The Snake War and the Bannock War: Northern Paiute and Bannock Resistance

A seed beater of mountain mahogany, curved like a cupped hand and worn smooth by a mother's grip and a grandmother's before that. Before light, somewhere below the Black Rock around 1850, a Numu woman takes it down and walks to the edge of a shallow lake to fill her winnowing basket. The water is there. The seeds are there. Nothing about the morning suggests that anything is ending.

Outsiders would later call this country empty. The Northern Paiute knew it season by season: which springs held water into August, where the camas came thick in wet years, how to stretch a hundred yards of milkweed netting for the fall rabbit drives. North and east, the Bannock, who called themselves Bana'kwut, crossed the mountains to hunt buffalo in Montana and came home for the Snake River salmon and the blue sheets of camas on the Camas Prairie.

Then gold brought miners, and two wars followed. The chapters move from the Northern Paiute war leader Paulina through the Snake War of the 1860s to his death and an uneasy peace, then to Buffalo Horn and the Bannock War of 1878, which broke out on the Camas Prairie itself, and the long retreat north that ended in surrender. They close with the forced removal of Paiute families, fighters or not, to the Yakama Reservation, and the years that followed.

Both wars came down to what the woman at the lake had never needed to write down: which ground fed which people, and who had the right to say so.