch and farm products from nearby Panaca in the Meadow Valley, which Mormon pioneers from Utah had colonized just five years earlier. A reciprocal trade network emerged which granted the Mormons access to mechanical goods and currency while obviating the need for the miners to import expensive foodstuffs from far away. Another factor in Pioche’s success was the mill at Bullionville near a local water source, where ore from the hills could be transferred and processed. Awkwardly built into the hills below the mining veins and fissures, Pioche had no water or natural resources to speak of: all the town’s water had to be hauled up from the valley, while mining machinery and ore were shipped via wagon to and from the railroad over 200 miles away. Despite making little geographic sense on its own, Pioche flourished as a central node in this interdependent system: in 1871 it was made county seat, the population soared to above 6,000, and at the apex of the boom from 1871-1873 the camp produced over $12 million in silver ore, vastly outcompeting regional rivals.

About half the town’s population was foreign-born: in addition to many Irish and English, there were Germans, French-Canadians, Greeks, Slavs, and even a sizable Chinese population – reported by the local paper to number “not less than 200.” Many native Paiutes, displaced after nearly 1,000 years of dominating the area, joined the wage-labor economy and made a significant contribution to infrastructure and services in Pioche and networked towns. Panaca’s Latter Day Saints, despite harboring reservations about contracting with the bawdy miners, were instrumental in hauling ore, operating the charcoal kilns that provided the fuel for smelting, working the mill at Bullionville, and contributing to the essential produce-for-goods trade. This knitting of the Mining Frontier with the Mormon Communal Frontier – industry and agriculture – was essential to recoding the Paiute homeland as “American” and “civilized.”

Yet early Pioche remained plagued by violence: “guns were the only law,” and local legend holds that more than 70 men died violently with their “boots on” before any one person died from natural causes. A more reliable source suggests that over 50% of Nevada homicides from 1871 to 1872 occurred in the vicinity of the Pioche mines. In January 1873 the local paper declared: “Crime is rampant in Pioche. Law-defyers, of high and low degree, emboldened by immunity from arrest and punishment for former transgressions, are seemingly more vicious and audacious with each returning day.” The town’s culture of crime and corruption stemmed from frontier remoteness: far from centralized power, there was no effective governing authority to adjudicate disputes; accordingly, the “big men” hired armed guards to protect claims and capital against adventurers, and many quarrels were resolved by gunfire. Furthermore, Pioche was born in the bloodshed of disorganized conquest: indigenous peoples and early prospectors frequently fought, and the Paiutes seem to have successfully regained the hills for intermittent periods between 1865 and 1868.

Even at the height of prosperity, the frontier town suffered many a calamity. In September 1871 a fire broke out at a Mexican Independence celebration leading to an explosion that displaced 2,000 people, killed over a dozen, and destroyed half the buildings. In 1873 and 1874 Pioche endured devastating flash floods, while in 1876 another great fire ravaged the town. The principle mines were shut down that same year due to the inability to extract further ore with existing technology. While the silver bonanza simmered and halted, Pioche endured as the administrative capitol of Lincoln County, occasionally bolstered by new finds and extraction operations, notably the lead and zinc boom from the 1930s to the 50s. What is most remarkable about Pioche is that it survived, while countless comparable towns defined by remote geography and transient populations were completely abandoned. While the miners abruptly introduced capitalism and recoded the Paiute frontier under the values of industry and individualism, their very survival depended upon effective cooperation with the local networks of trade and labor. The bonanza of early Pioche was a system of interdependence between people, products, and the environment.

For more (including 9 images) view the original article

On October 8, 1890, the United States opened the Fort Mojave Industrial School on a mesa on the east bank of the Colorado River. The school’s superintendent, Samuel M. McCowan, frequently expressed the school’s need for an irrigation system to sustain the school’s agricultural program in the arid environment of the Arizona desert. He, like many other federal officials in the nineteenth century, attempted to assimilate American Indian children into American society at off-reservation boarding schools by relying on labor-based instruction that promoted agricultural practices and sedentary lifestyles. A lack of water limited the development of the school’s farm, which impeded McCowan’s goal to turn Fort Mojave into a large industrial institution and interfered with the federal government’s efforts to transform American Indian children into self-supporting American farmers.

Despite his access to approximately 1,200 acres of rich and fertile alluvial soil located half a mile below the school buildings, McCowan claimed that he could not fulfill his plans without an irrigation system to sustain crops. He knew that Mojaves on a nearby reservation planted their crops on this soil once a year after the spring overflow. However, he did not utilize this technique because he wanted to cultivate two hundred acres of land year-round.

In 1890, McCowan built a school farm without irrigation. He enclosed two acres of land on the mesa and covered it with fertilizers and bottom soil to a height of eight inches to grow lettuce, radish, beets, turnips and potatoes to be used in the school’s kitchen. The following year, he ordered schoolboys and employees to dig trenches four feet deep by four feet wide, long enough to fit one thousand trees, vines, and roots each set sixteen feet apart on the originally gravel and sand-filled mesa. American Indian children balked at this work. Boys complained, avoided the farm work by refusing to show up for school, and believed that they should be paid for their labor. Nevertheless, their work ensured the survival of more than eighty percent of the crops.

On March 16, 1892, the school finally received a pump station, which consisted of a pipe, a boiler, and two compound duplex pumping engines each capable of extracting up to 1,300 gallons of water per minute from the Colorado River. When engineers completed the installation of this irrigation system, many of the crops on the twenty-acre school farm had already matured. That year, the farm yielded approximately fourteen tons of hay, one hundred bushels of potatoes, two thousand melons, and one thousand pumpkins, among other vegetables. The installation of the pump station produced immediate results. In 1893, students produced thirty-five tons of hay, ten bushels of onions, five thousand watermelons, three thousand pumpkins, and other small vegetables.

Agriculture programs played a major role in the forced assimilation efforts that attempted to erase American Indian cultures and ways of life. The lack of an irrigation pump at Fort Mojave Industrial School intervened with the United States’ efforts to force American Indian children to adopt the agricultural practices of American society.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article