Another Round at the Say When: The Massacre of the Rotten Moon
A journalist moves to the small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada line, to learn about why the high school football team never wins, and about the townsfolk who cheer them on, no matter what.
One in a series.
They gathered near a place the Paiute Shoshone people call Peehee mu’huh, or Rotten Moon, to memorialize one long-ago indignity at the hands of outsiders and to protest the possibility of yet another that looms in the months to come.
The historical injustice was the 1865 slaughter of a band of Paiute families near here, their bodies desecrated and the remains strewn across the desert by the U.S. Army and backup volunteer settlers.
Today, in this same majestic sweep of basin and range, now known as Thacker Pass, the U.S. government has given a Canadian-owned company the rights to lease federal land for the development of a lithium clay mining project on land the tribes here consider sacred, an integral part of their traditional homeland.
On Sunday morning, their numbers totaling nearly 100, Native Americans from the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone tribe, Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe, Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, and other tribal groups, gathered in the shadow of Sentinel Rock, a culturally significant outcrop on the east side of the proposed Thacker Pass Mine site.
Joined by supporters and environmental activists who have inhabited the land here since February to challenge the mine project, the native protestors beat drums and recited prayers, burned tobacco and cedar, while they spoke of the pain of the past and the threat of the future.
The ceremony, they said, highlighted tensions that have existed between indigenous people here and non-native newcomers for more than 150 years.
The killing of their ancestors was murder, they believe, while the desecration of the land, so big business can reap the raw materials necessary to build the batteries that power their newfangled electric vehicles, amounts to another unspeakable crime.
“We don’t want the mine to be built here,” said Myron Smart, who represents a group of Paiute-Shoshone called People of Red Mountain. “We want to protect our land.”
The massacre took place during the so-called Snake War, between the U.S. and bands of local tribes, who resented the growing footprint of white settlers who poured west through native territory, appropriating springs and water sources, and overhunting buffalo and other critical game.
Settlers felt entitled to the land, while natives viewed the newcomers as trespassers who threatened their very survival. Violence was inevitable.
Smart told the group that the U.S Government had already spread the local native population to forts across what is now northern Nevada and Oregon, far away from their ancestral lands.
The massacre, part of what historian Gregory Michno describes as “a summer-long hunt for renegade Indians,” began when soldiers departed their camp near Willow Creek, less than a mile east of Sentinel Rock, protest organizers wrote.
“The soldiers camped out there on the flat,” said Smart. He pointed east into a vast valley, wearing Wrangler jeans, cowboy hat, a turquoise shirt and a bolo tie with an indigenous design.
On September 12th, 1865 at 1 a.m., the First Nevada Cavalry surrounded a camp of northern Paiute people in Thacker Pass. The settlement consisted of women, children and elders of a band that had refused to relocate to nearby U.S. Army forts
While the men were away hunting buffalo, the cavalry moved in.
“They cut open their bodies and spread their intestines in the brush,” Smart told the group. “They massacred an entire village. That’s what the cavalry did to our people, to all Indians. We are here to memorialize those who were not buried in the proper way.”
Then Daranda Hinkey, another member of People of Red Mountain, read an excerpt from a 1929 autobiography by labor leader Bill Haywood. As a young man living in Nevada, Haywood wrote, he met a pensioner named Jim Sackett, who said he took part in the massacre.
As Hinkey read of Sackett’s account, the gathering was quiet. People sat in lawn chairs and in the beds of pickup trucks, their children perched on their laps or standing beside them holding hands. In the center, a small fire fed with sticks, cedar and tobacco. crackled softly.
“Daylight was just breaking as we came in sight of the Indian camp. All were asleep,” Hinkey read from Sackett's account. “We unslung our carbines, loosened our six-shooters, and started into that camp of savages at a gallop, shooting through their wickiups as we came.
“In a second, sleepy-eyed squaws and bucks and little children were darting about, dazed with the sudden onslaught, but they were shot down before they came to their waking senses. The other detachment came rushing in but did no shooting until they were close up. From one wikiup to another we went, pouring in our bullets … Those of the Indians who were only wounded we put out of their misery, and then mounted and rode away.”
The Paiute hunters returned to find the carnage under a full moon, giving the name Rotten Moon to the site of the desecration.
Three tribal members survived, including two infant twins. As the fire crackled, a descendent of the pair, a tribal member who now lives on Nevada’s Duckwater reservation, spoke by phone, her voice an emotional connection to the violent day that killed their ancestors, innocents all.
It was to them the mourners had come to pay tribute.
In May, after months of protest by local ranchers, tribal members and environmental groups, the People of Red Mountain group petitioned the U.S. Department of the Interior and others to halt construction of the lithium mine at Thacker Pass.
The lawsuit sought to temporarily block an archeological study required before construction can begin to unearth what experts believe is the largest known lithium deposit in the United States. Lithium Nevada Corp. hopes to begin construction early next year on the mine, a move approved by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Earlier this month, however, a federal judge refused the request. U.S. District Judge Miranda Du rejected a similar move in July for a preliminary injunction sought by environmentalists who claim the digging would destroy critical habitat for greater sage grouse, an imperiled ground-dwelling bird.
In her most recent ruling, Du said the People of Red Mountain are not a federally recognized tribe so it has no legal standing. Environmentalists say they plan to appeal the judge’s decision.
Smart said the People of Red Mountain group was created when the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone leadership refused to fight the mine project, which some believe will bring jobs and an economic boost to an area where many live below the poverty line.
“There’s a mountain over there where I live, Red Mountain,” Smart said. “It has always been there and we named our committee in its honor.”
In the ceremony, Smart said a prayer in Paiute that stressed “taking care of Mother Earth and how we do not the U.S. government to come in here and take it away.”
He motioned toward Sentinel Rock, adding that, “Way back in time, our people gathered here to do prayers and make tools like spears and arrowheads. Buffalo used to wander here.”
Then, one by one, many of the protestors stood before the cedar fire, wafting its smoke into their faces and clothing.
Smart mentioned another project, the Cordero Mine outside McDermitt, that closed in 1992. “It was an open pit mine,” he said. And when they did their blasting, the wind blew the dust into the two and onto our reservation.
“Now the water in town is poisoned by arsenic, but not on our reservation. Our prayers saved us.”
He said the Thacker Pass Mine will present similar threats. “These businessmen have got their minds made up to come here. But we don’t know what their mine will do to our water. The snow and the rain could seep the poison into our well water.”
He paused to face those gathered around him and the fire.
Suddenly, the children quieted.
“Then who are we going to turn to? Who is going to say ‘Enough is enough’?”
