Battle Born: Mining, Militarization, and Native Lands in the Nevada Desert, 1860–1990
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Sabin, Paul
Abstract
When Americans talk about federally owned “public” lands, they typically mean those managed by four agencies in the Agriculture Department and the Interior Department: the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Yet, much of the deserts of the interior U.S. West are overseen by a surprising fifth landlord: the Department of Defense (DOD). In a sense, DOD bombing ranges and weapons test sites are managed as permanent, productive wastelands. This most apparent in the “Battle-Born State” of Nevada, home to some of the largest installations in the country, including most famously the Nevada Test Site, administered jointly by the Department of Energy and DOD. How did such a geography come to be? This dissertation retells the history of the Nevada desert as a place in which “wastelanding” drove growth on the public domain through military occupation and the development of so-called “critical” infrastructure, first for extraction and later for national defense. It shows how the emptiness that settlers first saw when they arrived in the Great Basin elided the long history of Indigenous presence. Battle Born’s argument is chronologically twofold. First, in the process of going about trying to make the land produce for the settler empire, Americans rendered it empty in a social, ecological, and, to a certain extent, legal sense. Then, in the twentieth century, descendants of these early prospectors and pioneers (as well as hordes of new arrivals) capitalized on the emptiness their ancestors had produced. In the end, places like the Nevada Test Site came to exist, and many Americans considered it natural, even inevitable that deserts were well-suited as bombing ranges—an environmentally determined outcome for such a supposed wasteland. But as a result, Nevada also became a settler homeland, in which Americans lived and worked right next door. Indeed, by the 1950s, when the Nevada Test Site went operational, Nevada was the fastest growing state in the country. All along the way, violence against Indigenous people made it happen. Developing infrastructure for extraction or militarization always implied the dispossession of Shoshone, Paiute, and Washoe land. Battle Born traces this long arc from the Comstock Lode silver rush to the end of the Cold War.
Recommended Citation
Rose, Taylor Elliott, "Battle Born: Mining, Militarization, and Native Lands in the Nevada Desert, 1860–1990" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1268.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1268
