Shoshones fight trespass notice

Friday, May 1, 1998 | 10:39 a.m.

Western Shoshone Chief Raymond Yowell and ranching sisters Carrie and Mary Dann are challenging the BLM's order that they remove 750 cattle and horses from federally managed lands in Crescent Valley, about 350 miles north of Las Vegas.

A hearing on their injunction request is scheduled before Magistrate Judge Roger Hunt. The Indians want BLM efforts to take their livestock halted until they can pursue further legal options to assert their ownership of about one-third of the land in Nevada.

Despite past federal and U.S. Supreme Court decisions against them, the Indian leaders assert the lands are theirs under the Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863. They contend Western Shoshone lands are a separate nation called Newe Sogobia: Land of the People of the Earth Mother.

"They treat us like animals and get away with it," Carrie Dann said. "You just don't take other peoples' land. That is the history of the United States against the Indian people."

Earlier this month, the BLM's Elko District office demanded the Danns and the Western Shoshone National Council pay $564,000 for past grazing violations. In February, the agency issued a notice of trespass that charged the Indians with grazing their livestock illegally on public lands.

"We could still negotiate with them," said Dave Stout, a BLM official in Elko. "We have not really had any recent meetings."

The trespass notice is a preliminary step before the government can confiscate and sell livestock that it thinks are trespassing on lands managed by the BLM.

In 1992, the BLM rounded up and sold 700 horses that belonged to the Danns.

Since the early 1970s, the sisters have engaged in legal battles against the federal government. They claim that the federal government, by its approval of the old treaty, recognized the Western Shoshone's right to more than one-third of Nevada.

The U.S. Indian Commission Commission in 1979 awarded the Western Shoshones $26 million for their claims to public lands under the Treaty of Ruby Valley. The Indians, however, never have accepted any money.

The Dann sisters live on a ranch homesteaded by their father, Dewey, in the 1920s. During his life, Dewey Dann followed federal grazing laws and paid grazing fees to the BLM.