In 1974, after more than twenty years of litigation, the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California received a settlement from the federal government in the form of $5 million as compensation for the incursion of white settlers into their ancestral homelands beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.  This decision represented a culmination of the torturous route followed by the Washoe people of the Sierra and Great Basin toward reorganization into a tribal entity and recognition of their traditional homelands.