Treaty of Ruby Valley

An 1881 history reported that the swampy ground halted the cavalry's charge, allowing many Nua to escape, but 23 were killed in this second massacre.

That October, five months after the attack at Basawabi, tribal chiefs met with the United States officials to sign the Treaty of Ruby Valley.

It ceded no land, yet authorized emigrant roads, military posts, railroads, mining, ranching, and settlement across Nua territory.

While the treaty acknowledged the destruction of game, it called the resulting devastation an inconvenience.

And how have Native people themselves advocated for the return of that land or other forms of reparation? Yeah.

And the primary means... has been this treaty, the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, which was a pact that was signed between a set of Western Shoshone leaders in the northeast part of what's now Nevada.

And U.S. federal diplomats, really.

So there was a treaty convention that was actually held in 1863 in response to the rise of mining across the Intermountain West in what was then the Nevada Territory and the corresponding violence that was taking place between indigenous communities and prospectors.

And cherishing in a. in a natural state or in a state that wasn't destroyed, essentially, through open pit mining and through bombing and et cetera.

And so there was this really interesting coalition of, again, folks who you wouldn't expect coming together in defense of the land.

And so my sort of narrow interest in the Nevada test site blossomed into this much larger story, really with the Treaty of Ruby Valley sort of anchoring the whole thing.

Oh, wow.