Miracle Country: A Memoir by Kendra Atleework

Author:Kendra Atleework
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Those were the last days of a tenuous peace. A few weeks later, on a February night, a band of Paiutes, led by a chief who did not attend that gathering, allegedly danced around Bishop’s cabins. Inside, Samuel Bishop, his wife, and the ranchers must have watched through narrow windows. The Paiutes, the whites reported, waved pitch-pine torches and declared they could spit bullets from their bodies—that they could not die.

The Paiutes perhaps called on other tribes for help defending the valley, and perhaps men came from Mono Lake, from Southern California and the western foothills. By spring an army lieutenant who’d been sent to scout the valley reported between eight hundred and one thousand warriors in possession of “one hundred or more good guns.” I have heard from a descendant of those warriors that the Paiutes had four guns. I have heard they dug up waterlines and melted the lead into bullets, then bought more bullets from an Aurora merchant who refused to supply the ranchers, claiming that all the whites in Payahuunadu deserved to die.

An Indian agent wrote of the Paiutes: “They will fight to the last extremity in the defense of their homes.” The First People’s impulse was to protect the valley as they knew it, to protect the ways they knew of living here. Early in the spring of 1862, claiming harassment, forty-two white men and a few women and children barricaded themselves inside a stone house called Putnam’s Fort. The men fortified the walls with rocks and pieces of broken wagons. With rifles, shotguns, and revolvers, they kept a constant watch.

A rancher wrote in a letter that he and the others were menaced constantly. The colonel who eventually received the letter had heard of an isolated valley, where ranchers set their stock to graze irrigated fields. “It is very possible, therefore, that the whites are to blame,” the colonel wrote to a colleague, “and it is also probable that in strict justice they should be compelled to move away and leave the valley to its rightful owners.” Still, he sent a scouting party, which, according to white accounts, found chaos and unburied bodies. When the scouts released the people from Putnam’s Fort, some say the settlers fell in gratitude to their knees.

On the Fourth of July 1862, 157 soldiers rode into Owens Valley in the belted jackets and blue canvas pants issued to the Second Cavalry California Volunteers. The men erected a fifty-foot flagpole on a bare lot to serve as a parade grounds, gave three cheers, and fired small-arm salutes. They called the place Camp Independence.

Not long before, the riders passed Owens Lake. A man stood near the water, and as he looked after the cavalry, a soldier raised his revolver. The man fell on the lakeshore, the first Paiute the California Volunteers encountered in Payahuunadu.

As a child, Anthony used to sit on Pop’s lap and put his head under Pop’s big T-shirt, put his face through the neckhole, and bare his teeth while Pop curled his fingers into claws, and in this way they became a two-headed monster.

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