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52-700: The basin is bounded on the north by the southern end of the Blue Mountains . The ridge of Steens Mountain separates the basin from the watershed of the Alvord Desert to the southeast. No streams cross the volcanic plains that separate the basin from the watershed of the Klamath River to the southwest. The basin includes archeological sites of the Drewsey Resource Area . The central basin receives an average of 6 inches (150 mm) of rain per year, with

104-564: A reservation for the Paiute encompassing Malheur Lake and much of the basin. Growing settlement pressures, in particular the discovery of gold in the surrounding mountains, as well as the interest of white settlers to form ranches in the region, caused the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to abruptly terminate the reservation in 1879. The Northern Paiute would survive virtually landless until obtaining tracts of land near Burns in 1935. The basin has

156-463: A seminomadic lifestyle, moving from place to place following animal migration patterns and seasonal foods. They lived in small, independent groups that consisted of a handful or so of different family units. Upon arrival of foreigners into western Nevada, the Northern Paiute became sedentary in order to protect themselves and handle negotiations with the new settlers. Because of their change from

208-425: A wetlands oasis in the basin, providing a habitat for many migratory bird species, including 2.5 million ducks each year. Malheur Lake and its surroundings are embraced by Malheur National Wildlife Refuge . Harney County, Oregon , had a total population of 7,422 at the 2010 census , and Burns in the plain north of Malheur Lake is the only community with a population larger than 1,000. Dryland ranching

260-412: A figure in the eyes of the public by making claims of being a princess and using this attention to advocate for her people. Shamanism is popular among most Native American tribes, including the Northern Paiute people. A shaman is a medicine man called a puhagim by Northern Paiute people. The Northern Paiute believe in a force called puha that gives life to the physical world. It is the power that moves

312-477: A fire and cared for it until the fire grew bigger and bigger. The water from the flood dried, and a man "happened." This man was called Nűműzóho, who was a cannibal. The Cannibals (as he and his kind were called) killed all the Native people, except for a woman who was able to escape. This woman kept herself alive by traveling from place to place in the region, meeting and staying with different characters. She then found

364-589: A fire. The season for story-telling in the American West was during the winter months. The elderly members of the tribe would animatedly and humorously tell the tale from their memory as told to them by previous elders and family members. They were told “as a way to pass on tribal visions of the animal people and the human people, their origins and values, their spiritual and natural environment, and their culture and daily lives.” The stories were often poems that were performed musically, called "song-poems." Members of

416-455: A man living in the mountains whom she married. They bore four children: two Paiute (one brother, one sister) and two Pit Rivers (one brother, one sister). The two sets of children fought frequently because they were from different tribes. Their father (some think he was a Wolf) threw them in different waters. This caused them to go their separate ways while continuing to fight and quarrel whenever they came in contact with each other again. And thus

468-406: A nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle , women were relied upon more heavily for both their full-time employment and at-home work. In some modern Northern Paiute tribes, men work in "seasonal jobs on the ranches, in the mines, and as caretakers in the nearby motels" and women work "in the laundry, the bakery, in homes and motels as domestics, and in the country hospital". They gathered Pinyon nuts in

520-559: A widespread decline in groundwater which has put the region at risk of ecological and economic collapse. Irrigation pumping is dropping the water table as much as 10 feet (3.0 m) every year in one area. Blue Mountains (Pacific Northwest) The Blue Mountains are a mountain range in the northwestern United States , located largely in northeastern Oregon and stretching into extreme southeastern Washington . The range has an area of about 15,000 square miles (39,000 km ), stretching east and southeast of Pendleton, Oregon , to

572-594: Is found at several sites. Evidence suggests that there existed in the basin several species—in particular, the chiselmouth , coarse-scale suckers , and northern squawfish —that are currently found only in the Columbia River basin, indicating that at some point the Harney Basin may have been connected to the Columbia. During wetter years, the lake level of Malheur Lake was raised to a depth of 25 feet (7.6 m), allowing

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624-591: Is located along the south-eastern flank of the range. U.S. Route 26 crosses the southern portion of the range, traversing the Blue Mountain Summit and reaching an elevation of 5,098 feet (1,554 m). It is also crossed by the Union Pacific Railroad 's mainline between Portland, Oregon, and Pocatello, Idaho, which crests the summit at Kamela, Oregon . The summit lies on Union Pacific's La Grande Subdivision, which runs between La Grande and Hinkle ,

676-676: Is the basis of the area's economy, with relatively little irrigation water available from the streams that enter Malheur Lake. The Harney Basin Volcanic Field is a series of volcanic flows of rhyolite and of tuffs of ash flows in around Burns, Oregon . The field is within the High Lava Plains Province. The Harney-Malheur Lakes watershed is a 1,420 sq mi (3,700 km) Great Basin watershed . The adjacent Donner und Blitzen River watershed of 765 sq mi (1,980 km) discharges into Malheur Lake and includes

728-680: The Columbia . The southernmost portion of the Blue Mountains is drained by the Silvies River , in the endorheic Harney Basin . Northern Paiute The Northern Paiute people are a Numic people that has traditionally lived in the Great Basin region of the United States in what is now eastern California , western Nevada , and southeast Oregon . The Northern Paiute pre-contact lifestyle

780-636: The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, several individual colonies gained federal recognition as independent tribes . Humans have inhabited the area between the West and Northwest of the United States for over 11,000 years. One version of how the Northern Paiute people came to be is that a bird, the Sagehen (also known as the Centrocercus ), was the only bird that survived a massive flood. The Sagehen made

832-891: The North Fork John Day Wilderness , the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness , and the Monument Rock Wilderness , all of which are in Oregon. The Wenaha–Tucannon Wilderness sits astride the Oregon–Washington border. The range is drained by several rivers, including the Grande Ronde and Tucannon , tributaries of the Snake, as well as the forks of the John Day , Umatilla and Walla Walla rivers, tributaries of

884-864: The Ochoco Mountains and Maury Mountains in the west near Prineville, Oregon , through the Greenhorn Mountains , the Aldrich Mountains , and the Strawberry Range , to the Elkhorn Mountains . The tallest peaks are Rock Creek Butte at 9,106 feet (2,776 m) in the Elkhorn Mountains, and Strawberry Mountain at 9,042 feet (2,756 m) in the Strawberry Range. The ranges of the Blue Mountains were uplifted by folding upward into

936-737: The Oregon Trail and were often the last mountain range American pioneers had to cross before either reaching southeast Washington near Walla Walla or passing down the Columbia River Gorge to the end of the Oregon Trail in the Willamette Valley near Oregon City . The range is currently traversed by Interstate 84 , which crosses the crest of the range at a 4,193-foot (1,278 m) summit, from south-southeast to north-northwest between La Grande and Pendleton. The community of Baker City

988-511: The Pyramid Lake War of 1860, Owens Valley Indian War 1861–1864, Snake War 1864–1868; and the Bannock War of 1878. These incidents generally began with a disagreement between settlers and the Paiute (singly or in a group) regarding property, retaliation by one group against the other, and finally counter-retaliation by the opposite party, frequently culminating in the armed involvement of

1040-450: The Reno area, Washoe people. Later, the government created larger reservations at Pyramid Lake and Duck Valley , Nevada . By that time the pattern of small de facto reservations near cities or farm districts, often with mixed Northern Paiute and Shoshone populations, had been established. Starting in the early 20th century, the federal government began granting land to these colonies. Under

1092-645: The Snake River along the Oregon– Idaho border. The Blue Mountains cover ten counties across two states; they are Union , Umatilla , Grant , Baker , Wallowa and Harney counties in Oregon, and Walla Walla , Columbia , Garfield and Asotin counties in Washington. The Blue Mountains were named after the color of the mountains when seen from a distance and the blue hue imparted by the smoke of forest and range fires set by Indigenous people as management tools in

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1144-614: The U.S. Army . Fatalities were much higher among the Paiute due to newly introduced Eurasian infectious diseases , such as smallpox , which were endemic among the Europeans. The Natives had no acquired immunity . Sarah Winnemucca 's book Life Among the Piutes (1883) gives a first-hand account of this period. The US government first established the Malheur Reservation for the Northern Paiute in eastern Oregon. It intended to concentrate

1196-684: The "Blue Mountain Anticline" by tectonic rotation that began about 14 million years ago. More limited faulting and extension in places that include Baker valley and the Grande Ronde valley also contributed to today's topography. The Wallowa Mountains are considered to be part of the Blues by many geologists because their geology includes the same accreted terranes as the Elkhorns, Greenhorns, and Strawberries, although their mechanism of uplift differs somewhat. Similarly,

1248-436: The 20th century, gender roles began to shift. Men worked in seasonal jobs and the women mainly worked in laundry and medicine. The shift happened because the men that worked seasonal jobs would not have work at the end of a given season, while women had consistent work. This made women a major provider in the family. Another shift came in the shape of politics. While some women disrupted tribe meetings, Sarah Winnemucca became

1300-476: The Blue Mountains were inhabited by several different bands of the Northern Paiute , a Great Basin culture. Native American tribes originally migrated to the Blue Mountains for hunting and salmon runs. The Natives used to purposefully burn small parts of the forest in order to create pastures to attract game for hunting. In the mid-1800s, the Blue Mountains were a formidable obstacle to settlers traveling on

1352-578: The Cannibal who kills almost all of the Indians but not the woman; Coyote is "the one who fixed things," mentioned briefly in many of the origin stories; a man and a woman who meet and bear four children; the four children who are paired off into different tribes and quarrel with the other pair. The creativity in which the stories were told is part of the reason for such an array of versions. These epic stories were first told long ago to large groups gathered around

1404-685: The Nevada/California area in which they currently reside. They also may have overthrown and destroyed other Indian tribes in order to inhabit their current lands. For example, the Paiute were almost "continually at war" with the Klamath south and west of them. "The Achomawi, south of the Klamath, also were enemies of the Northern Paiute, (so much so that) the earliest wars related in Achomawi oral tradition were (with) Northern Paiute". Sustained contact between

1456-443: The Northern Paiute and European Americans began in the early 1840s, although the first contact may have occurred as early as the 1820s. Although the Paiute had adopted the use of horses from other Great Plains tribes, their culture was otherwise then largely unaffected by European influences. As Euro-American settlement of the area progressed, competition for scarce resources increased. Several violent confrontations took place, including

1508-440: The Northern Paiute community. The Northern Paiute believe that doctors/shaman retrieve the souls of those who have committed wrongdoings and re-establish them in to Native American society. They are the intermediaries between the evil acts of the sick and the goodness of the healthy tribe. For this reason, Northern Paiute do not perceive white doctors as capable of fully healing those in need because although they may be able to cure

1560-546: The Northern Paiute there, but its strategy did not work. Because of the distance of the reservation from the traditional areas of most of the bands, and because of its poor environmental conditions, many Northern Paiute refused to go there. Those that did, soon left. They clung to their traditional lifestyle as long as possible. When environmental degradation of their lands made that impossible, they sought jobs on white farms, ranches or in cities. They established small Indian colonies , where they were joined by many Shoshone and, in

1612-451: The Paiute were created and their homes established in Nevada, California, and Oregon. Another version of the creation story tells of a man and a woman who heard a voice from within a bottle. They dumped the contents of the bottle out, and four beings dropped out: two boys and two girls. The 4 people were divided by good and evil. The two good people (Paiute) were to be protected and cared for by

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1664-811: The United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management public agencies, but also by private land owners and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Much of the range is included in the Malheur National Forest , Umatilla National Forest , and Wallowa–Whitman National Forest . Several wilderness areas encompass remote parts of the range, including the North Fork Umatilla Wilderness ,

1716-593: The basin via Stinkingwater Pass , seeking a shortcut to The Dalles along what has become known as the Meek Cutoff . A total of 23 people died while the party wandered in the basin until finding water at the Crooked River . Because of its climate, it received sparse white settlements and was largely left to the Paiute until the late 19th century. Settlement pressures and conflicts with the Paiute in other areas of Oregon caused President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 to create

1768-422: The elements, plants, and animals that are a part of that physical realm. Humans are seen to be very much a part of that world, not superior or inferior, simply another component. The Northern Paiute people believe that "matter and places are pregnant in form, meaning, and relations to natural and human phenomena." This belief gave credibility and placed necessity in shamans, as it does today. In order to draw upon

1820-434: The fall. The Blue Mountains are unique as the home of the world's largest living organism, a subterranean colonial mycelial mat of the fungus Armillaria ostoyae . The Blues are uplift mountains and contain some of the oldest rocks in Oregon. Rocks as old as 400 million years protrude through surrounding Columbia River Basalt flows and related volcanics of 16.7 million to about 6 million years ago. Geologically ,

1872-706: The geology of Hells Canyon and the Seven Devils Mountains is also composed of accreted terranes of a similar nature. The river valleys and lower levels of the range were occupied by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Historic tribes of the region included the Walla Walla , Cayuse people and Umatilla , now acting together as the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation , located mostly in Umatilla County, Oregon. The southern portion of

1924-565: The lakes to drain over the Malheur Gap. In modern times, however, the lake level does not rise above 10 feet (3.0 m) in the wettest years. In the 19th century, the basin was inhabited by the Northern Paiute tribe. It was explored and extensively trapped by trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company in the 1820s. The basin lay far off the route of the Oregon Trail , but in 1845 experienced mountain man Stephen Meek led an ill-fated party across

1976-565: The latter of which is the site of a major UP yard. Birds of the area include bald eagle , Lewis's woodpecker , Williamson's sapsucker , red-breasted nuthatch , golden-crowned kinglet and many migratory species, with the riverbanks important habitat for this birdlife. Mammals that move through the mountain grasslands include Rocky Mountain elk , Bighorn sheep and Mule deer . Native fish include Chinook Salmon, Steelhead, Redband Trout, Bull Trout, and Pacific Lamprey. The Blue Mountains in Washington are home to one of 10 identified elk herds in

2028-415: The mid 1990s the area then became known for its mature males and trophy hunting. In 2018, Washington State proposed an updated elk management plan intended to improve the health of elk populations and habitats, reduce human conflict and agricultural damage, and managing elk populations for recreational, educational, scientific, and ceremonial purposes. The lands in the Blue Mountains are managed not only by

2080-592: The mountains in the fall as a critical winter food source. Women also gathered grass seeds and roots as important parts of their diet. The name of each band was derived from a characteristic food source. For example, the people at Pyramid Lake were known as the Cui Ui Ticutta (meaning " Cui-ui eaters", or trout eaters). The people of the Lovelock area were known as the Koop Ticutta , meaning "ground-squirrel eaters" and

2132-515: The oldest rocks of the Blue Mountains (400+ to about 150 million years in age) were created as island arcs in the Pacific Ocean and accreted onto the North American plate . Today, this suture zone runs through Western Idaho (Riggins and McCall) Within these terranes are igneous intrusions , some of which have intruded after accretion. The Blue Mountains include several mountain ranges, from

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2184-539: The outer shell, the inner shell will decay and be lost, leaving the person dead in reality. A shaman, however, would take an ill person (physically or spiritually ill) and use the power from the universe to heal him. In many cases, a shaman will utilize various mediums, such as a rattle, smoke, and songs, to incite the power of the universe. Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially. Alfred L. Kroeber thought that

2236-752: The people of the Carson Sink were known as the Toi Ticutta meaning " tule eaters". The Kucadikadi of Mono County, California are the " brine fly eaters". Relations among the Northern Paiute and their Shoshone neighbors were generally peaceful. There is no sharp distinction between the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone or Sosone . Relations with the Waasseoo or Washoe people, who were culturally and linguistically very different, were not so peaceful. These differences in lifestyle and language could be because Northern Paiute may have moved from southern regions to

2288-604: The powers of nature and the universe, shamans would frequently visit sacred sites. These sites can be found throughout the Great Basin and the American West. They include "mountains, caves, waterways, and unique geological formations." One such site is called the Parowan Gap and is sacred to the Paiute (see image). These sacred sites are where shamans performed many of their duties, including curing, rainmaking , warfare, fighting, or sorcery ." Shamans were and are an integral part of

2340-470: The river portion of the 292 sq mi (760 km) Malheur National Wildlife Refuge . " Alkali Field is located directly south of Malheur Lake, a few kilometers east of the Donner und Blitzen River. " The High Desert Wetlands ecoregion is a set of Northern Basin and Range wetlands with 1,651 sq mi (4,280 km) in Oregon, including a large area around Harney and Malheur Lakes . The basin

2392-553: The state, with a population of approximately 4,500 Rocky Mountain elk as of 2018 across the region. In 1989, in response to a decline in the elk population and a heavy female-biased population, the Washington Fish & Wildlife Department regulated elk hunting in the Washington Blue Mountains with a "spike-only" general hunting season, permitting hunting of only male elk with at least one visible non-branched antler. By

2444-664: The surrounding mountains receiving an average of 15 inches (380 mm) per year. The center of the basin is flat and contains Malheur and Harney lakes, which receive the streams originating within the basin in the surrounding mountains, including the Silvies River from the north and the Donner und Blitzen River from the south. Harney Lake is the actual sink of the basin, connected in some years to Malheur Lake but currently separated by constantly changing sand dunes . Both lakes cycle between open water in wetter years and marshes in drier years. The wetlands around Malheur Lake and Harney Lake form

2496-467: The tribe chanted and acted out the stories to the beat of a drum with people dancing. The Northern Paiute origin story, among many other important and formative legends, was passed on orally from tribal elders to younger tribe members and from grandmothers and grandfathers to grandchildren. Many of their stories and much of their history is passed on orally even today. Gender roles among the Northern Paiute did not stand out in society. Men and women divided

2548-502: The woman while the two bad people were subject to the man. The two sets of pairs (good and bad) left the man and woman. Each pair created fire: the two good people made a fire with minimal smoke, the two bad people made a fire with thick smoke. This made them enemies, even before foreigners plotted them against each other later on. War and strife have existed ever since. While several other variations of these stories are told, they all share some similar events and characters. Namely Nűműzóho

2600-424: The work between each other the most traditional way: women made household tools, gathered fruit and seeds, cooked, cleaned, cared for the children, and made the clothing, while men hunted and protected their families. Men also taught their sons how to hunt and fish as a means to pass on a survival skill. Both sexes took part in storytelling, artwork and medicine, and traditional medicine. As the Northern Paiute entered

2652-671: Was formed approximately 32,000 years ago when lava flows formed the Malheur Gap , separating the watershed of the basin from the Malheur River , a tributary of the Snake River. Archaeological evidence indicates the basin was inhabited as early as 10,000 years ago. Pollen records indicate that the climate, especially the level of rain and snowfall, has varied greatly since the end of the Pleistocene . Evidence of prehistoric fishing techniques

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2704-427: Was well adapted to the harsh desert environment in which they lived. Each tribe or band occupied a specific territory, generally centered on a lake or wetland that supplied fish and waterfowl. Communal hunt drives, which often involved neighboring bands, would take rabbits and pronghorn from surrounding areas. Individuals and families appear to have moved freely among the bands. Northern Paiute originally lived

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