Washo Indians
Carson City, Carson City, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Washo Indians. This marker has removed; on Maintenance List for ReplacementLong before the coming of emigrant wagon trains, this site overlooked the lands of the Washo Indians. A valley, a town, and a county still bear their name. A nearby trail marks their ancient route from the lowlands to Lake Tahoe and California. The Washo language is distinct from both Shoshone and Paiute. For many years, the Washo people remained isolated, roaming their native high Sierra and descending into the valleys for winter. Their pine nut ceremony is still held before harvest time, with men and women working together at this enterprise. The departure for the pine nut groves is celebrated by singing and dancing during the Pine nut ceremony called Goomsabyi. Their basketry, now world famous, is one aspect of Washo culture that has been preserved for generations. The beautiful work of their most celebrated artist, Dat-So-La-Lee is exhibited at the Nevada State Museum, Carson City, and the Nevada Historical Society, Reno, along with other equally talented basket weavers exhibits.
Erected by Washoe Cultural Resources Advisory Council
The Story
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.
Why it matters
The Washo remind us that the Great Basin was a living cultural landscape for millennia before American settlement, and that its Indigenous artistic traditions endure.
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Related people
- · Dat-So-La-Lee
Related events
- · Goomsabyi (Pine Nut Ceremony)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
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.
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.
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.