Over a thousand years ago, Fremont Indians inhabited southern Utah in an area known as the Parowan Gap. Once a flowing river, the Parowan Gap dried out over time. Erosion by wind and rain have further shaped this 600 foot deep notch or pass used by Natives and newcomers to traverse the Red Hills, a low range of mountains that forms the western border of the Parowan Valley. Hopis, Utes, and Paiutes used this area to travel back and forth to obtain resources and mingle with one another.

About 13 miles west of Parowan are the famous petroglyphs, carved or pecked into the sedimentary rock walls of this historic landmark. Petroglyphs depict images of people, animals and different lines and shapes, although the meaning of some of the depictions remains a mystery. Images of humans, snakes, mountain sheep, and lizards fill the wall panels. Archaeologists believe the gallery represents rock art extending over a thousand years. Some researchers postulate the wall was used for religious purposes and others contend the engravings represent a hunting ritual. One petroglyph depicts a calendrical system indicating when to plant and harvest crops. Zipper Glyph, the most famous petroglyph, depicts the route Paiutes traveled and indicates how long their journey through the gap might take.

The petroglyphs at Parowan Gap are fragile and can be ruined by human touch or by trying to chalk over them. Enjoy them at a distance by taking a photo or sketching them yourself. Everyone shares a responsibility to help preserve archaeological and historically significant sites.

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Unka tumpee wun-nurrx tungwatsini xoopakichu ahnax, Sikyaatutukwi, Bios to chi bi kool, Angka-ku-wass-a-wits, Bryce’s Canyon.

These are the former names of the geographic marvel now known as Bryce Canyon National Park. Southern Paiutes, Hopi, Zuni, Ute, and Navajo tribes all lived in this region and enjoyed its natural beauty and wonders. Even before these nations, other ancient peoples lived here for centuries. The Indian names, meaning “place of yellow points,” “red painted faces,” and “red rock standing like a man in a hole,” come from ancient legends of the rock formations now called “hoodoos,” meaning scary or a bad omen. Some claimed that the hoodoos were once people who had been turned to stone. This incredible landscape provided a place for indigenous peoples to hunt and gather grass seeds and other foods, creating a deep connection with the land.  Sadly, from 1850 to 1890, through various laws, acts, and atrocities, Native Americans were forced from Bryce Canyon, some to distant reservations. Those that were far removed from Bryce Canyon, like the Navajo, remembered its beauty through oral histories. The Paiutes were not driven out until about 1880, five years after LDS Scottish Rancher Ebenezer Bryce settled there. From the turn of the century onward, new people began coming into the area to settle or sight-see. In 1916, with help from the Union Pacific Railroad, lodges and rest stations began to be built, providing a place for visitors to stay. In 1923, Bryce Canyon became a National Monument and in 1928 it became a National Park, with the boundaries expanded in 1931 and again in 1942. In 1934 workers of the Civilian Conservation Corps created much of the infrastructure that helped make Bryce Canyon more accessible to the public. Today this beautiful National Park is visited by over 1.5 million people annually. Though this park is now accessible to many people, the indigenous nations that once lived there still have a great connection to the land through their histories and traditions. In past decades most members of those nations lack the resources needed to visit Bryce Canyon, though more indigenous people are able to visit these sacred sites today. They continue to pass on the traditions and stories to new generations. Some Paiutes have returned to the area and still live nearby. Dozens of people currently reside within Bryce Canyon's lands. Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, a member of the Hopi Tribe, teaches “This is our heaven. This is the human people’s heaven, and we need to appreciate that.” A sacred place to many tribes, and now a nationally protected park, Bryce Canyon deserves respect and reverence as visitors admire its wonders.

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Utah Lake is a freshwater body situated in the Provo–Orem area of Utah County. The Lake has been utilized for hundreds of years by a variety of Native tribes, including but not limited to the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshones. A variety of American Indian groups such as the Fremont people lived along the lake’s shores prior to these contemporary tribes, and they all had settlements and benefitted from the lake’s resources and fresh drinking water. Excavation sites organized by archeologist Joel Janetski have yielded a variety of culture-rich native artifacts including arrowheads, beads, shells, cooking utensils, and ceramics like clay pots. The Dominguez and Escalante Expedition of 1776 visited Utah Valley from New Mexico and described the lake and valley in glowing terms. Fur traders also frequented the area in the 1820s and 1830s. In 1847, Euro-American members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints entered Utah Valley, and they eventually utilized Utah Lake as a source of food and water for agriculture. This marked the beginning of settler colonialism and Western encroachment into the region which ultimately led to numerous settler–native conflicts over the land around Utah Lake. As one of the largest freshwater lakes west of the Mississippi River, Utah Lake historically was home to a wide variety of fish, bird, and plant species. The water now has high levels of phosphorus and calcium carbonate sediments, a result of pollution. Utah Lake remains an expansive sight for those living in the Provo–Orem area, and residents and visitors sometimes use the lake for watersports in the summer and ice fishing & skating in the winter.

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Desert National Wildlife Refuge is the largest wildlife refuge in the continental United States, spreading over 1.6 million acres of land and six different mountain ranges in Southern Nevada within the Clark, Lincoln, and Nye Counties. President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the refuge by executive order in 1936, and at that time federal protection spanned the entirety of the current Desert National Wildlife Refuge, Mount Charleston, and much of today’s Red Rock National Recreation Area. The need for protection stemmed from the steeply declining population of native plants and animals, specifically desert bighorn sheep. Desert National Wildlife Refuge includes lands sacred to the Nuwu, also known as the Southern Paiutes. The land is the setting of Nuwu origin stories and legends as well as the lands their people lived in and thrived upon for many generations. Artifacts of the Paiutes are scattered across the land and are sacred to local Paiute communities. Greg Anderson, Chairman of the Moapa Band of Paiutes says, “We honor these gifts through the many songs we sing that talk about the natural landscape that bestows food, medicine, wildlife, water and the air we breathe. We connect to the loves, joys and struggles of our many ancestors who were here long before us.” They still practice Nuwu traditions tied to the land, which makes preserving it important to keeping traditions alive. The Desert National Wildlife Refuge is also important to the Nuwu people because it is the natural habitat of the desert bighorn sheep, or nah’gah to use the Paiute name. The nah’gah were one of the Nuwu’s main food sources. Paiute legends tell how their people were starving and the desert bighorn sheep stepped forward and sacrificed their lives so the people could survive. Nuwu view the nah’gah as protectors of their people include giving them power and energy and guiding them through drought and disease. The Nuwu strive to protect the desert bighorn sheep because they believe their people are tied to them and if they die then the Nuwu people will die as well. To this day, the Nuwu honor the nah’gah through stories, songs, and dances.

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Like many areas in the continental United States and beyond, human presence in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge spans not hundreds of years but thousands. Though steady environmental changes altered the land’s usage over time (mainly the rise and fall of water levels in the Malheur and Harney Lakes), Paiutes’ connection to the land never diminished. Resource gathering remained constant as tribal members passed their cultural knowledge across generations, and the Paiute people continually returned to build new living centers. However, the arrival of fur trappers in the nineteenth century complicated this long-standing relationship with the land, and explorers identified the region not as one of plenty, but as one of malheur, French for misfortune. Paiute bands roamed the territory freely alongside these fur trappers until the creation of Malheur Indian Reservation in 1872. In addition to fur trading, plume hunters in the 1880s began to hunt the regions’s white herons for their feathers. When photographers William L. Finley and Herman T. Bohlman recognized the dismal state of their population, the two rallied for the creation of a refuge to protect the birds’ habitats. They got their wish in 1908 when President Roosevelt signed the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge into existence, creating one of the earliest wildlife refuges west of the Mississippi. Since then, Malheur has protected the homes of not only white herons but other bird species in the area. Decades of homesteading have had their impact on the land, however, and many people still call the surrounding areas home. Beginning in the 1900s, the Bureau of Land Management began to issue cattle grazing permits in the area. However, the jurisdiction of the federal government did not sit well with many ranchers. One pair of cattle ranchers, father and son Dwight and Steven Hammond, was convicted of repeated arson on refuge lands in 2012. A later order for them to return to prison would spark a national incident in 2016. The militia occupation of Malheur Refuge had many inciting factors, including the emboldening white nationalism in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Frustration with the federal government had long been present in the area, mainly from farmers and ranchers who felt they lacked adequate access to grazing land. Such frustrations were and are hardly unique in the United States West, and certainly not in Oregon. This entitlement, however, overlooks a similar loss of access—one that the Northern Paiute have faced for far longer. Forcefully evicted from their land, the Paiute fought for their treaty rights in the 1870s only for the government to forcefully relocate them to the Yakama Reservation in 1879. The recent Malheur occupation sparked discussions of land repatriation among the Paiute, something owed for far too long, bringing attention to the nationwide indigenous #LandBack movement, which aims to remove land rights from federal and private colonizers’ control. In many ways, Malheur shows the myriad disconnections between living the land, owning the land, and respecting the land.

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In 2015, the International Dark Sky Association accepted the Kaibab Paiutes’s application to acknowledge their reservation on the borderlands of Utah and Arizona as a Dark Sky Community. International Dark Sky Community’s official name, Thunder Mountain Pootseev Nightsky, uses the Southern Paiute language to recognize the importance Kaibab Paiute culture places on Thunder Mountain and the night sky. The Kaibab Paiutes’ recognized history in Utah and Arizona began when they entered the Colorado Plateau around 1150 CE, living off the land by hunting and foraging. Since then, the Kaibab Paiutes’ culture has emphasized being responsible for protecting and sustainably managing natural resources due to a history of conflict over resources. members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—sometimes nicknamed “Mormons” in that time—began forming settlements on the Colorado Plateau in the 1860s. Despite generous efforts by indigenous peoples elsewhere in the Intermountain West to accommodate and live peacefully with the overwhelmingly Euro-American newcomers, who had initially arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, by the 1860s the Latter-day Saints’ growing population of new arrivals and extractive agricultural practices were increasingly incompatible with indigenous ways of life, including those of the Kaibab Band of Paiutes. The Latter-day Saints who settled the Colorado Plateau cut down trees and other flora which grew on the of the Kaibab Paiutes’ homeland, and they took control of springs and wells for farm irrigation. No evidence exists of this group of Mormons attempting to purchase any plots or use rights, and they apparently simply seized the land without offering any compensation. Within a few years, the Mormons’ terraforming destroyed the Kaibab Paiutes’ farmland and degraded the landscape so much it could no longer support wildlife. To make way for farms and pastures, they had also cut down the Kaibab Paiutes’ piñon pine trees, whose edible nuts were a major food source that might have otherwise helped them stave off starvation. Having lost the natural world which once supported them, to survive, many of the Kaibab Paiutes had to relocate to camps near Mormon settlements and take jobs.  About 90% of the Kaibab Paiute population died from starvation and other difficult changes stemming from the relocation. The local Mormons justified their conquest of the land and people with the common Euro-American settler-colonial myth that the indigenous Paiutes were not properly utilizing the land. Though manifestly untrue—nineteenth-century Euro-Americans simply did not recognize the Kaibab Paiutes’ foodways and agricultural and hunting practices—the sting of that myth has not been forgotten. After the U.S. government created the Kaibab Paiute reservation on May 28, 1909, the people resolved to never let their natural resources be wasted or depleted now that they had land designated specifically for Kaibab Paiutes. Minerals and wildlife were the natural resources originally focused on for preservation and compensation when harmed or exploited by outside parties. This conservationist attitude extended to the night sky when the Kaibab Paiute become aware of how light pollution threatened their natural skies, and by 2015, every light in the 250-person community was modified to be night sky friendly. Celestial observation was a part of many Great Basin mythologies, and the Kaibab Paiutes were no exception. One myth, called Mountain Sheep in the Sky, is about how the three large stars that may make up Orion’s belt are three mountain sheep being chased westward by a Sheep Trailer who shoots the middle sheep.  Other versions of the myth exist with a blind man named Puiat as the hunter, different animals such as antelopes, and even a tale of conflict between beings like Coyote and Mountain Lion. Another tale about the same constellation describes a wife perpetually chasing after her baby and two husbands who left her since she did not work hard enough to satisfy the family. Roland Maldonado, Tribal Chairperson, and Daniel Bulletts, Environmental Program Director, in 2015 spoke of how preserving their night skies would restore value to the traditions of celestial observance.  The night skies provide a backdrop for teaching younger generations stories about culture or lessons in morality, and Thunder Mountain Pootseev Nightsky has chosen to defend that educational tradition for their heritage and ecological conservation.

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In 1864, Brigham Young called fifty families to move into Paiute territory in Circle Valley, southern Utah. Initially, the settlement of Circleville boomed, and by 1865, nearly 100 families lived in Circleville. One inhabitant, Oluf Larsen, described relations with neighboring Paiutes as friendly. “There was a small tribe of friendly Indians living in the valley which we furnished with bread stuff and treated kindly. They in turn brought us venison and beaver meat.” Despite the seemingly mutually beneficial relationship, Larsen added, “we dared not attach too much confidence to them and watched their every move with suspicion.” The settlers’ suspicions of the local Paiutes grew after one of Chief Black Hawk’s lieutenants, Tamartiz, led a raid on Circleville on November 25^th, 1865. Although the Paiutes had nothing to do with the attack, the settlers were afraid of being attacked again and began acting more aggressively toward all American Indians. Violence increased in the area, with nearby settlements being raided and settlers killing Indians even suspected to be guilty of any crime against the settlers. Growing tensions between local Indians and settlers increased and reached a climax in April of 1866. On April 22, Paiutes formerly viewed as friendly were spotted, allegedly behaving suspiciously, near Fort Sanford, 15 miles away from Circleville. A skirmish broke out between soldiers at the fort and the Indians, leaving one of the Paiutes dead and a soldier wounded. When the Circleville settlers heard that previously peaceful Paiutes were involved in the skirmish, they grew suspicious that the Paiutes near them were involved with Black Hawk and were planning to attack the settlement. To prevent any potential attacks, the militia of Circleville, led by Major James T.S. Allred, went to the local Koosharem Band of Paiutes and convinced them to gather their people together and come to Circleville for a meeting, promising peace between the groups. A group of roughly 20 Paiutes gathered, and the men were led to the meetinghouse and tied together while the women and children were placed in a nearby cellar.      

The Circleville settlers then sent a message to Colonel W.H. Dame and hoped to receive instructions on what to do with the imprisoned Paiutes. Erastus Snow, religious leader over Southern Utah, was with Colonel Dame when he received the message, and Snow told Dame to ensure the prisoners were treated kindly.

Unfortunately, the message was not received in time. When several Paiute men attempted to escape, they, along with all the other male prisoners, were immediately shot. Fearing survivors would report the violence to Black Hawk and return with reinforcements, the Circleville guards proceeded to slit the throats of all the Paiute women and children who were old enough to remember the horrific event, sparing only a few children. A total of 15 to 18 Paiutes were killed. Although the Circleville inhabitants claimed they acted in self-defense, today the event is remembered as a tragic massacre of innocent Paiutes. In honor of those murdered, on April 22, 2016, a monument with inscriptions written by the Paiute Tribe was dedicated in Circleville and includes the Paiute oral history of the event. The Tribe wrote: “None of us can ever hope to describe the emotions that these people might have felt. All we can do is honor their existence as human beings.”

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In 1859, several prospectors struck it rich when they found silver at the head of Gold Canyon in western Nevada. Hundreds of people soon came to mine for these minerals. As the population rapidly increased, they established Silver City, Virginia City, and Gold Hill. The following year, thousands more arrived, transforming the area into a hub for underground mining. Though many consider this discovery the beginning of civilization in the western United States, the indigenous people experienced a degrading impact on their lifestyle.

With a growing settler population came a significant loss of resources for the Paiute Indians. Many settlers brought their own livestock but would feed their animals on Paiute territory, which led to range wars, overgrazing, and exploiting the land of its mineral wealth. These conflicts stimulated further tension among the settlers and Paiutes. Additionally, the Pony Express gained physical traction and interrupted Paiute land with numerous stations along the trail between California and Missouri.

In a series of disagreements, some Paiutes murdered two white men, resulting in a response of blackmail and fraud from the settlers. A tribal chief named Winnemucca counseled with his people whether or not they should fight. What further spurred this decision was the kidnapping of two Paiute girls who were later found alive at the Williams Station near Carson River. When the two girls told their people of the abuses the Williams’ brothers had enacted on them, several Paiute warriors went to the station, captured two of the brothers and a traveler, and burned the building, killing those inside. The nephew of Winnemucca, named Young Winnemucca or Numaga, heard of the retaliation and knew the settlers would come back. He thereby created a plan to prepare his people for their arrival.

After hearing of the so-called Williams Station Massacre, nearby settler towns took up arms and assembled an attack force. Low in numbers and weapons, men from different towns gathered together and proceeded to the ruins of Williams Station. On May 9, 1860, the volunteer group spotted a few Paiute men and began to chase them into a nearby ravine in the Truckee River banks. As they approached the ravine, about one hundred Paiute warriors attacked in an ambush. The Paiutes then chased the survivors twenty miles south of their original entry point. Almost eighty men died from the volunteer group in comparison to a few Paiute casualties.

A month later, Colonel John Hays led a battalion of five hundred men to Pyramid Lake after hearing rumors concerning the result of the ambush. This time the attack did not end well for the Paiutes; about 160 Paiutes died. Small skirmishes and raids continued for the next few months until August, when both sides called for a ceasefire. The site of this battle has been preserved and is located on the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation.

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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.

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After establishing themselves in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sent missionaries across the globe to promote their version of the Kingdom of God on earth. International proselytizing efforts saw much success. Converts wishing to join themselves to their church brothers and sisters journeyed to Salt Lake after first stopping at New Orleans or California.

Latter-day Saint converts traveling from California to Salt Lake faced the trial of crossing the vast Mojave Desert of the American South West. To ensure the safety of these immigrants, Brigham Young felt it pertinent to establish a half way station at the Las Vegas Springs, as named by Spanish explorer Rafael Rivera. The springs provided a water supply for travelers and animals, was in the vicinity of lead ore deposits, and was in the midst of over a thousand Paiute Indians who the Latter-day Saints could potentially convert.

In 1855 Brigham Young called upon thirty men to travel to these springs to construct a fort to serve as a mission headquarters for the teaching of the local Paiutes and as a halfway station for saints, mail services, and other emigrants traveling from California to Salt Lake City. On June 16, 1855, the missionaries under the leadership of William Bringhurst arrived safely at the Las Vegas Springs without any loss of life.

Work began immediately on the construction of the fort and settlement of the land. The fort constructed of Spanish adobe bricks enclosed an area of one hundred and fifty square feet. Each man received two and a half acres of land.

The missionaries had much success among the Paiutes, who expressed excitement at the prospect of settlers living among them. Within weeks, scores of Indians began to consistently attend the missionaries’ Sunday services and by the end of the two year stay, the missionaries baptized several hundred Paiutes. Missionaries such as George Bean, remarked joyously at the great faith expressed by his converts and the prayers shared by them in Sunday services.

Shortly after settling at the springs, the missionaries discovered lead deposits near the fort and sent several samples to Salt Lake City. Fearing that President Bringhurst would mine the lead for his own personal gains rather than for the betterment of the community, President Brigham Young sent Nathaniel V. Jones to assume command of the mining and gave him authority to order all available missionaries to assist in the mining efforts.

A power struggle thus ensued between Bringhurst and Jones leading to Bringhurst demotion and disfellowship from the church. Samuel Thompson was then called to fill the vacancy. In January 1857, the embittered attitude of those present at the for,t and Indians uncontrollable thievery persuaded Brigham Young to order the forts closure and the missions end. On May 7, 1857, they vacated the fort.

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