Duck Valley Indian Reservation

This reservation sits on Western Shoshone homeland, straddling the Nevada-Idaho line. President Rutherford Hayes established Duck Valley by executive order in 1877 for the Western Shoshone, whose people had lived and hunted across this high sagebrush country for generations; Northern Paiute families later joined them. The reservation took shape as the open land the Shoshone had always used was closing around them, and it remains their home and governing ground today. The Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation govern their own affairs across the Owyhee River valley, a continuing Native presence in far northern Elko County.

What the plaque says

The Shoshone and Paiute people have occupied northern Nevada, southeastern Oregon, and southern Idaho since time immemorial. We lived peacefully until the mid 1800s when our way of life was changed forever after European emigrants invaded our homeland. The Duck Valley Indian Reservation is within the reservation outlined under the Bruneau Valley Treaty of 1866. On April, 16 1877, President, Rutherford B. Hayes signed an Executive Order establishing the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, seven years after Captain Sam’s (Western Shoshone) first request for this valley. On May 4 1886, President Cleveland issued an Executive Order expanding the Duck Valley Reservation on the Idaho side, sometimes referred to as the “Paddy Cap Extension.” In 1910, President Taft issued another Executive Order for another extension to the Duck Valley Reservation in order to protect reservoir sites. Between 1880 and the early 1900s, other small bands of Paiutes and Shoshones drifted into Duck Valley, or were forcibly relocated there by the United States. Some of Chief Leggins’ band were moved to Duck Valley from their territories in Paradise Valley. The different bands that came to Duck Valley from other areas became federally recognized in 1934 as the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. The membership of the newly recognized tribes officially accepted the proposal in a popular referendum vote on April 22, 1936. The Duck Valley Indian Reservation straddles the border of Idaho and Nevada and consists of a total of 289,820 acres, with 12,800 acres under an irrigation project, 268,816 acres designated as grazing acreage, and 8,204 acres for water storage, commercial, and residential areas.

Where it stands