Tuesday, May 26, 1998 | 9:59 a.m.
MOAPA VALLEY -- Common knowledge about the desert fan palm trees growing in Warm Springs says they are migrants, brought by Mormon settlers a century ago. But an amateur palm grower believes the palms are natives.
Most botanists and residents of the Moapa Valley, about 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas, tell of Mormon pioneers bringing palm trees to the valley from Arizona around the turn of the century. Further proof is found in Mormon diaries and journals.
When Will Spencer lived in the Moapa Valley for a couple of years in the 1980s, he heard the stories and developed a passion for the palm trees, known as Washingtonia filifera.
The late Chic Perkins, curator of the Lost City Museum in Overton, believed that the palm trees were brought to the valley recently. Spencer befriended him and began to learn about the history of the area, including how the Paiute Indians came to the valley at least 1,000 years ago.
Spencer, a graphics illustrator who moved to Stockton, Calif., began serious research into the desert fan palms about three years ago, after a fire swept through Warm Springs, charring the towering trees.
Besides reading the scientific literature, Spencer talked to Moapa Paiute members such as Evelyn Samalar, 77, who was born and raised in the Moapa Valley.
Samalar's grandfather was a Paiute medicine man and visited the shot prings, she said, drawing the warm water for purifying himself.
"We used to have to act a certain way when we went to the Warm Springs, because this was a very sacred place," Samalar said.
Spencer learned that pits carved into the stone of the nearby mountains allowed Paiutes to grind palm seeds into a kind of gravy with which they supplemented their diets of mesquite beans and vegetables grown there.
Instead of immigrants to the valley, riding in the saddle bags of settlers, the palm trees have been living along the hot waters flowing from deep within the earth along earthquake faults, Spencer's theory goes.
Spencer is trying to save the palm trees as well as the Moapa Paiute's history. "I'm more concerned now that a Moapa tribal history is dying," he said on a recent visit to the palm groves.
"We're letting their history slip away while we excavate earlier ruins," Spencer said. "We can't forget the ones that are still living."
Helen Mortenson, a longtime member of the Archaeo-Nevada Society, couldn't agree more with Spencer.
"Archaeo-Nevada is supporting the cultural renaissance of the Moapa Valley people," Mortenson said. Rather than telling the story through settlers' eyes, the society plans to help the Indians record their tales in their own words.
"Who knows how deep and far that language goes back?" Mortenson asked.
Paiute concerns are new to many researchers who have spent time preserving and managing rare fish and plants in the desert springs.
About 16 acres of Warm Springs has been exchanged by Del Webb Corp. for lands to develop in the Las Vegas Valley. The old Plummer ranch cradles some of the thousands of trees that drink from the hot springs there.
"We're an island of wet in a sea of dry," explained Bruce Lund, who lives at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and helps to save rare and endangered species like the Moapa Valley dace, a warm-water fish. Lund works for The Nature Conservancy.
"I would say the palms here were brought in by the Indians or the settlers," he said. "That's what botanists would say."
There's no good way to date a palm tree, Lund said. The trees don't grow rings and they can grow rapidly in ideal conditions, or survive in times of drought or cold weather.
However, Lund did not close the door that memories of Paiute elders are wrong. "You can find people who will tell you both stories," he said.
Teri Knight, a botanist for The Nature Conservancy, agreed with Lund.
"I wouldn't say they're wrong," she said of Spencer's idea that the trees have been there for thousands of years. "I'm saying I'm not sure."
Palms don't grow rings like cottonwoods or pines because they are an ancient plant that moved north from Mexico, she said. "I've read his work," Knight said of Spencer's work on the Warm Springs palms. "It's an interesting view and one that we need to pay attention to."
Spencer and the Archaeo-Nevada Society plan to tell both sides of the story, to save the palms and to save a culture that has lived in the valley for at least 1,000 years.
archive
