ABSTRACT
Between the Sierra of California and the Rockies is a vast land of broadly rolling sagebrush plains and pine-covered mountain ranges, the Great American Desert, according to the American explorers seeking farmlands and timber. The land’s indigenous people were disdainfully called Diggers, for their women were usually seen carrying a sturdy hardwood stick, grubbing up roots to take home in a woven bag tied to their waists. Population density was low, communities small and moving seasonally to their resources. When colonists’ wagon trains trekked across the First Nations’ valleys and passes, muddying streams and eating up forage, the land’s inhabitants seldom could fight off the well-armed invaders. Nearly a century later, professional ethnographers interviewed reservation-bound descendants of the First Nations, constructing a picture of family groups eking subsistence from fleet pronghorns and the yearly harvest of pine nuts in the hills. So their forebears had lived-that is, two generations earlier after Mormon farmers and hundreds of wagon trains had banished them from the lakes and marshes their ancestors had relied upon.
