¹ Gordon Brotherston, Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through Their Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 45, 103.

² The answer to this first question is not hard to find. The Humboldt range was named by John C. Freemont after another explorer, Alexander von Humboldt. This was the man about whom Emerson wrote, “Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar, like the Admirable Crichton, who appear from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties, – a universal man.” Quoted in Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), 105; that is, the great Prussian explorer and botanist, etc., after whom the second university in Berlin is named. (I owe discovery of the Emerson quote in de Botton to Dennis Walder.)

³ Named after Henry Comstock, an investor who was the first to realize that a particular quartz lode being worked by two speculators included a rich seam of gold. Ironically, Comstock sold his share in the claim early, realizing for himself only a small portion of the stupendous wealth in question.

⁴ The Pattern for Mark Twain's Roughing It: Letters from Nevada by Samuel and Orion Clemens, 1861–1862, collected and edited with an Introduction by Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), 39.

⁵ Rebecca Solnit confirms her own disappointment in Clemens's attitude to Native Americans in his Nevada writings, where he compares them with “James Fenimore Cooper's noble savages and finds them wanting”: “It never occured to Twain to wonder how the savages he described fared in the millennia before there were towns to beg in, and the literary loss was all his. Roughing It, his Nevada book, is a masterpiece of humor, but its scorn for the landscape and people of the region is depressing.” Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999; first published San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994), 165.

⁶ The Pattern for Mark Twain's Roughing It, 37–38.

⁷ Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, eds., Gender and Cultural Memory, special edition of Signs, 28, 1 (2002), 6.

⁸ Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, under the direction of Pierre Nora (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xxiv, from Nora's “Preface to the English-Language Edition.”

⁹ Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987), 36.

¹⁰ Marianne Hirsch, “Marked by Memory: Feminist Reflections on Trauma and Transmission,” in Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds., Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 71–91, 74.

¹¹ Sebald writes of memory and processes of association in The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1998), a memoir that takes as its starting point a journey by Sebald along the East Anglian coastline. Subsequently, in his “novel” Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2001), he marvels at the way the eponymous hero “put his ideas together … out of whatever ocurred to him, so to speak, and the way in which, in his mind, the passing on of his knowledge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of historical metaphysic, bringing remembered events back to life” (14). The quoted words seem a good account of Sebald's own approach to memory mapping, both in the work in question, as well as in The Rings of Saturn. Some such “historical metaphysic,” or what I call elsewhere a poetics of cultural history, can, I firmly believe, be set as a goal in every serious attempt at widescale memory mapping. Certainly I have tried to aim thus high in the present article.

¹² Above all in his trilogy of London walk books, Lights Out for the Territory (1998), London Orbital (2002) and Edge of the Orison (2005). Sinclair has recently edited a further collection by others as well as himself, London, City of Disappearances: Myths and Memories Retrieved (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006).

¹³ Kenneth Foote, Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (revised edn, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003; first published 1997).

¹⁴ Ibid., 336.

¹⁵ Ibid., 347.

¹⁶ Ibid., 322.

¹⁷ Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (London: Penguin, 1986; first published 1977), 191. It seems appropriate to remember at this moment that in the immediate aftermath of the attack in New York upon the World Trade Center's twin towers on 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush asked the pertinent question, “Why do they hate us so much?” Sadly, over the years since, at the level of government not only have attempts at an answer to the President's puzzled query been inadequate, but the very question has been allowed to disappear. Indeed, it was all too quickly crowded off the agenda of official responses, by a governing culture bristling with revenge and self-justification. The sheer “otherness” of the other became what had by all means to be suppressed, rather than understood. This is all differently but well put by Hélène Cixous, in an essay on the twin towers written little more than a month after the attack on the World Trade Center. Cixous switches the term to Twin Powers: “Enemy twins, American world politics and totalitarian Islamism are powers that mirror each other. What do the Twin Powers have in common? (1) The tremendous ignorance about the other side of the world. About the other culture. About the other human being. (2) The shoring up of the sociopolitical scene by the primacy of religion. The idea that ‘God’ is with one and against the other. (3) And thus the possibility of maintaining in one's Law capital punishment, symptom of the lack of the ability to identify with the other's suffering. N.B.: The United States, like a certain number of Arab-Islamic countries (and like China), has still not reached the age of human respect. Those who govern lack the vital hesitation called compassion. They do not know doubt.” From Hélène Cixous, “The Towers: Les Tours,” in Hirsch and Smith, Gender and Cultural Memory, 432.

¹⁸ See, for example, their separate essays in Miller and Tougaw, Extremities, and Hirsch's work in Hirsch and Smith.

¹⁹ Ross Chambers, “Orphaned Memories, Foster-Writing, Phantom Pain: The Fragments Affair,” in Miller and Tougaw, 92–111, 92–3, 95–6.

²⁰ Hirsch, ‘Marked by Memory,’ 75, 86.

²¹ Solnit, Savage Dreams, 24.

²² Hirsch and Smith, 5.

²³ Photo-offset reproduction of the Oakland California publishing firm of Thompson and West's 1881 History of Nevada: With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers, intro. David F. Myrick (Berkeley: Hywell-North, 1958), 444. This comes from Ch. XLVI, entitled “History of Humboldt County.”

²⁴ Ibid., 443–44.

²⁵ Ibid., 158.

²⁶ Ibid., 150.

²⁷ Ibid., 151.

²⁸ Ibid., 153.

²⁹ Ibid., 156–57.

³⁰ Solnit, 50.

³¹ Quoted in Ibid., 55–56.

³² Mark Twain, Works, Vol. 2, Roughing It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 184–85, 188; original emphasis.

³³ Keith Schneider, Foreword to Carole Gallagher, America Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1993), xv.

³⁴ Solnit, 56–57.

³⁵ Silko, 245–46.

³⁶ Solnit, 85.

³⁷ Ibid., 4–5, 57.

³⁸ Ibid., 7, 15.

³⁹ This latter “landscape war” over Yosemite fills out the latter half of Solnit's Savage Dreams, 215 ff. However, it is not immediately relevant to my rememoration of Nevada, so I shall not again refer to that portion of her overall argument.

⁴⁰ Solnit, 60, 68.

⁴¹ Ibid., 157. For a more specific account of the context and terms of the Treaty of Ruby Valley, and the way it was from the first reneged upon by the invader culture, see Ibid., 159–63.

⁴² Source for lyrics and warm-up lines to Tom Lehrer's “The Wild West is Where I Wanna Be”: http://www.sing365.com.

⁴³ The file numbers of the deportation proceedings were A-6419253 – San Antonio (1400 K-2079) and A-6652180 – San Antonio (1400-20521).

⁴⁴ Private family document.

⁴⁵ Private family document.

⁴⁶ Private family document.

⁴⁷ Private family document.

⁴⁸ As reported by Stephen Grey from Balad, Iraq, in “Good Bomb, Good Bomb!” New Statesman, 11 October 2004, 14.

⁴⁹ During an earlier and English phase of his career at University College London (as a member of J. B. S. Haldane's department) M. J. D. White had written one of the first books on chromosomes in the mid-1930s, later translated into a number of different languages.

⁵⁰ Noted in Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8. Draaisma's own reference point for the quote is D. E. Leary, ed., Metaphors in the History of Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 43.

⁵¹ See my earlier discussion of important issues raised by Foote.

⁵² Consider the more philosophical reaches of my deceased colleague Francis Barker's book The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

⁵³ “la scarsità degli elementi oggettivi ‘nazionali’ ai quali fare riferimento, per la inconsistenza e gelatinosità dell'organismo studiato,” Antonio Gramsci, Il Risorgimento (Torino: Einaudi, 1949), 55. America too, like Italy since the Risorgimento, is perpetually a nation under construction, as I hope is evident from my own approach to its conflictual histories in this piece.

⁵⁴ “Come si può parlare di ‘tradizioni, mentalità, problemi, soluzioni’ propri dell'Italia? … Le tradizioni, le mentalità, i problemi, le soluzioni erano molteplici, contradditorî, di natura spesso solo individuale e arbitraria e non erano allora mai visti unitariamente.” Gramsci, 54.