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2: Contacts and Conflicts
- University of Nevada Press
- Chapter
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The Adventures of Zenas Leonard, Fur Trader The first battle between Indians and whites in what is today Nevada took place in 1833, when Nevada was still part of Mexico. By the 1830s, several different fur companies competed fiercely with one another for a diminishing supply of beaver in the Pacific Northwest. Hoping to discover fertile new lands for trapping, Captain Benjamin Bonneville in July 1833 dispatched a party of about forty trappers from an area north of the Great Salt Lake, placing them under the leadership of his lieutenant Joseph Walker. This party entered today’s Nevada near Pilot Peak (the first peak described in the excerpt below) and became the first white party to cross northern Nevada from east to west. They traveled along the Humboldt River, which was at that time referred to as the Unknown River, Ogden’s River, or Mary’s River. The Walker party was disappointed with Nevada. Unaware that fur trapper Peter Ogden and his men had taken about one thousand beaver from the Humboldt River area several years earlier, the Walker party found the river “barren,” and they bestowed the name of Barren River upon it. They also found forage scarce and the landscape desolate. In their ill temper, men in the Walker party were all the more frustrated to discover that Indians were stealing their beaver traps at night. Some hot-headed trappers apparently vowed to kill the first Indian they met and, accordingly , shot and killed an Indian who was fishing, tossing his body into the river. Although Walker scolded the men who committed this act, the party became anxious that the Indians would seek revenge. When they encountered a great gathering of Indians further down the river in the area of today’s Humboldt Sink, they feared for their lives and launched the attack described below; they killed thirty-nine Indians by Zenas Leonard’s reckoning, while suffering no casualties themselves, and repeated the act the following summer on their return trip from Monterey, California, where they had wintered. Washington Irving’s well-known The Adventures of Captain Bonneville u.s.a. (1837) was the first published report of this trip, wherein Irving strongly condemned the Contacts and Conflicts 2 7 8 | u n c o v e r i n g n e v a d a ’ s p a s t Walker party for the vicious massacre of peaceful and merely curious Indians. Perhaps in defense of his leader, Joseph Walker, Zenas Leonard—a young man from Pennsylvania who served as clerk on the expedition—reported an eyewitness account of the incident that was first published in the newspapers of his hometown in 1839 and is excerpted here. He insists that the party’s defensive strike was justified and came only after repeated efforts to avoid violence. Later historians have surmised that the Indians who stole the traps upriver were Shoshones, while the peaceful gathering downriver were innocent Paiutes. Whatever the case, this 1833 massacre set a pattern of mutual mistrust between Indians and white travelers and settlers in Nevada that would break out in repeated acts of violence and war throughout the nineteenth century. —Cheryll Glotfelty After traveling a few days longer through these barren plains, we came to the mountain described by the Indian as having its peak covered with snow. It presents a most singular appearance—being entirely unconnected with any other chain. It is surrounded on either side by level plains, and rises abruptly to a great height, rugged and hard to ascend. To take a view of the surrounding country from this mountain, the eye meets with nothing but a smooth, sandy, level plain. On the whole, this mountain may be set down as one of the most remarkable phenomena of nature. Its top is covered with the pinion tree, bearing a kind of must, which the natives are very fond of, and which they collect for winter provision. This hill is nearly round, and looks like a hill or mound, such as may be met with in the prairies on the east side of the mountain. Not far from our encampment we found the source of the river mentioned by the Indian. After we all got tired gazing at this mountain and the adjacent curiosities, we left it and followed down the river, in order to find water and grass for our horses. On this stream we found old signs of beaver, and we supposed that, as game was...