Wild West – June 2019

JUNE 2019 WILD WEST 47

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esentment had been mounting among

the tribes of the Great Basin since the

1849 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill

in the Sierra Nevada foothills first

brought tens of thousands of whites

storming down the California Trail.

White immigrants had built ranches in the Carson,

Eagle and Washoe valleys of far western Utah Territory

(near present-day Carson City, Nevada), their livestock

ravaging ecosystems that had supported abun-

dant game. The whites chopped down nut-

bearing pine forests for lumber and fuel

and reneged on grazing agreements, fur-

ther reducing traditional food sources.

Then, in the spring of 1859, two Irish-

men discovered the Comstock Lode

at the site of what would become Vir-

ginia City. The gold rush decade had

already decimated California’s indig-

enous people. The Great Basin tribes

—Paiute, Washoe, Bannock, Goshute,

Western Shoshone—feared a similar fate

as a flood of white prospectors poured

back over the Sierras from California. In

the spring of 1860 tribal leaders gathered at

Pyramid Lake, just north of the silver camps, to

discuss their options.

By then Sarah Winnemucca, a teenage daughter of

Paiute Chief Winnemucca, had been living in Carson

City with prominent white settler William Ormsby and

his wife for more than two years. (Winnemucca would

grow into one of the most fascinating women of the

19th century, her lectures and book, Life Among the

Paiutes, drawing attention to injustices visited on the

tribes.) She recalled that while the Paiutes and other

Great Basin bands were “not fond of going to war,” the

ferocious winter they’d recently endured and the end-

less white incursions had convinced many their only

options were to starve or fight. The militants among

them advocated a war to scourge the unwanted mi-

grants from their homelands. Respected Chief Numa-

ga, who had toured California and understood the pre-

ponderance of white power, counseled accommodation.

Into the volatile debate came word that on May 6

an Indian war party had raided and burned Williams

Station, an isolated trading post on the Califor-

nia Trail some 36 miles east of Virginia City,

and killed two of the three Williams broth-

ers and a handful of other men at the

station (reports varied on the number).

That the brothers had reportedly ab-

ducted and raped two 12-year-old In-

dian sisters didn’t change the racial

calculus. “There is no longer any

use for counsel,” Numaga told the

gathering of tribal leaders. “We must

prepare for war, for the soldiers will

now come here to fight us.”

Numaga was correct. The surviving

Williams brother’s account of the “massa-

cre” had thrown Virginia City into an up-

roar. (He’d neglected to include details about the

molested Indian girls; with command of such facts,

members of most any culture might have excused

the reprisal raid.) A “committee of arrangements”

telegraphed Carson City, dispatched riders to warn

other settlements and prospecting parties, and raised

a volunteer force.

Longtime eastern slope resident and San Francisco

Herald correspondent Richard Allen held a dim im-

pression of the Williams brothers and other such men

who ran “the little grog shops called trading posts along

In Deep Water

In May 1860, after Indians

raided Williams Station in

what would become Nevada,

volunteers led by William

Ormsby trailed the war party

north toward Pyramid Lake and

into an ambush on the 12th.

William Ormsby