Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
It never was on Indian land, so was legally ambiguous to begin with. That's a tiny tiny rancheria. So Trump deliberately gave it too big a footprint (including parking), that it had to be on his own private property adjacent, and required the Chukchansi to lease the thing from him, at obviously little net profit to them. I knew something was fishy back when somebody was buying up all the land around it. But he's lost money on most of these gigs. Can't compete with the big Casinos like Table Mtn. I don't know how many Chukchansi are still left. But at least they're not a totally fictitious band like some. One of the very few potentially remaining ones I went to school with, and I'd sometimes run into him in the high country when he was leading pack trains for the Cunningham outfit. Little tiny guy on a huge horse. His cowboy hat was almost bigger than he was. I ran cross-country with him, along with a couple of guys now technically classified as part of the North Fork tribe, both of whom are doing well. One of them got his phD and has since opened a little day school up there to try to keep
the dialect alive, as well as get down in writing some of last of the native lore. Every little village up there had a slightly differing dialect, or radically different if
you compare Paiute-extracted Monache bands to either Central Valley Yokuts or the Miwok around Yosemite. The Monache were aggressive and virtually wiped
out some of the earlier foothills Yokuts. It's very difficult to say when they migrated over the top. I'm think it might have been given a boost back when the
southwest was hit by prolonged droughts in the 1200's or whatever. Hard to say what was happening in the Great Basin per se. But apart from Mono Lk, food was always a lot more abundant on the western slope of the Sierra, including tons of salmon, lots of acorns. Then sometime relatively late, probably in the 1700's, there seems to have been a huge population explosion among the Monache, only a century or so before anglo contact. The Spanish never messed with
them - they learned that lesson the hard way. There was a tiny Spanish outpost in the lower foothills. But I'll never publicly post its exact location.
Was that Spanish outpost connected with the Spanish gold mine?