Dresslerville
Douglas County, Douglas County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Dresslerville. In 1917 State Senator William F. Dressler gave this 40-acre tract to Washo Indians, then living on ranches in Carson Valley. After a school was opened in 1924, it became a nucleus of settlement. Before the intrusion of Caucasians in 1848, Washo lived in winter in the Pinenut Hills where they stored autumn harvested pinenuts. In summer, they lived in the Lake Tahoe Basin fishing the tributary streams and gathering roots and berries. In fall, they hunted jackrabbits and gathered seeds in Carson Valley. Their only form of organization was that of kinship. These stone age people lived in daily communion with giants, monsters, animals whose characteristics were interchangeable with those of people, and with water babies, "having the bodies of old men and the long hair of girls," who lived in the lakes of the High Sierra.
Erected by Carson Valley Historic Society
The Story
In 1917, State Senator William F. Dressler gave this forty-acre tract to Washo people then living and working on ranches across Carson Valley, and after a school opened in 1924 it grew into a settled community. For generations before European intrusion, the Washo had followed a seasonal round—wintering in the Pinenut Hills where they stored pinenuts, summering in the Lake Tahoe Basin to fish and gather, and hunting in Carson Valley each fall. Their world was organized by kinship and animated by a rich cosmology of water babies and spirit beings of the High Sierra.
Why it matters
Dresslerville marks both the deep continuity of Washo life in the Tahoe–Carson region and the twentieth-century struggle of a dispossessed people to secure a permanent homeland of their own.
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Related people
- · William F. Dressler
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Dat So La Lee (Louisa Keyser)
Carson City, NV
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.
Stewart Indian School
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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.
De Ek Wadapush (Cave Rock)
Douglas County, NV
Known to the Washoe as De-ek Wadapush, Cave Rock has been a sacred place for thousands of years, a site where medicine people meditated and prayed and a landmark woven through the tribe's legends and traditional life beside da ow — Lake Tahoe. In the settlement era it also served the newcomers: quarried granite blocks still brace the old Lake Bigler Toll Road on its face, and highway tunnels were bored through the rock in 1931 and again in 1957. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property.
Washo Indians
Carson City, NV
Long before emigrant wagons crossed these valleys, this ground overlooked the homeland of the Washo people, whose language stands apart from that of their Shoshone and Paiute neighbors. For generations they wintered in the valleys and summered in the high Sierra around Lake Tahoe, gathering pine nuts in the autumn Goomsabyi ceremony that continues today. Their basketry—epitomized by the celebrated weaver Dat-So-La-Lee—became world famous.