Dat-So-La-Lee

Famed Washoe basket maker, Datsolalee, is buried in this cemetery along with many other Washoe weavers.  Also known as Louisa Keyser.  Dat So La Lee, and Dabuda, over 120 of her major documented baskets were made expressly for sale to Arts and Crafts collectors from 1895 until her death in 1925 under patronage of the Cohn family.  Datsolalee’s baskets are prized by collectors and displayed in museums across the country.

Utilitarian, straight-walled, decorated coiled willow basketry is a Washoe tradition extending back thousands of years.  Datsolalee brought international fame to the spherical Washoe degikup willow basket and highlighted the form with innovative decorative motifs in bracken fern and redbud Fibers.  She and her patrons promoted this craft to the public, elevated it to an art form, and, most importantly, motivated basketry production by other tribal members during a period when the Washoe were recovering from mid-nineteenth- century loss of their homelands and aboriginal life ways.

STATE HISTORICAL MARKER NO. 77

STATE HISTORIC PRESERVATION OFFICE

RENO CHAPTER, DAUGHTER OF THE AMERICAN COLONISTS

AND

IN RECOGNITION OF THE INVALUABLE ASSISTANCE OF THE WASHOE INDIANS