GREAT BASIN

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

• Nevada and parts of Utah, Oregon, Idaho and California
• Wasatch Mountains to the east
• Sierra Nevada to the west
• Snake River Plain to the north.

CONTINUED

• Colorado Plateuo
• Rocky Mountains
• 200,000 square mile area that drains internally

SMALL BASINS

• Great Salt Lake
• Pyramid Lake
• Humboldt Sink

EARLY NATIVES

• 9,000 to 4,000 years ago
• hunting and gathering economy
• Great Salt Lake in Utah, people made extensive use of dry cave sites

MIDDLE NATIVES

• 4,000 to 1,500 years ago
• people tended towards increasingly diverse exploitation of food resources
• Mountain sheep hunting
• medium-game hunting and seed collecting

LATE NATIVES

• 1,500 years ago
• overwhelmed by American settlers in the late 1800s.
• New Culture/ Technology

PRE COLUMBIAN LIFESTYLE

• Two tribes are known as the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe and the Paiute Tribe
• They are descendants of the Archaic Desert traditions
• They make their own goods
• They also make their weapons

POST COLUMBIAN LIFESTYLE

• first European contact with Great Basin groups was in the Southwest in the early 1600s,
• Europeans first entered the Great Basin in the late 1700s
• During the early1800s other parts of the Great Basin were explored by Europeans
• After 1840 immigrants increasingly passed through the Great Basin + some stayed
• The Mormons migrated to Utah in the 1840s

CONTINUED

• 1860s American ranchers had taken over most of the valleys
• Between 1846 and 1906 39 formal treaties/ agreements were signed with Great Basin groups
• By the late 1800s, the government had established some 20 reservations
• the native peoples either left the reservations or remained on them and starved to death.

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