# The People Who Never Left

Source page: https://carsonriverresorts.com/story/the-people-who-never-left

The Story

This valley is Wá∙šiw country — before the county, the mines, and the resort, and still today. The Washoe are not a chapter of local history. They are the neighbors, eight miles up the road at Woodfords.

The Washoe — Wá∙šiw, "the people from here" — are the original people of
Lake Tahoe and of all of what is now Alpine County. Their name for Tahoe,
dáʔaw, is where the word "Tahoe" comes from. The tribe holds that it has
lived here for ten thousand to fifteen thousand years; in one telling, the
Washoe were placed at dáʔaw at creation by géwe, Coyote.

Archaeology counts its own way — in radiocarbon dates, in obsidian carried
over these passes from before 2000 BCE, and in the Washo language itself,
an isolate related to no other, which linguists read as evidence of deep,
unbroken residence. The two accounts are different kinds of knowledge, and
this site does not rank them. They agree about how long people have been
here.

The old pattern of life moved with the seasons — summers at Tahoe and the
high meadows, winters in the sheltered valleys, and every fall the piñon
harvest in the Pine Nut ranges east of here, a staple food and a ceremony at
once. Ancestral Washoe territory ran to about 1.5 million acres. Three
regional bands made up the Washoe world — the Welmelti in the north, the
Pauwalu of Carson Valley, and the Hung-a-lel-ti in the south — and the
southern band belonged to this country: the Carson's forks, Diamond
Valley, the meadows under the passes.

Washoe basketry is known worldwide. Dat So La Lee — Louisa Keyser, a
southern Washoe weaver born around 1829 — perfected the degikup form and
left roughly 120 documented masterworks by her death in 1925, held today
in collections including the Smithsonian and the Nevada State Museum.

The federally recognized Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California includes the
Hung-A-Lel-Ti Community at Woodfords, about eight miles north of the resort
— some 400 residents with an elected council. The tribe's environmental
staff works actively in this watershed: it was a Washoe Tribe petition,
filed in 1997, that pushed the poisoned Leviathan Mine onto the federal
Superfund list in 2000.

In 2021, a ridge in this county formerly carrying a slur was renamed
Hungalelti Ridge. In 2025 the tribe reclaimed about 10,000 acres near Tahoe
— the largest return of land in the region's history. The recent record
holds losses too: the 2021 Tamarack Fire burned piñon groves that Washoe
families had gathered for generations.

Heritage sites exist throughout the East Carson corridor — the Forest
Service documents active heritage work here. Following the practice
federal law directs for sacred and archaeological places, this site never
names, maps, or gives directions to any of them.

**A standing invitation.** This page was written from tribal and
tribally-reviewed sources, and the resort intends to get it right. The
Washoe Tribe — and any Washoe reader — is invited to review this page and
correct it, and the resort is opening contact with the tribe's Cultural
Resources Office. The tribe's own telling is at washeshu.org, and it should
be read first.

People have camped at this bend of the river for thousands of years. The
cabins sit beside the same water.

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Carson River Resort · 12399 Highway 89, Markleeville, CA 96120 · (530) 694-2229 · store open 8am to 6pm, every day.
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