BLOODBATH AT PYRAMID LAKE
Resentment 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 abundant game. The whites chopped down nut-bearing pine forests for lumber and fuel and reneged on grazing agreements, further reducing traditional food sources. Then, in the spring of 1859, two Irishmen discovered the Comstock Lode at the site of what would become Virginia City. The gold rush decade had already decimated California’s indigenous 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 endless white incursions had convinced many their only options were to starve or fight. The militants among them advocated a war to scourge the unwanted migrants from their homelands. Respected Chief Numaga, who had toured California and understood the preponderance 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 California Trail some 36 miles east of Virginia
