|
|
|
The Saga of Tim Hooper's Homestead: Non-Reservation Shoshone Indian Land Title in Nevada
MARTHA C. KNACK
Native American history often recounts Indian land loss, but rarely Native acquisition of title. Little-known public domain allotments and Indian homesteads were difficult to obtain. The lengthy efforts of one Nevada Shoshone family to gain off-reservation land illustrate some of the reasons why Indians were so noticeably unsuccessful in controlling land outside reservations.
|
|
|
|
LOSS OF NATIVE TRIBAL TERRITORIES to Euro-Americans is a major theme in Indian history. Sometimes, however, Native people reversed this trend and acquired properties instead. By the early-twentieth century, through both special Indian legislation and also general property laws, Natives were gaining title to lands that had never been attached to reservations. Because the federal Bureau of Indians Affairs (BIA) was not always involved in these transactions, the records lie as private documents in county courthouses across the West, rather than aggregated in federal archives. Thus difficult to document, the transition of non-reservation Indians into contemporary private property owners has gone largely unanalyzed.1 |
1
|
|
Off-reservation Indians had to compete with Euro-American settlers and miners for the limited resources of the arid West. Rights to water were encompassed by state laws and rights to land increasingly fell under federal homestead legislation and direct federal enclosures, such as national forests. In this changing landscape, Indians responded creatively, often adopting wage labor as their traditional economies—along with access to land and its plants, game, and water—evaporated. |
2
|
|
By the late-nineteenth century, Natives of the Great Basin, between the Wasatch Range of Utah and the Sierra Nevada of California, faced exactly those challenges. Few had reservations set aside for them; there were none for the Western Shoshones of Nevada. Small pedestrian groups there had resisted settler militias and vigilante miners, but they were almost immediately outnumbered and out-gunned, without official military intervention or treaty negotiation. Then, most regional ethnohistories declared, these people "attached themselves in small groups to ranches and towns."2 They became virtually invisible non-reservation Indians. |
3
|
|
Tim Hooper was such a man. For two generations in the early-twentieth century, he and his family struggled to gain title to small pieces of their traditional Shoshone territory in central Nevada. Hooper's experiences, shared by others less well-documented, illustrated why the available Indian laws failed to provide mechanisms for Native people to acquire a viable non-reservation land base. |
4
|
|
Since its founding the United States has created laws applicable only to Indians as a designated population with the Office (later Bureau) of Indian Affairs to administer them. Most of the statutes clearly intended to eliminate Native land possession and transfer property to the very non-Indians who controlled the legislative process, as through treaties of cession, removal of eastern tribes westward, reservationization,3 and subsequent division of tribally-held reserves into individual allotments.4 Collectively these policies reduced tribally-held land from the entire 2 billion acres (of what is now the United States) in 1492 to roughly 32 million acres by 1934.5 |
. . . |
There are about 11951 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
