ELY, Nev. — White attackers turned a lush, high desert oasis in eastern Nevada, with its bubbling springs and a rare stand of Rocky Mountain junipers, into killing fields. They massacred hundreds of Native people there in the 1800s — a horrific history once retold in hushed tones behind closed doors.
That was until tribal members reluctantly found themselves defending the valley’s historical significance in state hearings. In the 2000s, they shared their painful past with authorities weighing whether to divert substantial amounts of groundwater that feeds the valley their relatives have long considered sacred.
Bahsahwahbee — Shoshoni for “Sacred Water Valley” — is where the spirits of their dead live on in the trees growing among the open graves, the final resting place of ancestors who remained where they were slain.Now they want to tell their story on their own terms. The Ely Shoshone, Duckwater Shoshone, and the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation — a coalition representing about 1,500 enrolled tribal members — are lobbying the federal government to designate nearly 40 square miles (100 square kilometers) as Bahsahwahbee National Monument.
“The goal is to commemorate what happened there to protect the memory of that place,” said Warren Graham, the Duckwater Shoshone chairman.
This lush section of the valley was visited by Shoshone and Goshute people, who were all related and called themselves “Newe,” for centuries, serving as a sacred site for healing and celebration. It was desecrated at least three times. In the mid-1800s, federal soldiers carried out two massacres at Bahsahwahbee in retaliation for attacks on settlers and their property.
During the final massacre in 1897, two girls were away on a walk during the fall harvest. Upon return, they found vigilantes killing their family and friends.
A coalition of tribes is lobbying the federal government to turn a massacre site where their ancestors were killed into a national monument. (Jan. 24) (Video and production by: Brittany Peterson)
One of those girls was Laurene Mamie Swallow, grandmother to 86-year-old Delaine Spilsbury, an Ely Shoshone elder who has worked for years on federal recognition of the sacred site.
“The people that were killed here were left here,” said Spilsbury, sitting at dusk in a camp chair nestled among the trees. “Their spirits, their bodies are in those trees. And so we darn sure are going to protect those people.”
For more than a century, the history of the massacres was recounted on a need-to-know basis. Charlene Pete’s mother closed the doors and drew the blinds the day she told her children about the violence against their Goshute ancestors — trained from her days at a boarding school to believe she’d face punishment for recalling her heritage.
“That’s the first time I’d ever seen my mom emotional like that,” Pete said, recounting a wailing sound she later learned was customary for mourning. It was one of the few traditions her mother recalled from a time before the government forced her to attend a boarding school established to assimilate Native American children into white society.
When Las Vegas, which nearly doubled its population from 1990 to 2000, pursued a pipeline in the early 2000s to divert groundwater from the Bahsahwahbee area and pump it 300 miles to the burgeoning desert city, tribal members felt compelled to speak up.
“It came to a point where we had to start talking to save it,” said Ely Shoshone elder Alvin Marques. He testified in a multi-decade legal battle alongside ranchers, local officials and environmental groups who all opposed the project by the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
