Nevada Indian passes away at age 112

Thursday, Feb. 29, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Mamie "Marie" Bill, who spent a century keeping Indian traditions alive and was said to be the oldest living Indian in the United States, has died in Elko. She was 112.

A lifelong Nevadan, Bill, a Whiteknife Shoshone-Paddy Cap Paiute, died at 11 p.m. Tuesday at the Ruby Mountain Manor convalescent center, her home since 1985. Although she never lived in the Las Vegas area, Bill was an inspiration to Indians throughout the state, and her deeds were legendary.

"As an elder who passed on wisdom and knowledge and perpetuated our culture -- which has long been our means of survival -- she was a tribute to Indian people everywhere," said Richard Arnold, longtime director of the Las Vegas Indian Center.

Bill was born three years before Karl Benz received the first patent for the automobile, 20 years before the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, N.C., and 86 years before astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

She was 7 years old when U.S. cavalry soldiers massacred Indians at Wounded Knee, and 41 when Indians were given the right to vote.

As a young, robust woman, standing about 5 feet 9, Bill delivered mail on horseback 60 miles between Elko and Tuscarora, and later worked on several ranches.

"Although she could not have children because of an illness in her youth, she was a strong matriarch to her nieces and nephews, great nieces and nephews, great-great nieces and nephews and great-great-great nieces and nephews," said Bill's great nephew, David Platerio, a consultant to tribes and governments.

"She was a remarkable woman."

Among the traditional ways of life that Bill worked to preserve were tanning deer hide, making beaded buckskin gloves, basket weaving, baking chokecherry pies, rug making and passing down oral histories through language, song and dance.

In addition to English, Bill spoke Shoshone and Paiute, despite being taken at age 11 by the government to the Stewart Indian School in Carson City (now a museum), where children routinely were forbidden to speak their native tongue.

"In her case, the process failed," Arnold said, noting that Stewart schoolchildren were forced to endure spirit-breaking Spartan existences. "She was able to survive that kind of treatment and go on to enjoy a productive life."

Bill was born Mamie Harney on Oct. 15, 1883, in a teepee at the Western Shoshone Reservation -- now the Duck Valley Reservation -- in Owyhee.

She was the second of 14 children born to Race and Genevieve Henry. Her father, a hunter and trapper, also lived beyond 100, as did one of her brothers. Her only surviving sibling, Earl Dean Harney of Owyhee, is 93.

Bill met her first husband, Jimmie James, a cowboy, at the Spanish Ranch north of Elko, where she also worked. After his death, she dated a man named Bobbie Bill for more than 30 years, marrying him at age 91. She was widowed again in her late 90s.

Throughout her life, Bill chose to remain in rural Northern Nevada, declining chances to move to more populated areas until she needed full-time nursing care well past her 100th birthday.

"There's too much noise in town -- it makes me nervous," she was quoted as saying in the January 1978 issue of the Ruralite Magazine distributed by Wells Rural Electric. "I like my home here (on the reservation). It's quiet and peaceful. I have a good life."

According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the life expectancy for an Indian woman at that time was about 75 years. Bill was 95 at the time of that interview and suffering just from arthritis. She lamented only that it prevented her from dancing.

Bill's secret to longevity, she said, was her diet, which included a high content of meat such as squirrel, rabbit and deer.

She also credited her long life to a good deal of praying and the practice of addressing stressful situations before they became too serious, Platerio said.

For relaxation, Bill regularly gambled in what Indians called "the squaw game," a poker-type card game generally played by the older women in the tribe.

In later years, her family received presidential proclamations proclaiming Bill the oldest Indian in the United States, said Platerio, a linguistics major at UNLV.

Crediting his great aunt with providing him inspiration in many of his endeavors, including world travel, Platerio is working to develop a computer program that will translate Indian languages into English.

Services are 2 p.m. Friday in Elko at the Burns Funeral Home. Burial will follow at Memorial Gardens.