Dresslerville

This is among the youngest stories on these markers, and one of the more telling. The Washoe had lived in the Carson Valley and at Lake Tahoe since long before any settler arrived, but by the early twentieth century they held no land of their own. In 1917 State Senator William Dressler deeded forty acres south of Gardnerville to be held in trust for them, and the Washoe families who settled it built their homes on rocky, poor ground. The Dresslerville Community endures as one of the four governing communities of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California.

What the plaque says

In 1917 State Senator Wm. F. Dressler gave this 40 acre tract to Washo Indians, then living on ranches in Carson Valley. After a school was opened in 1924, it became a nucleus of settlement. Before the intrusion of Caucasians in 1848, Washos living in winter in the Pinenut Hills where they stored autumn harvested pinenuts. In summer, they lived in the Lake Tahoe Basin fishing the tributary streams and gathering roots and berries. In fall, they hunted jack rabbits and gathered seeds in Carson Valley. Their only form of organization was that of kinship. These stone age people lived in daily communion with giants, monsters, animals whose characteristics were interchangeable with those of people, and with water babies, "having the bodies of old men and the long hair of girls", who lived in the lakes of the High Sierra. State Historic Marker No. 131 Nevada State Park System Carson Valley Historic Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 10 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
• Stewart Indian School — 15 mi
  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
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 16 mi
  One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 18 mi
  Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back

More markers nearby

• Twelve Mile House — steps away
• Gardnerville — 3.4 mi
• Minden — 4.4 mi
• Luther Canyon (Fay Canyon) — 6.0 mi