The Northern Paiute are generally considered to have been more warlike than the Southern Paiute and fought in a number of conflicts with non-Indians. At first, in contacts with fur trappers and traders, such as Jedediah Smith in 1825, Peter Skene Ogden in 1827, and Joseph Walker in 1833, the Northern Paiute were friendly. But after gold was discovered in California late in 1848, and miners and migrants began streaming across Indian lands in great numbers, the Northern Paiute turned hostile.
The Northern Paiute played a prominent role as allies of the COEUR D’ALENE in the Coeur d’Alene War of 1858—59. Then the following decade, during the Civil War, while federal troops were busy fighting in the East, the Northern Paiute carried out numerous raids on miners and mining camps; stagecoaches and stage stations; wagon trains and freight caravans; and ranches and farms. Nevada and Oregon volunteers had little success in tracking down the hostile bands. In 1865, after the Civil War, army troops were assigned to forts in the region in an effort to bring peace to the area.
The conflict that followed during 1866—67 is usually called the Snake War. Two Northern Paiute bands, the Walpapi and the Yahooskin, were known collectively to whites as the Snake Indians. Two chiefs, Paulina and
Old Weawea, led Snake warriors against troops in lightning-quick raids, after which the Indians would disappear into the highlands. But a rancher and stage driver named James Clark, who fought in many different campaigns, divided his troops into many small tracking patrols that kept constant pressure on the insurgents for a year and a half, forcing about 40 different skirmishes. In one of them, in April 1867, Chief Paulina was killed. Old Weawea eventually surrendered with 800 warriors. Most of them were settled on the Malheur Reservation in Oregon.
Some of these same warriors were caught up in the Bannock War of 1878. When the BANNOCK leader Chief Buffalo Horn was killed in that conflict, two Northern Paiute took over the leadership of the rebels, Chief Egan and the medicine man Oytes.
Other Northern Paiute bands fought in an uprising referred to as the Paiute War (or the Pyramid Lake War). This conflict started just before the Civil War, in 1860, when traders at the Williams Station, a Central Overland Mail and Pony Express station on the California Trail just east of the present-day Nevada-California border, kidnapped and raped two Northern Paiute girls. Warriors attacked and burned the station, killed five whites, and rescued the girls.
Miners in the region organized a volunteer force under Major William Ormsby. But a Northern Paiute chief named Numaga outmaneuvered them at the Big Bend of the Truckee River by having his men hide in sagebrush along the pass and attack from both sides. After this defeat, control of the military operation was given to a former Texas Ranger, Colonel Jack Hays. He organized a force of 800 Nevada and California volunteers plus some army regulars and tracked the insurgents to Pinnacle Mountain, where he defeated them. He then established Fort Churchill to guard the valley and keep the California Trail open.
World History
