Ely Shoshone Tribe

A nation today

Limestone and marble formations inside Lehman Caves at Great Basin National Park, Nevada.
Famartin, Wikimedia Commons (2015-01-14) · CC BY-SA 4.0

Background

The current land base is 3,629 acres spread across six parcels, on a reservation created in 1934 under the Indian Reorganization Act. Total membership is 763, of whom 319 live in the service area of White Pine County. It accounts for the land in three steps. In 1931 the federal government bought ten acres near Ely for tribal use, the ground now known as Pine Street, where small homes went up in the early 1930s, some families lived in tents, babies were born there, and the whole development shared one well and a water trip to Murray Springs about a mile away. A rock building from the 1930s is still standing. It served as the community bath and wash house. In 1973 the Tribe took a 55-year lease on eleven acres from White Pine County for home sites, a mutual-help project where the homeowner helped build the house, bought the land outright in 1992, and now holds seventeen homes there at capacity. In 1977 Public Law 95-191 conveyed a further 90 acres, 30 of them on the east side of Highway 6 facing the commercial strip, where the Tribe has 74 homes at full occupancy with a waiting list and a community play area. Self-governance came in stages: first negotiated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1992 and stated in 1993, then taken up with Indian Health Service in 1993, with self-governance under those in 1994. A 1998 Brownfields grant paid for the cleanup of the old Ely city landfill, unregulated from the early 1900s until the late 1950s. The cleanup finished in October 2003, and the ground is not developable.

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Visit and learn

Ely Shoshone Tribe's own site

Tribal lands have their own laws. Check the nation's site before you visit.

Parks on its homelands

Limestone and marble formations inside Lehman Caves at Great Basin National Park, Nevada.Great Basin National Park

The Ely Shoshone Tribe is one of the nine bands the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863 created out of the Western Shoshone Nation. The Tribe's own history places Newe villages at Duck Creek, McGill, Warm Springs, Schellbourne, Egan Canyon and Cherry Creek in Steptoe Valley, with Ely the largest of them. Source

Programs

  • Ely Shoshone departments

    The Tribe's department list is also its address book. The Law Enforcement Department and the Judicial Center share 101 Heritage Drive, the Housing Office is at 201 Heritage Drive, the Newe Medical Clinic at 400 Newe View Drive, and the Education Building at 250 Heritage Drive. The Administration Office at 505 South Pioche Highway, Building 1, also holds Finance, the Health Department and Human Resources, while the Environmental Department is in Building 3 and Maintenance in Building 5 on the same road.

    https://www.elyshoshonetribe.com/departments·other

Sources

Checked September 2026.

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