Dat So La Lee (Louisa Keyser)
Carson City, Carson City, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Dat So La Lee. Famed Washoe basket maker, Datsolalee, is buried in this cemetery along with many other Washoe weavers. Also known as Louisa Keyser. Dat So La Lee, and Dabuda, over 120 of her major documented baskets were made expressly for sale to Arts and Crafts collectors from 1895 until her death in 1925 under patronage of the Cohn family. Datsolalee’s baskets are prized by collectors and displayed in museums across the country.Utilitarian, straight-walled, decorated coiled willow basketry is a Washoe tradition extending back thousands of years. Datsolalee brought international fame to the spherical Washoe degikup willow basket and highlighted the form with innovative decorative motifs in bracken fern and redbud Fibers. She and her patrons promoted this craft to the public, elevated it to an art form, and, most importantly, motivated basketry production by other tribal members during a period when the Washoe were recovering from mid-nineteenth- century loss of their homelands and aboriginal life ways.
Erected by Washoe Indians
The Story
Louisa Keyser — known as Datsolalee — was a Washoe weaver whose spherical degikup willow baskets, decorated with bracken fern and redbud, elevated a thousands-of-years-old utilitarian craft into internationally celebrated fine art. Working under the patronage of the Cohn family from 1895 until her death in 1925, she produced more than 120 documented major baskets now prized in museums nationwide. Her success came as the Washoe were recovering from the mid-19th-century loss of their homelands, and it inspired renewed basketry across the tribe.
Why it matters
Datsolalee showed that Native artistry could command national acclaim on its own terms, and her legacy helped sustain Washoe cultural traditions through a period of profound dispossession.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Louisa Keyser (Datsolalee)
- · Cohn family
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Stewart Indian School
Carson City, NV
Founded as the Carson Indian Training School, the Stewart Indian School was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs for nearly a century to give vocational and academic instruction to Native American students gathered from across the West. First superintendent W.D.C. Gibson renamed it for Senator William Morris Stewart, who secured its federal funding, and in the 1920s Superintendent Frederick Snyder launched a building program in which students worked alongside stone masons — some from the Hopi Tribe — to raise the distinctive stone buildings still standing on the National Register–listed campus.
Nevada Children’s Home
Carson City, NV
Nevada's care for orphaned children began in 1864 when the Daughters of Charity opened the Nevada Orphans' Asylum in Virginia City. The state took over most of that work with the Nevada State Orphans' Home, authorized in 1869 and built on this Carson City site, admitting its first child in 1870. A larger sandstone building from the state prison quarry replaced it in 1903, and the institution—renamed the Nevada State Children's Home in 1951—served dependent children until modern cottage-style care and, eventually, its 1992 closure.
The Governor's Mansion
Carson City, NV
Designed by Reno architect George A. Ferris and completed at a cost of $22,700, this neoclassical residence is the only home ever built expressly for Nevada's governor. Acting Governor Denver Dickerson and his wife Una became its first residents in July 1909, and their daughter June was born there two months later. Sixteen families occupied the mansion through the twentieth century, and in 2000 First Lady Dema Guinn led a revitalization of its grounds.
Camp Nye
Carson City, NV
Established just north of here in October 1864, Camp Nye was the home base of Companies D and E of the 1st Nevada Volunteer Cavalry during the Civil War. Rather than fighting Confederates, these Union troopers were largely engaged in conflicts with American Indians across the region; Company D suffered Nevada's only two combat deaths of the war in a battle at Table Mountain in Elko County on May 20, 1865. The camp was deactivated that August, and no trace of its barracks and stables remains.