Southern Paiute: A Portrait

Clara Belle Jim

180 Clara Belle arrives in her white ’97 Ford pickup with a camper shell, a classic wool blanket bedroll ready in the back. She sizes me up as if I was a horse at auction, and gets right to the business of how money will work for this book. Later, her relative Chris Wilson arrives, and says everyone in Pahrump knows her as that old Indian lady up there who shoots shotguns. She’s fearless with her makeup, bold slashes of black, red, and blue. She’s lean as a strip of leather, and though at least eighty years old, she moves effortlessly with a light step. It’s immediately clear that she speaks her mind, and that she’s harnessed her second language, English, into something uniquely hers. Well, I’ll tell you what; I don’t interrupt into someone else’s territory except we stay on our own. No way Jose. That’s the Indian way. I don’t bother with the other’s territory unless they tell me. I’m not like the white people. White people go here and there as they please without asking. The Indian way is you have to ask first, if you want to enter that place. You ask that person that belongs to that, native there, for hunting, picking pine nuts. My great great-grandfather, Whispering Benn, owned that Indian Springs. He lived everywhere: Corn Creek. Tule Springs. Willow Creek. Cold Creek. Ash Meadows. Cactus Springs (used to be called Mesquite Springs). You know how mens are: get rid of the womans , get another one. Five times, that’s what my sister said, Whispering Benn was married. Benns are related on my mother’s side. My mother’s mother was Wahmoritz, Whispering Benn’s daughter. From there my mother was Ruby Mennem. My father was Long Jim. He was a Panamint Shoshone for Furnace Creek, Death Valley area. My dad came from one of Hungry Bill’s sisters from over in the Panamint Range. As a kid I identified with the Paiute. I was born there in Pahrump, went to school. I wasn’t sent away like the others did. Mother, she didn’t know how old she was. My dad too; he said, “I may be over a hundred, I don’t know.” You can’t count the Paiute families in Pahrump before I was around. There was a lot of people, they said. “Scattered Indians,” that’s what they called us. Died, passed away. They rounded people up like a herd of cattles. That’s the reason why they’re in the Moapa Reservation now. I’m not enrolled. I’m a scattered Indian. Clara Belle Jim pahrump band, birthdate a secret 182 Tecopa was my chief of Pahrump. His son, John Tecopa, he owned that Pahrump Ranch. His other son was murdered—Charlie Tecopa, killed at that Indian camp above Manse Ranch. Some people say he went down there to steal a gallon of wine and brought it back. My older sister said Johnny Yount, white guy, killed him. Johnny came to the Indian camp. He said there’s a coyote down there, I want to shoot him. They gave him the gun, and then he shot him, not any coyote. Shot with his own gun for a bottle of wine. Called this canyon Horse Shoot ’Em, after this Indian; he got killed right there. Whites wanted him killed because they thought he was stealing horses up there. They cut his head off to prove he got killed. They made Indians hunt him down. They said they would kill their families if they didn’t. Like that Mouse—my mother said he lived in that Valley of Fire. In the night he used to go up and pick vegetables, like a garden. Said they cut his finger off to give, to show he got killed. That Mouse put his track backwards, pretend he’s going the wrong way, walked backwards to trick the trackers. My mom and dad used to say they found him down at Mouse Tank. Whites told the Indians they better go find him because he was stealing. The Indians tracked him down, finally found him. He ran away so fast; died from thirst, no water. They found him dead. Queo, another Indian, used to be down in the canyon I heard. Mom used to talk about him too. The picnic area down from Hoover Dam? Willow Creek? Living there. He was killing some peoples...