In 1917 State Senator Wm. F. Dressler gave this 40 acre tract to Washo Indians who had been living on ranches in Carson Valley, and after a school opened in 1924 it became a nucleus of settlement. Before the intrusion of Caucasians in 1848, Washos spent winters in the Pinenut Hills, where they stored pinenuts harvested in autumn. In summer they lived in the Lake Tahoe Basin, fishing the tributary streams and gathering roots and berries, and in fall they hunted jack rabbits and gathered seeds in Carson Valley. Their only form of organization was kinship. These stone age people lived in daily communion with giants, monsters, animals whose characteristics were interchangeable with those of people, and with water babies, "having the bodies of old men and the long hair of girls," who lived in the lakes of the High Sierra.