American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The broad results of political and economic processes are often far clearer in Native American ethnohistory than are the specific local mechanisms which brought them about. In the Great Basin, native groups lost control over land and the resources it contained between 1850 and 1870 through a relatively peaceful process without large-scale military conquest, and those groups were forced to find ways to adapt in order to survive. One common means of adaptation is often referred to in the literature as the “attachment” by Indian families to ranches and farms, where they performed wage work for non-Indians. Yet there remains a great gap between our knowledge of this general cultural re-orientation and our understanding of the human actions which produced it, between the overall historical pattern and the specific human reality as it was lived by Indians themselves. Tokens of this period remain in the many Indian family names which were “taken” from ranch employers. Historic archaeology has uncovered the remains of a distinctively non-Anglo way of life on some ranch sites, such as the grinding of coffee on manos and metates, and circular willow houses associated with historic period tin cans, buttons, and broken leather harness. This much we know, but little more. In an attempt to fill in some of the details of the relationship between white employers and Indian laborers, I have examined the account books of the Stewart Ranch, one of the earliest and largest in the Las Vegas area.