It is true I have been in Shoshone Land, but before that, long before,
I had seen it through the eyes of Winnenap' in a rosy mist of
reminiscence, and must always see it with a sense of intimacy in the
light that never was. Sitting on the golden slope at the campoodie,
looking across the Bitter Lake to the purple tops of Mutarango, the
medicine-man drew up its happy places one by one, like little blessed
islands in a sea of talk. For he was born a Shoshone, was Winnenap'; and
though his name, his wife, his children, and his tribal relations were
of the Paiutes, his thoughts turned homesickly toward Shoshone Land.
Once a Shoshone always a Shoshone. Winnenap' lived gingerly among the
Paiutes and in his heart despised them. But he could speak a tolerable
English when he would, and he always would if it were of Shoshone Land.
He had come into the keeping of the Paiutes as a hostage for the long
peace which the authority of the whites made interminable, and, though
there was now no order in the tribe, nor any power that could have
lawfully restrained him, kept on in the old usage, to save his honor and
the word of his vanished kin. He had seen his children's children in
the borders of the Paiutes, but loved best his own miles of sand and
rainbow-painted hills. Professedly he had not seen them since the
beginning of his hostage; but every year about the end of the rains
and before the strength of the sun had come upon us from the south, the
medicine-man went apart on the mountains to gather herbs, and when he
came again I knew by the new fortitude of his countenance and the new
color of his reminiscences that he had been alone and unspied upon in
Shoshone Land.
To reach that country from the campoodie, one goes south and south,
within hearing of the lip-lip-lapping of the great tideless lake, and
south by east over a high rolling district, miles and miles of sage and
nothing else. So one comes to the country of the painted hills,--old red
cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral earths, hot, acrid springs,
and steam jets issuing from a leprous soil. After the hills the black
rock, after the craters the spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible
thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts. There are picture writings
carved deep in the face of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do
not know it. On the very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in
a wide sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone Land.
South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded
with ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the
Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very far by broken ranges, narrow
valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line,
east and east, and no man knows the end of it.
It is the country of the bighorn, the wapiti, and the wolf, nesting
place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that
live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the creosote and the
mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It
grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long
winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about
the lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the
mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift,
where it seems no rain could penetrate, the main trunk grows, attaining
often a yard's thickness, resistant as oak. In Shoshone Land one digs
for large timber; that is in the southerly, sandy exposures. Higher on
the table-topped ranges low trees of juniper and pinon stand each apart,
rounded and spreading heaps of greenness. Between them, but each to
itself in smooth clear spaces, tufts of tall feathered grass.
This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and
time enough. Trees grow to consummate domes; every plant has its perfect
work. Noxious weeds such as come up thickly in crowded fields do not
flourish in the free spaces. Live long enough with an Indian, and he or
the wild things will show you a use for everything that grows in these
borders.
The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land
will not be lived in except in its own fashion. The Shoshones live
like their trees, with great spaces between, and in pairs and in family
groups they set up wattled huts by the infrequent springs. More wickiups
than two make a very great number. Their shelters are lightly built, for
they travel much and far, following where deer feed and seeds ripen, but
they are not more lonely than other creatures that inhabit there.
The year's round is somewhat in this fashion. After the pinon harvest
the clans foregather on a warm southward slope for the annual adjustment
of tribal difficulties and the medicine dance, for marriage and mourning
and vengeance, and the exchange of serviceable information; if, for
example, the deer have shifted their feeding ground, if the wild sheep
have come back to Waban, or certain springs run full or dry. Here the
Shoshones winter flockwise, weaving baskets and hunting big game driven
down from the country of the deep snow. And this brief intercourse is
all the use they have of their kind, for now there are no wars, and many
of their ancient crafts have fallen into disuse. The solitariness of the
life breeds in the men, as in the plants, a certain well-roundedness
and sufficiency to its own ends. Any Shoshone family has in itself the
man-seed, power to multiply and replenish, potentialities for food and
clothing and shelter, for healing and beautifying.
When the rain is over and gone they are stirred by the instinct of those
that journeyed eastward from Eden, and go up each with his mate and
young brood, like birds to old nesting places. The beginning of spring
in Shoshone Land--oh the soft wonder of it!--is a mistiness as of
incense smoke, a veil of greenness over the whitish stubby shrubs, a web
of color on the silver sanded soil. No counting covers the multitude of
rayed blossoms that break suddenly underfoot in the brief season of the
winter rains, with silky furred or prickly viscid foliage, or no foliage
at all. They are morning and evening bloomers chiefly, and strong
seeders. Years of scant rains they lie shut and safe in the winnowed
sands, so that some species appear to be extinct. Years of long storms
they break so thickly into bloom that no horse treads without crushing
them. These years the gullies of the hills are rank with fern and a
great tangle of climbing vines.
Just as the mesa twilights have their vocal note in the love call of
the burrowing owl, so the desert spring is voiced by the mourning doves.
Welcome and sweet they sound in the smoky mornings before breeding time,
and where they frequent in any great numbers water is confidently looked
for. Still by the springs one finds the cunning brush shelters from
which the Shoshones shot arrows at them when the doves came to drink.
Now as to these same Shoshones there are some who claim that they have
no right to the name, which belongs to a more northerly tribe; but that
is the word they will be called by, and there is no greater offense than
to call an Indian out of his name. According to their traditions and all
proper evidence, they were a great people occupying far north and east
of their present bounds, driven thence by the Paiutes. Between the two
tribes is the residuum of old hostilities.
Winnenap', whose memory ran to the time when the boundary of the Paiute
country was a dead-line to Shoshones, told me once how himself and
another lad, in an unforgotten spring, discovered a nesting place of
buzzards a bit of a way beyond the borders. And they two burned to
rob those nests. Oh, for no purpose at all except as boys rob nests
immemorially, for the fun of it, to have and handle and show to other
lads as an exceeding treasure, and afterwards discard. So, not quite
meaning to, but breathless with daring, they crept up a gully, across
a sage brush flat and through a waste of boulders, to the rugged pines
where their sharp eyes had made out the buzzards settling.
The medicine-man told me, always with a quaking relish at this point,
that while they, grown bold by success, were still in the tree, they
sighted a Paiute hunting party crossing between them and their own land.
That was mid-morning, and all day on into the dark the boys crept and
crawled and slid, from boulder to bush, and bush to boulder, in cactus
scrub and on naked sand, always in a sweat of fear, until the dust caked
in the nostrils and the breath sobbed in the body, around and away
many a mile until they came to their own land again. And all the time
Winnenap' carried those buzzard's eggs in the slack of his single
buckskin garment! Young Shoshones are like young quail, knowing without
teaching about feeding and hiding, and learning what civilized children
never learn, to be still and to keep on being still, at the first hint
of danger or strangeness.
As for food, that appears to be chiefly a matter of being willing.
Desert Indians all eat chuckwallas, big black and white lizards that
have delicate white flesh savored like chicken. Both the Shoshones and
the coyotes are fond of the flesh of Gopherus agassizii, the turtle
that by feeding on buds, going without drink, and burrowing in the sand
through the winter, contrives to live a known period of twenty-five
years. It seems that most seeds are foodful in the arid regions, most
berries edible, and many shrubs good for firewood with the sap in them.
The mesquite bean, whether the screw or straight pod, pounded to a
meal, boiled to a kind of mush, and dried in cakes, sulphur-colored
and needing an axe to cut it, is an excellent food for long journeys.
Fermented in water with wild honey and the honeycomb, it makes a
pleasant, mildly intoxicating drink.
Next to spring, the best time to visit Shoshone Land is when the
deer-star hangs low and white like a torch over the morning hills. Go
up past Winnedumah and down Saline and up again to the rim of Mesquite
Valley. Take no tent, but if you will, have an Indian build you a
wickiup, willows planted in a circle, drawn over to an arch, and bound
cunningly with withes, all the leaves on, and chinks to count the stars
through. But there was never any but Winnenap' who could tell and make
it worth telling about Shoshone Land.
And Winnenap' will not any more. He died, as do most medicine-men of the
Paiutes.
Where the lot falls when the campoodie chooses a medicine-man there it
rests. It is an honor a man seldom seeks but must wear, an honor with
a condition. When three patients die under his ministrations, the
medicine-man must yield his life and his office.
Wounds do not count; broken bones and bullet holes the Indian can
understand, but measles, pneumonia, and smallpox are witchcraft.
Winnenap' was medicine-man for fifteen years. Besides considerable skill
in healing herbs, he used his prerogatives cunningly. It is permitted
the medicine-man to decline the case when the patient has had treatment
from any other, say the white doctor, whom many of the younger
generation consult. Or, if before having seen the patient, he can
definitely refer his disorder to some supernatural cause wholly out
of the medicine-man's jurisdiction, say to the spite of an evil spirit
going about in the form of a coyote, and states the case convincingly,
he may avoid the penalty. But this must not be pushed too far. All
else failing, he can hide. Winnenap' did this the time of the measles
epidemic. Returning from his yearly herb gathering, he heard of it at
Black Rock, and turning aside, he was not to be found, nor did he
return to his own place until the disease had spent itself, and half
the children of the campoodie were in their shallow graves with beads
sprinkled over them.
It is possible the tale of Winnenap's patients had not been strictly
kept. There had not been a medicine-man killed in the valley for twelve
years, and for that the perpetrators had been severely punished by the
whites. The winter of the Big Snow an epidemic of pneumonia carried off
the Indians with scarcely a warning; from the lake northward to the
lava flats they died in the sweathouses, and under the hands of the
medicine-men. Even the drugs of the white physician had no power.
After two weeks of this plague the Paiutes drew to council to consider
the remissness of their medicine-men. They were sore with grief
and afraid for themselves; as a result of the council, one in every
campoodie was sentenced to the ancient penalty. But schooling and native
shrewdness had raised up in the younger men an unfaith in old usages,
so judgment halted between sentence and execution. At Three Pines the
government teacher brought out influential whites to threaten and cajole
the stubborn tribes. At Tunawai the conservatives sent into Nevada for
that pacific old humbug, Johnson Sides, most notable of Paiute orators,
to harangue his people. Citizens of the towns turned out with food and
comforts, and so after a season the trouble passed.
But here at Maverick there was no school, no oratory, and no
alleviation. One third of the campoodie died, and the rest killed the
medicine-men. Winnenap' expected it, and for days walked and sat a
little apart from his family that he might meet it as became a Shoshone,
no doubt suffering the agony of dread deferred. When finally three men
came and sat at his fire without greeting he knew his time. He turned a
little from them, dropped his chin upon his knees, and looked out over
Shoshone Land, breathing evenly. The women went into the wickiup and
covered their heads with their blankets.
So much has the Indian lost of savageness by merely desisting from
killing, that the executioners braved themselves to their work
by drinking and a show of quarrelsomeness. In the end a sharp
hatchet-stroke discharged the duty of the campoodie. Afterward his women
buried him, and a warm wind coming out of the south, the force of the
disease was broken, and even they acquiesced in the wisdom of the tribe.
That summer they told me all except the names of the Three.
Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we shall
have a hand in the heaven of hereafter; and I know what Winnenap's will
be like: worth going to if one has leave to live in it according to
his liking. It will be tawny gold underfoot, walled up with jacinth and
jasper, ribbed with chalcedony, and yet no hymnbook heaven, but the free
air and free spaces of Shoshone Land.