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10 2 Making Space Mormons, miners, and Southern Paiutes all tell stories about their coming to the land. Through those stories, we get a glimpse of the three different worldviews that brought competing meanings to the same geographic place. What follows is an exploration of those founding rituals —a Paiute origin story and settlement stories of the Mormons and miners.1 As the religious historian Mircea Eliade contends, “[T]o settle in a territory is, in the last analysis, equivalent to consecrating it.”2 Although Mormons, miners, and Southern Paiutes used very different means to consecrate their space, those means fall within three broad commonalities that offer room for comparison. The founding rituals of each group included the selection of space to inhabit, the naming of that space, and the ritualization of the founding experience through its retelling . In general, these founding rituals served important transtemporal functions as they positioned each group in time and space and defined its worldview. The founding experience for the miners was most complicated. It included a contest for silver that involved the Mormons and Paiutes and culminated in a court of law. The courtroom drama that ensued not only symbolizes the contested nature of mining space but also embodies the economic power structure that came to dominate the region. The story begins, as best as historians and anthropologists can determine , around ad 1000, with the Southern Paiutes’ gradual push eastward from California. Within three hundred years, the Southern Paiutes had spread to inhabit a large area extending through what would much later become southern California, southeastern Nevada, southwestern Utah, and northern Arizona.3 Bounded on the southwest by the Colorado River, traditional Paiute lands hug the landscape and are defined by its features. To the north, small Paiute bands dominated the southern rim of the Great Basin. The largest bands, however, inhabited the Colorado Plateau, where they hunted, gathered, and farmed along the Virgin River and its major tributaries, Ash Creek, the Santa Clara River, and the Muddy River. Ethnographers have identified as many as thirty-five smaller groups, or at least sixteen larger bands of Paiutes, inhabiting this vast region in the nineteenth century. Of principal import to this study are the bands that occupied lands straddling what would become the Utah/Nevada/Arizona borders: the Moapits who occupied the banks of the Muddy River, the Pahranagats who inhabited the Pahranagat Valley, the Tonoquints or St. George band who lived along the Santa Clara, the Shivwits and Uinkarets who made a homeland bounded by the Virgin River on the north and Colorado River on the south, and the Matisabits or Panaca band who roamed at the north end of Meadow Valley Wash in Lincoln County, Nevada, near the present-day Mormon town of Panaca and the mining town of Pioche.4 This is the geopolitical and economic space the Paiutes constructed. It is the space that separated them from other tribes and within which the Paiutes organized themselves in small family bands. It is the space on which they hunted and gathered, the space they farmed, the space they came to know intimately as their annual cyclical journeys took them to the best springs, hunting spots, garden plots, and gathering places. Every rock, ledge, gulch, and canyon were familiar to them; it was stingy ground, but it was their homeland. “We climb the rocks and our feet are sore,” one Paiute explained. “We live among rocks and they yield little food and many thorns.” Nonetheless, he continued, “[T]he pines sing and we are glad. Our children play in the warm sand; we hear them sing and are glad. The seeds ripen and we have to eat and we are glad.”5 Clearly the Paiutes built significant value into their space. Understanding the premium they placed upon their homeland, therefore, is integral to comprehending the contest that ensued between Mormons and miners.6 For the Southern Paiutes, as with most Native Americans, land was not a commodity to be bought or sold, or even possessed in the Anglo-American sense. Billy Mike, a southern Ute, closely related in culture and language to the Paiute, recalled his people’s association with the land before the white man arrived: “‘No one really owned the land. It was like it owned us.’”7 John Wesley Powell, an explorer who spent considerable time among the Paiutes in the 1870s, came to a similar Making Space 11 [3.137.185.180] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 09:16...

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