About the Name.

I named the firm after Chief Truckee — a Northern Paiute leader who, in 1844, helped a stalled wagon train find a way over the Sierra Nevada.

The party was the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy expedition, eleven wagons and around fifty people. They'd been pushing west all summer and were stuck near the Humboldt Sink with winter coming on. No emigrant party had ever brought wagons all the way across the Sierra. They didn't know whether they could be the first.

Truckee rode out to meet them. He dropped his rabbit-skin robe so they'd know he was unarmed, drew them maps in the sand, and told them about a river that flowed east out of the mountains. Follow the river, he said, and there's a pass.

The settlers couldn't understand most of what he was saying, but he kept repeating one Paiute word — tro-kay. It means something close to "it is all right." They thought he was telling them his name, and called him Chief Truckee from then on. He kept the name for the rest of his life.

The river they followed is now the Truckee. The pass they crossed that November, working five wagons through two feet of snow, was the first wagon route across the Sierra. Later it would be called Donner Pass, after the more famous party that didn't make it. The route became, in time, the Lincoln Highway, then U.S. 40, then Interstate 80.

His Paiute name was something closer to Tru-ki-zo. He was the father of Chief Winnemucca and the grandfather of Sarah Winnemucca, who in 1883 wrote Life Among the Piutes, the first book published in English by a Native American woman. He guided Frémont's expedition through the Great Basin, fought alongside U.S. forces in the Mexican-American War, and was given the rank of captain, which he proudly used for the last decade of his life. There is no record of him ever leading a war party against settlers, even as others in his community urged him to. He died near Pyramid Lake in the fall of 1860.

What happened after his death is the part of the story I think about more than the rest.

Within months, the Paiute War broke out. Within five years, U.S. cavalry killed twenty-nine members of his son's band, including Sarah's mother. The route Truckee had shown the settlers became the route by which his people were displaced from their land. The welcome he extended did not come back to his descendants the way he had believed it would. His granddaughter spent the rest of her life — over four hundred speeches in this country and in Europe — trying to undo what came after. There is a statue of her in the U.S. Capitol now, one of two Nevadans honored there.

Why we carry his name

Not as costume, and not as claim. Truckee was a guide who knew the country, read the terrain, and could point at the pass when the season was short and the next move mattered. He paid a price his descendants are still carrying for the welcome he extended.

We are a guide service. He was the original. We carry his name with that understood.

In our own much smaller and very different work, what we hope to honor is what he was good at — clear sight, calm under pressure, a useful answer when the route ahead is unclear.

If you want to know more, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes is in the public domain. It is the truer history of this place than anything we could write here.