Moo adza kappu, meaning long, long ago before the white man came and crossed their lands, Indians of the Great Basin or western ranges made the most of its varied terrain. Being the driest domain in North America, as the name implies, the basin forms a vast sink enclosed within higher ground and it has no outlet to the sea. Its few rivers and streams empty into the lakes and marshes. That, along with the region’s wooded mountaintops, has done much to sustain life in an otherwise inhospitable environment. 

The Basin dwellers ultimately had to adapt to severely arid conditions. They did so by remaining highly mobile, trekking up and down the ridges and back and forth across the lowlands from marshes to fields of wild grain and other seasonal foraging stops. They hunted antelope and mountain goats but were less likely to feast on large animals than on jackrabbits, field mice and insects. Grasshoppers were a delicacy.

Survival for the Indians depended on dispersing into small groups, often single families called clans. Every five square miles of the hospitable parts of the Basin was able to support a family.

The early Basin dwellers were not without assets or devices, for ancient artifacts have been found in our areas around Fallon and in the Lovelock Cave.

The local people ate roots, and seeds of the tule and used the plant fibers to fashion ropes, shoes, garments, baskets and duck decoys. They also left behind bows and arrows, bones of fish, and large stones that were too heavy to carry. Homes were made of tules, sagebrush, a plant named greasewood, and common willow.

Most all of the Indians spoke a language all their own but the Paiutes and Shoshones had a similar language. For example:

One Great Basin Indian group spoke a completely different tongue. They are the Washoe Indians from the Lake Tahoe area, who belonged to the same Hokan language family as the Pomo and other coastal groups.

After the arrival of horses, however, distinctions between Shoshones and other groups grew sharper. The Shoshones were sometimes called "Diggers" after the pointed sticks they used to dig wild edible roots from the earth, a technique shared by many peoples of the western ranges. The Indian tribes were, in fact, highly resourceful, both in their careful exploitations of wild growth for eating and remedies used in their healing ceremonies for the sick.

They used ingenious hunting methods like the grasshopper drive, which forced insects spread over several acres into one small pit to be crushed and dried for future consumption.

The annual pursuit of sustenance began during "hungry days" of early spring. In the Great Basin the seeds, dried fish and meat that had been stored away were often used up long before spring. Pine nuts were one of the main sources of sustenance for all of the tribes. Spring brought the gathering of wild lettuce and cattail roots, the gathering of duck eggs, migrating fowl and spawning fish.

The hunters pursued waterfowl in a way unique to that season. When the young birds, too immature to fly, and the adults were temporarily grounded because they were molting, the Indians made rafts from bunches of tule and herded the flightless waterfowl ashore. Women cleaned the birds as quickly as the men gathered them in. Feathers were used for pillows, cushions and decorations.