Washoe People - History

History

Washoe people are the only Great Basin tribe whose language is not Numic, so they are believed to have inhabited the region before neighboring tribes. The Kings Beach Complex that emerged around 500 CE around Lake Tahoe and the northern Sierra Nevadas are regarded as early Washoe culture. The Martis complex may have overlapped with the Kings Beach culture, and Martis pit houses gave way to conical bark slab houses of historic Washoe culture.

The Washoe people and the neighboring Northern Paiute people were culturally and linguistically very different, and they sometimes came into conflict. The Washoe were confined to the area south of Carson City, and they were deprived from owning horses.

Washoe people may have made contact with Spanish explorers in the early 19th century, but the Washoe did not sustain contact with people of European culture until the 1848 California Gold Rush. Washoe resistance to incursions on their lands proved futile, and the last armed conflict with the Washoes and non-Indians was the "Potato War" of 1857, when starving Washoes were killed for gathering potatoes from a European-American farm near Honey Lake in California.

Loss of the valley hunting grounds to farms and the Piñon pine groves to feed Virginia City's demand for lumber and charcoal drove most Washoe to dependency on jobs in white ranches, farms and cities. The areas where they settled became known as Indian colonies.