Journeys West: Jane and Julian Steward and Their Guides

4. Coyote's Country

4. Coyote’s Country After some quiet days at Deep Springs, where Julian worked on his field notes and made repairs to the car, he and Jane left for Nevada in late May. He hoped to find Shoshone elders in western Nevada who could tell him more about Death Valley country, adding to what he had learned from George and Mamie Gregory at Olancha. The California-Nevada border divided the Western Shoshone people of the region, but held little meaning for them. They had their own geography of the high desert, with names and boundaries that differed from those shown on the U.S. Geological Survey maps that Julian studied so carefully.1 He and Jane drove forty miles east toward Lida, Nevada. Famed as the first mining town complete with saloon in the region, Lida had boomed in the 1870s. It soon faded, then briefly revived in 1905, when it boasted a population of six hundred people, a newspaper, and a dozen saloons. Thirty years later it stood almost empty, a lonely place of weathered wood buildings with broken casements and sagging roofs.2 After passing Lida, they turned south. Their route, which skirted the border, offered a better road—and despite the scorching heat, greater safety and comfort—than a direct route through Death Valley. From his years at Deep Springs Julian knew that motorists who ventured into Death Valley during the hottest months risked their lives. Temperatures soared, sometimes rising above 130 degrees Fahrenheit ; and travelers who ran out of water or who lost their way or had 84 part 2 any other misadventure in that vast arid zone often died there. The valley’s name gave fair warning. A journey of a hundred miles took Jane and Julian from Deep Springs Valley to the town of Beatty, Nevada. They drove past bare hills and through open desert where sagebrush, along with a scattering of Joshua trees, claimed the valley floor. Nevada, standing in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, was America’s most arid state, and they were passing through one of the driest parts of that dry land. Despite its great size, the state also had one of the smallest populations —only ninety-one thousand people—and a population density of fewer than one person per square mile. Compared to neighboring California, it looked like a lonely land.3 Beatty, with a population of about two hundred, was due east of Death Valley and just six miles from the California-Nevada border. It stood at the south end of Oasis Valley on the banks of the elusive Amargosa River. The river flowed largely underground, emerging now and again as a small ribbon of water or in seeps, but withholding most of its water. Minerals sometimes colored the water nearly red and turned it poisonous to animals. The nearby Amargosa Desert stretched for forty miles almost without surface water and edible plants.4 In Beatty they looked up a town resident, recommended as a contact by a friend in Utah. He in turn gave them a letter of introduction to “a real, 100%, red Indian, a gentleman,” Steward later said, mockingly . They located the man, who turned out to have only one Indian grandparent—and Cherokee at that. In the language of the time, he was “¾ white.” More to the point, he had not grown up Shoshone, a detail that had escaped the notice of Steward’s contact in Beatty. Although his cultural ancestry disqualified him as an informant, he did give Steward the name of someone who might help him: a man named Albert Howell who lived at Ash Meadows in Amargosa Valley . Howell, while not Shoshone, was the child of a Southern Paiute 85 Coyote’s Country woman and had grown up among her people. His father was African American.5 Julian and Jane left Beatty and drove south to Ash Meadows, where dozens of springs and seeps had once supported an expansive oasis, with carpets of native grasses and other edible wild plants. Overgrazing by livestock and years of extravagant irrigation had damaged the fragile ecology of the wetlands. A green land turned brown. Many of the native plants vanished, and many of the birds left. Groves of mesquite and ash trees had flourished near the wetlands, and Julian saw that some screw-bean mesquite trees still grew at Ash Meadows. The bean pods, pounded into meal, had long provided...