FEBRUARY, 1951 35 CENTS - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

One of the beautifully grained dark and light opalized wood specimens from the
Wilson Canyon field.
Fossil Wood in Nevada . . .
By HAROLD O. WEIGHT
Photographs by the Author
Map by Norton Allen
70WARD THE end of the last
century in quiet, green Mason
Valley at the base of the Singatse
Mountains in Nevada, the "Messiah"
lived. The "Messiah" was Wovoka
— a full-blooded Paiute also
known as Jack Wilson, since he had
been brought up by David Wilson, a
pioneer rancher of the valley.
Wovoka was a peace-loving man. He
preached a peaceful religion. But part
of that religion was the Ghost Dance,
which swept through the Indian tribes.
In their quest for new fields
for the rock collectors, Harold
and Lucile Weight went to
Yerington, Nevada, where the
mayor of the town guided them
into a rugged area along the
Walker River where many great
logs of petrified wood may s>till
be found bulging out of the
slopes.
and the creed he taught became distorted
as it traveled from mouth to
mouth among the Indians east of the
Rocky Mountains. His religion is said
to have been the spark which fired the
Sioux outbreak of 1890, bringing about
the massacre of Wounded Knee and
the killing of Sitting Bull.
Reportedly, Wovoka was the son of
an earlier Paiute prophet of Mason
Valley, who died when the boy was
14. Brought up by the Wilsons, he
apparently mixed their Christian religious
beliefs with his own. His life
followed normal lines until he reached
his early thirties. Then one day, according
to the story he told to James
Mooney of the Bureau of Ethnology,
the sun died—apparently an eclipse
—and Wovoka fell asleep in the daytime
and was taken up into the other
world. It was a pleasant place where
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