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1 i n t r o d u c t i o n A Hand’s-Eye View of the Great Basin Before going headfirst into the individual entries, it would seem wise to offer an overview of the Great Basin, and what better way to start than with the elegant metaphor suggested by the American poet Edward Dorn: If you were to place your right hand on a map of these western United States palm down, and so that your pinky touches Salt Lake City adjoining the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, then by splaying it, your thumb (on the scale of one-inch equaling fifty miles) will cover the “Biggest Little City in the World,” Reno, Nevada, nestled against those even loftier still annually snow-capped Sierra Nevada Mountains containing majestic Lake Tahoe near its summit and straddling the adjoining westward state of California; the tip of your middle finger, consequently, will also be seen as “dipping” into the Snake River in Idaho in the north while the heel of your palm accordingly covers the Colorado River and glitzy Las Vegas at the southeastern and southwestern boundaries of the Great Basin. (1966, 16) Plenty of other good reasons exist for employing the hand as a metaphor for this wondrous, rugged 400,000-square-mile geographic expanse, which has been likened to an “inverted equilateral triangle” (D. Madsen 2007, 3) and, according to historian Gloria Cline (1963, 3), measures 880 miles north by south from southern Oregon to the Colorado River in northern Arizona and 572 miles on the diagonal from its southwestern terminus in Death Valley, California, to the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming on the northeast: • the appearance of straw-blown outline as well as actual handprints found on cave walls at Indian Creek, near Epsom, Utah (Castleton 1987, 1:10) as well as represented on those spectacular “Barrier Canyon Rock Art Style” pictographs (Schaafsma 1971, 2008; see Fremont; Rock Art) in this same eastern part of the Great Basin, which might well represent signatures of the earliest people to inhabit the New World • a world-famous Washoe Indian basket weaver’s handprint employed as her signature to authenticate sales (see Datsolalee; see also Gigli 1974, 8) • the “open hand” believed to have been ingenuously extended in friendship by Great Basin Indians toward the first Euro-Americans, but more often than not was unfor- 2 g r e a t b a s i n i n d i a n s tunately in turn met with what historians have characterized as the “mailed fist” of ambitious and aggressive explorers, fur traders, emigrants, settlers, federal agents, and their like at the beginning of “contact,” if not ever since (see Christy 1978; see also Bannock; Northern Paiute; Shoshone; Southern Paiute; Ute; Washoe) n And the Last Shall Come First! Encountering the remnants of a human population whose lives had been devastated by not only the effects of slaving expeditions but also an environmental holocaust caused by the very sort of stagecoach travel that brought this otherwise great American writer from Missouri to Virginia City in 1861 to write newspaper copy for his brother, Mark Twain (née Samuel L. Clemens) characterized those Great Basin Indians as the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen. I refer to the Goshoot Indians . From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots. . . . I find but one people fairly open to that shameful verdict [that is, as “degraded” as the “Goshoot”]. The Bushmen [who with] our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo or Norway rat, whichever animal-Adam the Darwinians trace them to. (Neider 1966, 526–29) One might defend Twain by claiming he was only using satire again as part of his familiar literary trope, but the more shocking fact remains that this sort of denigration of Great Basin Indians has also crept into what otherwise are outstanding contributions to our knowledge about them from professionally trained anthropologists specializing in Great Basin Indian studies. But despite what has generally been negatively written by scholars as well as nonscholars about Great Basin Indians, they, despite the relative paucity of their population spread across a vast geographic area, nonetheless can boast a seemingly disproportionate larger number of “firsts” than most if not all other traditional...

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