Dat-So-La-Lee

Louisa Keyser, known as Dat-So-La-Lee, was the most celebrated Washoe basket weaver who ever lived. Born in the Carson Valley before the settlers came, she perfected the degikup—a tightly coiled basket swelling from a small base to a wide shoulder, its surface covered in design—and elevated Washoe weaving into fine art. From 1895 the Carson City merchant Abe Cohn and his wife housed and promoted her, selling her baskets for thousands of dollars; the arrangement made her famous and also shaped, and sometimes obscured, her story. Her work is now held by the Smithsonian and the Nevada State Museum.

What the plaque says

“Myriads of Stars shine over the graves of our ancestors.” Dat-So-La-Lee had seen some 96 winters, mostly in Carson Valley, when death came in 1925. She was the last of those Washoe weavers whose ancient art had been practiced by countless generations. Gathering willow, fern and birch with the aid of her husband, she wove into her masterpieces the legends of her people and their love of nature. Her baskets are unsurpassed for artistic conception and symbolic importance. She is buried in the adjoining cemetery, yet her memories and her visions are so woven into her baskets that she will live on to remind us of the history and unique tribal artistry of her people. State Historical Marker No. 77 Nevada State Park System Reno Chapter, Daughters of the American Colonists And In Recognition of the Valuable Assistance of the Washoe Indians.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stewart Indian School — steps away
  The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices
• Carson City — 3.2 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 8.8 mi
  The other thing the Comstock took off Lake Tahoe—not its trees but its water, hauled over a mountain range through the highest-pressure pipeline on earth, on a flume grade that is now one of the country's great mountain-bike rides
• Genoa — 9.2 mi
  Nevada's oldest town—a California Trail trading post and Carson Valley ranch country that came eight years before the silver and quietly outlasted it

More markers nearby

• Stewart Indian School — steps away
• Eagle Valley — 0.8 mi
• Historic Flume and Lumberyard — 2.4 mi
• Gardner’s Ranch — 2.5 mi