Blank Spots on the Map Page 6
Of his camp near the Humboldt Sink, Vincent Geiger described a space of death, where “the most obnoxious, hideous gases perfumed our camp . . . arising from the many dead animals around.”
Past the river’s terminus at the Humboldt Sink lay sixty miles of desert emigrants had to pass, a trek that spanned days without water or shade before reaching the Truckee River. One emigrant described the landscape as having “large rocks and deposits of lava and the whole surface appear’d cover’d with ashes looking like the effects of some earthquake or volcano, the stones appearing to have melted and run together.” The stretch was littered with death and wreckage: “Where we started this morning,” wrote Charles Glass Gray, “there was a lot of dead oxen, broken wagons, wheels and lots of iron fixtures scatter’d in every direction. I counted 160 oxen, dead and dying and wandering about scarce able to stand up—being left here to die!” Later that day, “seventy dead animals were counted in the last 25 miles. Pieces of wagons also, the irons in particular—the wood part having been burnt—were also strewn along. An ox-yoke, [a] wheel and a dead ox, yoke, and wheel; and a wheel, dead ox, and a yoke, was the order of the day, every hundred or two hundred yards.” Milus Gay wrote that “such destruction of property as I saw across the Desert I have never seen I should think I passed the carcasses of 1200 head of cattle and horses and a great many waggons Harnesses-cooking utensils-tools water casks etc. etc. at a moderate estimate the amount I would think the property cost in the U.S. $50,000. We also see many men on the point of starvation begging for bread.”
Upon completing the trip, one emigrant wrote that “until one has crossed a barren desert, without food or water, under a burning tropical sun, at three miles an hour, one can form no conception of what misery is.” Forty-niner Alonzo Delano wrote that “any man who makes a trip by land to California, deserves to find a fortune,” after making the journey himself.
And that route was north of the present-day test sites. It was the “easy” route to California.
Few traveled through the regions of the present-day Nellis Complex, and the few who haphazardly braved the southern desert barely escaped with their lives, if they escaped at all. When William Lewis Manly decided to take a “shortcut” to California via the “Southern Route” in 1849, the result was catastrophic. Climbing mountains alongside his party’s chosen route, Manly later wrote, “I saw that the land west of us looked more and more barren.” When Manly finally emerged from the desert starving and dehydrated, he described a landscape of “dreadful sands and shadows . . . exhausting phantoms, salt columns, bitter lakes, and wild, dreary, sunken desolation . . .”
Twenty years after Manly narrowly escaped death on a trek that took his party near Groom Lake and onward through Death Valley, Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler was charged by the Army Corps of Engineers with undertaking a “reconnaissance” mission through the same territory, a region Wheeler described as “hitherto unexplored.” Wheeler’s objective in mapping out “one of the most desolate regions upon the face of the earth” was to describe the physical features of the landscape, survey potential mining sites, note potential routes for future roads and railroad lines, describe the “numbers, habits, and disposition of the Indians who may live in this section,” and, tellingly, to identify and select sites “as may be of use to future military operations.”
“All the tribes, without exception, belong to that wild, roving breed known as ‘Mountain Indians.’ Their lawless and migratory life has carried them beyond the notion of anything like order, even among their own people,” wrote Wheeler of the native peoples, but he conceded that “it is almost impossible to obtain white guides who have any accurate knowledge of regions sensibly new, while hardly any nook or corner can be found not well known to the Indian.” The “unexplored” land Wheeler’s reconnaissance mission was to chart had after all been well-explored for many generations. Wheeler possessed little sympathy for Nevada’s natives. Although “they are quite intelligent, and were very friendly,” he wrote, “Virtue is almost unknown among them, and syphilitic diseases very common.” Per his own estimation, Wheeler’s mission gave him ample “opportunity for studying the Indian character,” but his dealing with them “has in no way produced a sympathy with that class of well-intentioned but ill-informed citizens who claim that the Indians are a much-abused race.” Despite his disdain for the indigenous peoples, Wheeler found one praiseworthy attribute: “They have . . . a wonderful regard for superior force.” After the “Indian difficulty is settled” and the railroads came, he remarked, the development of the Southwest could proceed.
Development spelled ruin for native peoples. Mines poisoned the land with mercury and cyanide; whites cut down trees for fuel. Cattle devoured the plants native peoples relied on for food. Local game was frightened away. The brutality was not merely environmental. Invading settlers raped mothers in front of their children, attacked Western Shoshone women, and slaughtered native peoples indiscriminately. In the 1860s and ’70s, Nevada’s main newspaper, aptly titled Territorial Enterprise, advocated “exterminating the whole race.” Decades later, those words would echo through the mouth of a deranged Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel about colonialism’s heart of darkness: “Exterminate all the brutes.”
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” said Mark Twain, who spent his fair share of time traversing the West. So too with human geographies. Landscapes are built upon the foundations of what came before. “Nothing disappears completely . . . ,” wrote Henri Lefebvre. “In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. . . . Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.” For the French geographer, it wasn’t just that landscapes were built on foundations laid in the past, but that the way we see a particular place is also guided by what others before us saw. What we see strongly guides what we do: To an extent, we enact what we imagine. When early explorers and settlers first came to the Basin and Range, they saw a wasteland. Then they laid waste to it.
Beginning in the early 1960s, history began to rhyme once again when the Department of Energy and the military began setting off nuclear weapons in the desert. Mushroom clouds lit the skies, and fallout fell like snow. The explosions were called tests but were nonetheless full-fledged dress rehearsals for Armageddon, perhaps more. Among the desert’s longtime residents, the difference between “nuclear testing” and “nuclear war” was far from self-evident.
One day in October, as the beginnings of winter added a dry chill to the desert wind, I drove along Highway 80 parallel to the Humboldt River in a big white Suburban along roughly the same route the settlers had trekked almost two centuries earlier. In a matter of minutes, I’d blown through the stretch of desert between the Carson Sink and the Truckee River that had once been littered with abandoned wagons and pack-animal corpses, and where so many westbound pioneers met their fate in the unforgiving desert. I turned south near Elko and drove into the Crescent Valley, looking for another base of sorts. This one was only slightly easier to find than the “nonexistent” military facilities two hundred miles south.
Scribbled on a page of paper torn from a spiral notebook, my directions said “white, single wide trailer—first trailer facing the road across the street from the old baseball diamond.” When I arrived at a cluster of trailers about a mile past the convenience store, I realized that I had no idea what the directions meant, so I knocked on the first plausible door.
A young woman with long, dark hair named Okaadaka answered and invited me into the dilapidated structure. Unpacked suitcases sat in the corner, fresh with baggage tags marked Ely, the closest airport to the Crescent Valley (several hours away). Files, papers, and pamphlets were piled high on every horizontal surface. Flyers, maps, and pictures were plastered on the far wall. This trailer was home to the Western Shoshone Defense Project, and from this remote location, an elderly Native American woman named Carrie Dann and he
r staff of two full-timers and two part-timers take on the military, the Bureau of Land Management, mining and defense contractors, and the U.S. government itself. Dann says that the United States has been illegally occupying Western Shoshone land for 150 years and that she has the paperwork to prove it.
As I sat in the unmarked trailer with Dann, Okaadaka, and a human rights lawyer named Julie Fishel, who works with the defense project, Dann explained that their work began in 1992, two decades after the Bureau of Land Management started harassing Dann and other Western Shoshone in the area for “trespassing.” The Shoshone provoked the BLM’s ire by refusing to pay grazing fees for allowing their cattle to wander through the Crescent Valley. “I’ve never seen any documentation that says the Western Shoshone ever gave their land to the United States,” said Dann. In her view, the Crescent Valley still rightfully belongs to the Western Shoshone, and it’s the United States, not the Native Americans, who are doing the trespassing. The Indian Wars never really ended, she says.
The basis for Dann’s argument hangs near a doorway leading to a back room in the trailer. Bound with a red ribbon, the document has a cover page written in calligraphic letters: the Treaty of Ruby Valley.
Signed in 1863 between the United States and the Western Shoshone, the Treaty of Ruby Valley was meant to end an undeclared war that began when thousands of whites arrived in present-day Nevada. As previously mentioned, the emigrant trains destroyed local food sources and indiscriminately killed indigenous peoples, initiating cyclones of violence across the desert. The endgame began in the early 1860s when a colonel named Patrick E. Connor set up a fort in the Ruby Valley. Charged with protecting the mail routes from periodic Shoshone raids, Connor ordered his California Volunteers to “destroy every male Indian whom you may encounter” and to “leave their bodies thus exposed as an example of what evildoers may expect.” In January of 1863, Connor ambushed a Shoshone village along the Bear River in present-day Utah. His troops raped many and massacred approximately 250 Shoshone, among them approximately 80 women and children. The event became known as the Bear River Massacre. Later that year, at gun-point, the Western Shoshone signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley.
Shoshone legend holds that the signing was a grisly affair. As Western Shoshone Council Chief Raymond Yowell tells it:
They had [the Indians] lined up along that ridge, and the troops were standing there ready with their rifles. . . . They fed the Indians first, before signing the treaty. Before they did that they had the Indians turn over a supposedly bad Shoshone to them, who’d maybe killed some white people or something like that. And so they hung him in front of them first, that morning when they were going to sign the treaty. And then, after he was dead, they cut him down and took him away, and they [the Shoshone] didn’t know what they did with him. His relatives wanted the body, but they wouldn’t give it to them. Later on, they fed [the Shoshone] a meat that they couldn’t recognize. Pretty soon, they figured out that they had cooked the Shoshone that they had hung and fed it to them.
It’s not clear whether Yowell’s story is historically accurate or not. More revealing is that the cannibal story is not entirely implausible. If settlers saw a wasteland on their way out west, the indigenous people saw—experienced—a storm of ultraviolence.
Whatever the circumstances under which the treaty was enacted, the Treaty of Ruby Valley’s text declares “peace and friendship” between the United States and the Shoshone and outlines a working relationship toward the lands that the Western Shoshone call Newe Sogobia. In addition to granting the United States certain rights of passage and mining claims in Western Shoshone territory, the Western Shoshone are charged with ensuring that “hostilities and all depredations upon the emigrant trains, the mail and telegraph lines, and upon the citizens of the United States within their country shall cease.”
But the Treaty of Ruby Valley was, and is, clear about one thing: The Western Shoshone retain sovereignty over their traditional land. At the time, this was perfectly reasonable: No one in the United States wanted the wasteland anyway. For the same reason, it was one of the few treaties that the United States never bothered to nullify. And, according to Carrie Dann and other traditional Western Shoshone, the treaty remains a singular legal basis for the relationship between the indigenous nations and the United States. The United States, for its part, has not refuted Dann’s argument, nor has it offered any documentation showing that the treaty of friendship between the two nations has been abrogated.
In September of 2002, the United States returned. Once again, Dann was being accused of trespassing; once again, Dann rejected the notion that it was possible for her to trespass on land she saw as rightfully belonging to her people. At four A.M. one Sunday, around forty-five armed federal agents, a helicopter, an airplane, and a fleet of ATVs descended on Pine Valley and other places where Dann’s herd grazed. Mary Gibson, a Shoshone, was camping in one of the canyons with a group of eleven people, waiting for the raid after being warned to expect it. “We saw a convoy of twenty vehicles with flashing lights roaring up the valley,” she recalled. “I could not help but think of how this is how our ancestors felt when they saw the cavalry coming. So many of my people were killed on this land and now it’s happening again.” The Feds rounded up Dann’s cattle and loaded them into trucks to be sold at auction. The ranch was devastated.
As our conversation wound down, I asked Dann what would happen if somehow the Western Shoshone were put in charge of the territory they call Newe Sogobia. What would happen if, say tomorrow, the United States came out and said, “You’re right, this land is yours—here it is.” What would change?
“I think about that a lot,” says Dann. “I couldn’t give you an answer, but my personal opinion is that we’re willing to sit down with anyone, with the Feds, or whomever. When you sit down and talk, you can work out pretty much any problem. The problem right now is that they’re not even willing to sit at the same table with us. I’m sure that there are ways that things could be figured out for the best of everyone who’s here.”
Julie Fishel chimes in: “There are a couple of things that you can be sure about. If the Shoshone won this tomorrow, there’d be no more testing at the nuclear test site, there’d be no nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, and there’d be some kind of compensation for the things that are going on now in terms of mining. The Western Shoshone would start thinking about how to repair the land and figuring out how to clean this mess up.”
“What’s happening right now is a spiritual holocaust,” says Carrie. “I don’t know what they call it, but that’s what’s happening.”
“When you allow this kind of corruption to fester in a government and you allow it to spread, it legitimizes everything,” says Fishel. The United States starts to think, “We killed a bunch of people to get this land in the first place, and it worked then and we didn’t get in trouble for it, so let’s do it some more. Let’s do it in Iraq, let’s do it somewhere else, too.”
For the collection of activists sitting in an unmarked trailer in the recesses of Nevada’s vast valleys, the black world is much more than an array of sites connected to one another through black aircraft, encrypted communications, and classified careers. It is the power to create those geographies, to create places where anything can happen, and to do it with impunity.
5
Classified Résumés
Mojave Desert
In the fall of 2004, I called up the Flight Test Historical Foundation at Edwards Air Force Base, hoping for an invitation to an annual fund-raiser and reunion for the test pilots and aerospace engineers whose industry has long dominated California’s Antelope Valley. This year’s event promised to be particularly interesting. Entitled “Out of the Black . . . Into the Blue,” the ceremony would induct a handful of test pilots into a club of “Eagles,” a kind of flight-test hall of fame administered by the Historical Foundation. This year’s ceremony was unique because it honored pilots who’d tested previously classified aircraft, all o
f which had flown at Groom Lake between the late 1970s and the late 1990s. These men had spent much of their lives working in the black world. With the aircraft they piloted now declassified, they were receiving long-overdue credit for their work. After a series of conversations, the Flight Test Historical Foundation’s volunteer officers said they’d be happy to have me.
“Out of the Black . . .” took place at a hotel ballroom one hot, dry autumn evening in Lancaster, California, in the westernmost part of the Mojave Desert. To the north, lights from the legendary flight test center at Edwards Air Force Base filled the horizon with a deep orange glow. First built as a remote Army airfield in the run-up to the Second World War, modern-day Edwards (first known as Muroc) came into its own when it became the secret base for the United States’ first black aircraft, the XP-59A, which was the original American jet fighter and whose secure hangar at North Base remains home to black aviation projects and units to this day. After the war, Edwards was ground zero for the so-called golden age of test flight. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier here in 1947, and Scott Crossfield blazed past Mach 6 in the X-15 rocket plane twenty years later. In 1981, the space shuttle Columbia landed on Edwards’s expansive dry lake after its maiden flight into space.