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The first battle between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in what is today Nevada occurred in 1833 when a party of forty or fifty beaver trappers led by Joseph Walker killed more than twenty-five Paiute Indians near the Humboldt Sink.1 This battle, where the Humboldt River pools up and sinks into the desert, was known by contemporaries as "The Battle of the Lakes" and is significant in Nevada history as it commenced a pattern of violence between northern Nevada's indigenous peoples and Euro-American travelers and settlers that would erupt in the Pyramid Lake War in 1860 and in local skirmishes throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.
This first battle is described in what appears to be the first published work set in Nevada, a best-selling book, published in 1837 in both England and America, known today by the title The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. The author was none other than Washington Irving. Although Irving never visited Nevada, he appears to be the first published author to describe the area. (Beaver trappers Jedediah Smith and Peter Ogden both kept journals of their explorations in the West, including Nevada, but neither journal was discovered and published until the twentieth century.) Irving's book is based on the journal of Captain Benjamin Bonneville, who also had not stepped foot in Nevada. Although Bonneville dispatched Joseph Walker, who did cross Nevada, Bonneville himself spent the year in the Idaho area, not meeting up with Walker again until the following summer at Bear River. It is premonitory that Nevada's first chronicler never actually saw Nevada, nor did his informant. From the very beginning to the present day, Nevada's national image has been a figment of the imagination.
As we shall see, there are a half-dozen different primary accounts of the infamous Battle of the Lakes. While the basic story remains fairly consistent among the accounts, views conflict on what motivated the battle, what its meaning is, and how native peoples, trappers, and the region are represented. Furthermore, the twenty or more historians who have written about this battle show just as much disagreement among themselves as do the participants. Reading these accounts in one sitting is like witnessing a war, a print war over how the battle shall be construed....