Indians of Lassen Volcanic National Park and Vicinity

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Title: Indians of Lassen Volcanic National Park and Vicinity
Author: Schulz, Paul E.
Language: English
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NATIONAL PARK AND VICINITY ***

INDIANS
OF
LASSEN VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARK AND VICINITY

by
Paul E. Schulz

Published by the

Loomis Museum Association
Lassen Volcanic National Park
Mineral, California

Printed in the United States of America
Susanville _Lassen Litho_ California

_PREFACE_

It is with some temerity that the author, a geologist by training and an
interpretive naturalist by occupation, undertakes to compile this
booklet on Indians who once inhabited the vicinity of Lassen Peak.

The main mission of a naturalist, as he functions in the National Park
Service, is to act as an interpreter of technical information gathered
together by research scientists. It is his obligation as well as his
privilege to make these data of history and natural history available
for visitors to units administered by the National Park Service of the
United States Department of the Interior. The Park Naturalist is
challenged to create in visitors an eager interest by presenting
information in an appealing manner so that the great stories of the
respective areas may be learned easily and pleasantly. In doing this,
visitors gain fuller understanding and hence better appreciation of the
significance of these areas. This leads to greater enjoyment of the
scenic masterpieces, the scientific natural wonders, and the historic
shrines of areas of the National Park System. Not only is the visitor’s
enjoyment enhanced by his active reception of the interpretive
facilities and services offered him by the Federal Government, but his
pride is stimulated in these areas which have been set aside for his own
use as well as for the benefit of future generations. A citizen’s pride
in his park areas in turn develops a love of country. It also promotes a
sense of responsibility which helps the National Park Service fight
vandalism, fire carelessness, and litter carelessness to the ultimate
benefit of all concerned.

Little on the pages which follow may be classed as original material for
it is in the role of interpreter that the undersigned has assembled
information gleaned by qualified students.

The term “Amerind” instead of the traditional word “Indian” was
seriously considered for use in this book but finally rejected. Ever
since Christopher Columbus’ historic mistake the word Indian has had a
confusing two-fold meaning. Columbus, of course, thought that he had
been successful in reaching India when his little fleet touched the
shores of the New World. Hence he applied the word Indian to the people
he found there, supposing them to be natives of India. The term Amerind
is a coined contraction of the words: American Indian. The use of
Amerind has been advocated by some authors to do away with confusion,
and it does seem to be an excellent name, but it has not enjoyed wide
usage by the American public.

I am deeply indebted to the following named persons whose research and
learned writings have provided the bulk of the information contained in
the present publication. The bibliography carries the titles of the
specific references used.

Dr. Roland B. Dixon
Mr. Thomas R. Garth
Dr. E. W. Gifford
Dr. Robert F. Heizer
Dr. Stanislaw Klimek
Dr. A. L. Kroeber
Dr. Saxton T. Pope
Dr. Carl O. Sauer
Dr. Edward Sapir
Dr. Leslie Spier
Miss Erminie W. Voegelin
Dr. T. T. Waterman

Properly, specific credit should be given in the text for each fact and
quotation taken from the works of others, but the result would in this
case have been unwieldy and of no practical benefit to the readers whom
this book is intended to reach. It is hoped that professional
ethnologists into whose hands this volume may fall will forgive this
unorthodox usage of the research results of serious students.

Mrs. Selina La Marr (Boonookoo-ee-menorra) was a valuable and gracious
informant. Thanks are due again to Dr. E. W. Gifford, Director of the
Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, for many
courtesies, including donation of a copy of Dixon’s rare “Yana Indians”
and also for his constructive perusal of the manuscript. Others who
assisted the author were Mrs. Grace Schulz, Miss Lois Bell of the
University of California “University Explorer” radio program, and Mr.
Louis Caywood, National Park Service archeologist. Dr. J. H. Woolsey,
M.D., earned gratitude of the author by donation of his personal copy of
Pope’s “Medical History of Ishi”. Miss Lilian Nisbet of the Tehama
County Library was helpful in the securing of other reference materials.

Most Californians are vitally interested in the Indians of this state,
yet few are aware of the excellent California State Indian Museum
operated by the Division of Beaches and Parks. The Indian Museum is open
to the public daily, free of charge, in a separate building on the
grounds of Sutter’s Fort State Historical Monument in Sacramento. The
author highly commends this museum to you. It contains a wealth of
authentic materials which have been organized into handsome and exciting
story-telling exhibits of first quality by Curator Jack Dyson.

Paul E. Schulz
Park Naturalist
Lassen Volcanic National Park
Fall 1954

_CONTENTS_

Preface I
Contents III
Prehistoric Man Comes to North America 1
Early Cultures in North America 4
The California Indians 8
Indian Tribes of the Lassen Area 16
Indian-Pioneer Conflict; the Ishi Story 20
Hunting 38
Fishing 43
Gathering and Preparation of Other Foods 48
Houses and Furnishings 60
Household Implements, Tools, and Weapons 66
Basketry and Textiles 80
Tanning, Cordage, and Glue 96
Transportation 99
Domestic Animals and Pets 103
Clothing 105
Beauty and Personal Grooming 111
Wealth 117
Ceremonial Dress 119
Tobacco and Smoking 120
Music and Arts 122
Games and Social Gatherings 126
Dances 129
Political Organization of Tribes 131
War and Peace 133
Birth and Babies 136
Adulthood Rites 141
Marriage and Divorce 143
Death and Burial 145
Counting, Time, and Place 149
Concepts of Sun, Moon, and Stars 151
Weather Phenomena 153
Earthquake Beliefs 155
Creation Beliefs and Other Legends 157
Medical Treatment 162
Spirits and Ghosts 164
Shamanism and Doctoring 166
Miscellaneous Magic 173
Bibliography 175

[Illustration: Association logo]

Chapter I
PREHISTORIC MAN COMES TO NORTH AMERICA

Archeological studies of human remains from all over the world have
shown beyond serious question that man originated in the Eastern
Hemisphere about a million years ago. Meager remnants of prehistoric
skeletons of man and his tools, hearths, and debris heaps have been
found in deposits of late Cenozoic time, Chapter Five of earth’s
history. This late Cenozoic period starting about a million years ago is
called the Pleistocene or Ice Age. These discoveries show the orderly
processes of survival of the fittest and of evolution developing
successive generations of man with refined physical and mental
qualities, ultimately producing modern man.

During the Ice Age there were four separate times during which ice
formation on all continents of the earth increased tremendously. Just
what caused changes in climate to make this possible is not definitely
known. Slight changes in amount of carbon dioxide in the air, which
could have been affected by the amount of volcanic activity or by major
changes in the amount of plant life in existence, may have affected the
climate. Slight variations in the orbit of the earth in its course
around the sun may also have had their influence. Even today it would
require a drop of only a few degrees in the average annual temperature
of the earth’s climate to produce a large increase in ice formation. All
that is required is that a little more snow falls each winter than will
melt in the summer. Thus, each year the excess would gradually build up
glaciers and continental ice sheets, producing another “ice stage” in a
few thousands of years.

The area of ice in the world today is relatively small: under 6 million
square miles, about the same as that existing during each of the four
interglacial (warm climate) stages of the Pleistocene. During the four
glacial stages of the Ice Age, continental ice sheets increased their
areas by three or four times, also becoming larger in size in each
successive cold cycle. The latest and most extensive of these glacial
times, the Wisconsin Stage, actually saw two ice advances with a brief
recession separating them about 60,000 years ago.

During each glacial stage tremendous amounts of water were removed from
the oceans and deposited on the continents as ice fields. This involved
amounts of as much as 20 million cubic miles of water, causing
world-wide lowering of sea level of about 150 or 200 feet. Today the sea
between Alaska and Siberia is very shallow. It is not difficult to
realize that lowered sea level during the glacial stages of the ice age
drained the water from this and other shallow sea floors exposing these
as land links or “land bridges” which extended between continents and
islands. This state of affairs made possible the overland migration of
man to the Western Hemisphere.

In his illuminating paper “Early Relations of Man to Plants” Sauer has
pointed out that early man’s migrations to the New World were not the
result of mere aimless wanderings. Peking Man of the first interglacial
stage about 900,000 years ago in Asia used fire in established hearths.
He ate both cooked meats and vegetables. This evidence indicates at
least a semi-sedentary family life. Since he had learned to make himself
more comfortable generally by remaining in one favorable place, it
follows logically that even primitive Peking Man migrated only when he
could improve his lot by doing so. He moved on only when he was forced
to do so by a failing food supply or because of crowded conditions
caused by increasing numbers of his fellow men. It is believed that not
only Peking Man, but his descendants were as sedentary as their food
supply allowed them to be. Dr. Sauer observes that

“... the history of human population (numbers) is a succession of
higher and higher levels, each rise to a new level being brought about
by the discovery of more food either through occupation of a new
territory or through increase in food producing skill.”

The invention of a better tool, improved food preparation, discovery of
new foods, better storage, or utilization would bring about this
increase in food availability.

Apparently the twin circumstances of the need for more food and the
existence of a dry land connection between Asia and North America
enabled a series of migrations of prehistoric men to the New World. The
migrations did not occur just during one glacial stage, nor during the
last 15 or 25,000 years as some have claimed, but continued
interruptedly over a period of many thousands of years. Perhaps such
migrations started as long ago as 300,000 years—whenever land
connections permitted and other conditions warranted. As a result, we
find a number of stocks of Old World Man at various levels of cultural
development coming into the Americas. Naturally a variety of plant and
animal species migrated in both directions between the Old and New
Worlds of their own accord, in addition to those which might have been
brought along by prehistoric man.

A classic example of plant migration to the New World is that of
California’s celebrated redwoods. In China just a few years ago the
little changed ancestors of these trees, the still-growing Metasequoia
were discovered. In rocks of the most recent era (Chapter Five of
earth’s history) the step by step migration of the changing redwood
ancestors can be followed by studying successively younger rock layers
in Siberia, Alaska, and in Canada and northwest United States. These
relics and imprints of the foliage, fruits, and even of wood texture of
these ancient trees were covered by sands and muds, and thus preserved
in stone as fossils. This has made it possible to identify the ancestral
redwood species and to demonstrate their march to California. It is
interesting to note how the redwoods changed in the process, evolving by
degrees to cope with new conditions of climate and soil during their
slow migrations. At length today two distinct and unique Sequoias are to
be found living only in California. One, the Coast Redwood, has adapted
itself to coastal fogs and reproduction by sprouting root shoots. The
other, restricted to drier areas of the west slope of the Sierra, the
Sierra Redwood or Big Tree, has its needles reduced to small scales to
withstand the drier climate, and reproduces only by seed.

Sauer observes that the stone implements of prehistoric man are the best
preserved relics of his culture and are the most easily found.
Unfortunately the less durable and less easily recognized relics of
skin, bone, wood, and vegetable fibers which are equally or often even
more important clues to the past, have been altered beyond recognition
or completely destroyed. As a result these disappeared or their
camouflaged remnants have been overlooked and passed unrecognized by
even careful students seeking to learn the details of this fascinating
story of the how’s and why’s and when’s of your ancestors and mine in
Europe and also of the Indians in Asia and in North America in general,
and of those of the Lassen area in particular.

Chapter II
EARLY CULTURES IN NORTH AMERICA

The fact that skeletons of primitive forms of man have so far not been
discovered in the Western Hemisphere does not mean that ancestral forms
preceding modern man did not migrate to the New World in remote times.
It is that erroneous idea which has caused some persons to reason that
man arrived here only in the final glacial stage. Good evidence has been
presented to suggest that the sites he would have been most likely to
inhabit might be submerged at present or may have been especially
vulnerable to destruction by erosion.

Certain primitive peoples of the New World (in South America) do no
boiling of foods and do not have the dog, indicating very early
immigration from the Old World. Dr. Sauer suggests a date during the
third glacial stage, the Kansan, about 300,000 years ago instead of the
Wisconsin Glacial Stage of 15,000 or 25,000 years ago as some have
contended.

At the present level of archeological and paleontological knowledge of
prehistoric man in North America, Sauer recognizes five basic early
cultures. These are listed below in the order of their apparent
appearances in the New World.

The most primitive and oldest culture of man recognized to date is very
difficult to detect, for its evidences were of a fragile nature. Few
traces of it remain to be seen today. This first culture known in North
America lacks both stone weapon points and grinding stones. These items
were also found lacking in the cultures of some isolated contemporary
peoples of both North and South America.

The second oldest culture in North America was that of the Ancient Food
Grinders which appears to have been widespread in the rather rainy
climate of the Mississippi and Pacific regions of North America. These
people built fireplaces or hearths—beds of collected stones. They used a
grinding slab of stone on which a handstone was rubbed to crush hard
seeds. This indicates a greater variety of foods than used in the
earlier culture. A number of crude pounding tools such as choppers and
scrapers were employed as were a few rude knives of stone. It is of
interest and significance that use of the grinder and grinding slab
disappeared completely from most or all of this area later. The well
known metate and mano grinding devices of the Southwest were introduced
much later, along with the growing of corn or maize, from the Central
American region. Coiled basketry appears to be identified with this
second culture too, such articles being essential as containers for
collection of seeds, winnowing, et cetera. Studies of the evidence in
the field show also that these peoples were sedentary to the extent of
developing refuse mounds or middens. The fact that this culture is not
found in Europe or in Asia indicates that it developed in the Western
Hemisphere.

About 35,000 years ago the third culture appears to have developed. It
was one in which hunting was of major importance. These hunters were not
nomads, however, for the building of hearths, accumulations of
artifacts, and also the general use of seed grinding stones, all
indicate rather sedentary habits. This culture is characterized by the
presence of dart or spear throwers, an invention of European origin.
This indicates more recent migrations from the Old World. These darts
were stone tipped and propelled with a spear thrower or atlatl, making
hunting of animal food much more effective than in the case of earlier
cultures.

The fourth culture is that known by the names Folsom and Yuma. In these
people interest in plant foods and fibers was slight, for this was
primarily a mobile hunting culture. The people were not sedentary, but
moved around.

Well after the disappearance of the glaciers of the Ice Age, late comers
from the Old World brought a fifth culture to the Americas. These people
used the bow and arrow with its small and finely worked stone point.
Fish hooks were used and many stone implements were well polished. This
too is the first culture of the New World with which the dog was
associated.

In Eastern North America, and particularly well known in the Southwest,
are abundant archeological evidences from easily recognized prehistoric
living sites. These reveal a succession of more recent cultures and
changes within cultures, as well as movement of early peoples. In
contrast there are relatively few recognized prehistoric sites in
California which tell much about early customs and material culture of
aboriginal man. Some productive areas which have been found are notably
the following: The Farmington Reservoir area of Stanislaus County more
than 4,000 years old—possibly much older, Kingsley Cave, the Santa
Barbara area, and the off-shore islands to the southwest of it. There
are also a few shell mounds in the Los Angeles—Ventura area and more
numerous and extensive ones in the San Francisco Bay vicinity. Of the
latter shell mounds A. L. Kroeber writes:

[Illustration: AREAS AND SUBAREAS OF CULTURES IN AND ABOUT
CALIFORNIA
after A. L. Kroeber]

NORTHWESTERN CALIF.
NORTH PACIFIC COAST AREA
CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
PLATEAU AREA
PLAINS AREA
CALIFORNIA-GREAT BASIN AREA
SOUTHWEST AREA
LOWER COLORADO

“... all the classes of objects (shells, refuse, mortars, pestles,
obsidian, charmstones, and bone awls) in question occur at the bottom,
middle, and top of the mounds, and ... they occur with substantially
the same frequency. In other words, the natives of the San Francisco
region traded the same materials from the same localities one, two, or
three thousand years ago as when they were discovered at the end of
the eighteenth century. They ate the same food, in nearly the same
proportions (only mammalian bones became more abundant in higher
levels), prepared it in substantially the same manner, and sewed
skins, rush mats, and coiled baskets similarly to their recent
descendants. Even their religion was conservative, since the identical
charms seem to have been regarded potent. In a word, the basis of
culture remained identical during the whole of the shell-mound period.

“When it is remembered that ... the beginning of this period
(occurred) more than 3,000 years ago, it is clear that we are here
confronted by a historical fact of extraordinary importance. It means
that at the time when Troy was besieged and Solomon was building the
temple, at a period when even Greek civilization had not yet taken on
the traits that we regard as characteristic, when only a few
scattering foundations of specific modern culture were being laid and
our own northern ancestors dwelled in unmitigated barbarism, the
native Californian already lived in all essentials like his descendant
of today. In Europe and Asia, change succeeded change of the
profoundest type. On this far shore of the Pacific, civilization, such
as it was, remained immutable in all fundamentals.

“... The permanence of Californian culture ... is of far more than
local interest. It is a fact of significance in the history of
civilization.”

Successive intrusions of different peoples and the isolation of the
resultant developing Indian tribes, century after century, gave rise to
many diverse languages. Although some were mere dialects, there were
about 750 different North American Indian languages.

Chapter III
THE CALIFORNIA INDIANS

Dr. A. L. Kroeber’s map shows all tribes within the present political
boundaries of the State of California. The tribes of the extreme
northwest corner and those of the southern tip of the state are not
typical of what we generally think of as “California Indians”.

Although it may not be scientifically sound to do so, it is often
convenient to refer to the Indian tribes of the California region
collectively. The term “Digger Indians” is frequently used for this
purpose with a somewhat disparaging connotation. The origin of this name
is traceable to white traders and pioneers who observed that local
Indians dug extensively for a number of food items, hence the name
Digger was applied. However, this is a poor name as digging was but one
of many methods the Indians used to secure food. Besides, digging was by
no means peculiar to Indians of the California area. It is best,
therefore, simply to use the term California Indians, if one wishes to
refer to this group of tribes as a whole.

In connection with the nickname Digger Indian, it is of interest to note
that the California tribes used the conspicuous pine of the foothills,
_Pinus sabiniana_, as a source of edible pine nuts and for other
purposes too. Because the so called Digger Indians used these trees so
much, the pioneers named the conifers Digger Pines, a name recognized
today as the proper common name of that tree.

California tribes are usually not considered high culturally among
Indians generally, yet Yurok, Pomo, and Chumash are equal to any tribe
in North America in wood, bone, steatite, obsidian, feather, and skin
work, while local tribes of the Lassen area made basketry of a variety
and quality unsurpassed elsewhere.

Although there were local differences in food habits, the California
Indians as a group had a highly diversified diet in contrast to the
so-called one-food tribes in surrounding areas. Of course it is an
over-simplification to speak of one-food tribes, for all ate quite a
variety of foods. Yet, it is true that several cultures had been built
upon the great abundance and importance of one particular food item as
compared to all other foods eaten. North of California, Indians built
their culture largely upon the salmon. To the east were tribes which
depended upon the bison for most of their needs, and southeast of
California the Southwest Indians built their culture around the all
important maize or native corn. In any of these regional groups, if the
main food item failed, disaster struck the tribes. In contrast, the
Californians, with diversified eating habits, had four major food
sources: fish, game, roots, and seeds or nuts. Each was important and
the failure of any one caused hardship, but by no means the serious
disaster which befell the more specialized groups of Indians if their
main food supply item failed. If any one item of the California Indian
diet were to be selected as the most important and universal food, one
of the nuts, the acorn would have to be named.

[Illustration: INDIAN TRIBAL DISTRIBUTION IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
after A. L. Kroeber]

TOLOWA
YUROK
KAROK
UPPER
LOWER
SHASTAN
SHASTA
OKWANUCHU
ACHOMAWI
ATSUGEWI
KORO MINU
NEW RIVER
MODOC
NORTHERN PAIUTE
LASSEN VOL. NAT. PARK
PYOT
WHILIOUT
ATHABASCAN
CHILULA
HUPA
NONGATL
SINKYONE
LASSIK
WAILAKI
KATO
YUKI
YUKI
HUCHNOM
COAST YUKI
POMO
N.
C.
S.W.
E.
S.E.
WAPPO
CHIMA RIKO
WINTUN
NORTHERN
CENTRAL
SOUTHWESTERN
SOUTHEASTERN
COSTANOAN
SAN FRANCISCAN
SANTA CLARA
SANTA CRUZ
YANA
N.
CENTRAL
SOUTHERN
YAHI
MAIDU
NORTHEASTERN
NORTHWESTERN
SOUTHERN
WASHO
MIWOK
COAST MIWOK
PLAINS
NORTHERN
CENTRAL
SOUTHERN
YOKUT
NORTH VALLEY

California Indians are often regarded to have been lazy and shiftless.
To be sure there were such individuals, but we have that type of person
in our midst too, and I dare say in equal or greater percentage. As a
matter of fact, Indians generally could not afford to be lazy—there was
no beneficent government to coddle them. It was largely a case of sink
or swim. They had to provide their own shelter, food, and clothing as
well as what amusement and extras—hardly to be called luxuries—they
wished to enjoy. These things were all wrought from the wilderness with
their own bare hands, using only wood, stone, and fire as tools. These
native Americans lived in a stone-age culture. Metals, the wheel,
domesticated herd animals, and agriculture were unknown to California
Indians. Although there was some seasonal migration, there were no truly
nomadic or wandering tribes in California.

In California there were 103 separate tribes each speaking its own
language. To be sure, some were mere dialects of others, but there were
21 tongues completely distinct from each other and mutually
unintelligible. These belonged to several unrelated language families,
as shown on the second map.

As suggested above, Kroeber has shown that we are technically incorrect
in referring to the California Indians as a single group of tribes.
Within the political boundaries of the State of California there were
actually three separate cultures with a number of subcultures, which
were as follows: The small area in the northwest corner of the state,
the Klamath River drainage, was occupied by the Northwest California
Sub-culture, a part of the North Pacific Coast Culture which extended
into British Columbia. The California-Great Basin Culture had three
representatives in the state: the smallest or Lutuami Sub-culture,
represented by the Modoc tribe only, extended down from the north across
the east central portion of the northern boundary of California. The
next larger was the Great Basin Sub-culture just east of the
Cascade-Sierra backbone. The third and largest sub-culture of the
California-Great Basin Culture was that of the Central California tribes
(the Diggers of the pioneer), extending westward from the Cascade-Sierra
crest to the Pacific Ocean across the bulk of the state. The fifth
sub-culture is known as the Southern California comprising the area
south of the Tehachapi Mountains from the coast east across the Colorado
River, being a part of the Southwest Culture.

[Illustration: LINGUISTIC FAMILIES
INDIAN LANGUAGE GROUPS OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA and the families to
which they belong, after A. L. Kroeber]

Lutuamian
LUTUAMI
Hokan
KAROK
SHASTAN
CHIMARIKO
POMO
WASHO
YANA
Shoshonian
PAIUTE
Penutian
WINTUN
MAIDU
MIWOK
YOKUT
COSTANOAN
Algonkian
YUROK
Athabascan
ATHABASCAN
Yukian
YUKI

Nevertheless, some generalities hold, and at the risk of the inaccuracy
which is typical of generalizations, we might set forth the following
customs as being characteristic of California Indians:

Animal flesh bulked a smaller volume of food eaten than did vegetable
materials—or, in the case of coastal peoples, than did seafoods. Dog and
reptile flesh were considered poisonous or undesirable, but insects and
worms were generally eaten. Acorns were the most important single food.
All tribes utilized seeds of such plants as buckeye, grass, sedge, and
sunflower family plants. All items, but the first, were collected with a
basketry seed beater in a conical burden basket, parched, winnowed,
ground, and eaten either dry, as unleavened bread, or as boiled mush.

Although the fish hook and line were known throughout the area, most
fishing was done by means of nets, weirs, use of poison, and harpoons
thrust, but not thrown.

Hunting with bow and arrow was most important. Disguise and dogs were
used in the north, but surrounding the game was the common means of
hunting in the south.

The northern bow was short, broad, and sinew backed while southern
Californians used long narrow bows without reinforcement.

Arrows were usually two-piece and tipped with obsidian points. Three
different arrow releases were used among California Indians. Northern
arrows were straightened by use of a hole through a piece of wood or
similar material, and were polished by use of horsetail stalks while a
grooved squarish soapstone (steatite) did both jobs in the south.

Basketry was highly developed, being California’s best art form. The
northern quarter of the area did twined basketry; coiled basketry
prevailed elsewhere.

Cloth was unknown, but woven rabbit skin strip blankets were universal,
especially for bedding. Rush mats were twined and sewn.

Pottery was unknown except for a very crude undecorated form in the San
Joaquin Valley, an intrusion from the Southern California Sub-culture
where pottery became important.

Music of California was characterized by singing, rattles, whistles,
split slap sticks, flute, and musical bow. The last two instruments were
the only ones which were able to make real melodies, but amazingly,
neither one was used for dances or ceremonies. California Indians were
virtually without any drums—the exception being a single headed flat
foot drum used in ceremonial sweathouse chambers of the tribes in the
Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.

Dress of California women was a front and a back apron of
skin—especially buckskin—or of plant fiber. Men wore nothing or a folded
skin about the hips or between the legs. In bad weather both sexes used
cape-like or wrap-around (over one arm and under the other) skin robes.
In localized areas the brimless dome-shaped basketry cap was worn by
women. Hair of both sexes was long (but shorn in mourning) and
frequently put up in nets by men. Men removed their beards by pulling
with their fingers.

In mountain areas social and religious cults were lacking. In the
extreme northwest corner wealth dances were held; in central California
the secret society and Kuksu dances, in the south the Jimsonweed
initiation system, and in the Colorado River area the dreamsong ceremony
flourished.

Houses varied from open enclosures and brush or bark shelters to frame
structures more or less completely dug into the ground and covered with
bark, brush, and dirt, usually with a roof entrance and or one to the
south; this was the earth lodge. In the extreme northwest housing was
not the earth lodge, but a structure built on top of the ground;
hand-split planks were used in its construction.

Sweat houses were of the earth lodge type, often of daily service and in
northern areas, lived in too. Sweat houses of California were not heated
by steam, but directly with fire.

Boats generally were of rushes tied into balsa rafts or into boat
shapes. In addition one-piece dugout canoes from tree logs were typical
of the northern portion of California, becoming progressively more
refined in workmanship and in design to the northwest. A unique lashed
split board canoe was made by channel island tribes in the Santa Barbara
vicinity.

The tribe as a political unit, so common elsewhere in America, did not
exist in California. What we call a tribe was actually a number of
groups of Indians, each of whom had a chief, spoke the same language
dialect, had the same customs, intermarried regularly, and were usually
mutually friendly. There was no tribal chief as such.

In the northwest portion of California wealth was so important that real
chieftain leadership was lacking. In central and southern California the
chief was a powerful local leader on a hereditary basis. Between the two
extremes was a zone where tribes struck a compromise; the hereditary
local chief had moderate authority and usually was well to do, but not
necessarily so. Rich men in smaller political divisions were influential
headmen under the local chief.

Warfare was only for revenge and not for plunder or for a desire for
distinction. Except for the Northwest Sub-culture, scalps were generally
taken and included the victim’s skin down to his eyes or nose, and
including the ears. Not infrequently the whole head was taken by a
victorious warrior. The weapon was the bow and arrow, with rocks
employed in close combat. Such war implements as shields, clubs, spears
(throwing), and tomahawks were not used.

Guessing games, usually played by men, were universal, with variations,
and heavy gambling was the rule. Shinny in several different forms was
widely played.

Shamans were employed for curing diseases which were believed due to the
presence in the body of some foreign hostile object. This was removed by
sucking accompanied by singing, dancing, and tobacco smoking.

The girls’ adulthood or puberty ceremony and dance was important to all
California tribes.

Population figures even on the most scholarly basis, Kroeber states, are
at best reasonable guesses. As nearly as can be determined there were
originally about one million Indians in North America, three million in
Central America, and three million in South America. California probably
had about 133,000 Indians or nearly one per square mile. This is a
density three or four times greater than for the whole of North America.

Today the North American Indian population (including about 30%
half-breeds) is less than 10% of what it was. Over 90% of our Indians
have been destroyed by wholesale killing at the hands of the white man,
by new diseases, unfavorable changes in diet, clothing, and dwellings
plus such Caucasian cultural factors as settlement, concentration, and
the like. The decline in Indian population varied directly with the
degree of civilized contact the several tribes experienced. It is
interesting to note that virtually all of the Indians exposed to the
Spanish missions commencing 1769 are gone except for a few in the
extreme south who were only partly missionized. Kroeber states:

“It must have caused many of the fathers a severe pang to realize, as
they could not but do daily, that they were saving souls only at the
inevitable cost of lives. And yet such was the overwhelming fact. The
brute upshot of missionization, in spite of its kindly flavor and
humanitarian root, was only one thing: death.”

Kroeber also points out that some tribes had much less resistance and
hence suffered greater decline in population in response to equal white
contact than others did. As in the case of other living things, there
were favorable circumstances under which the Indian flourished—where
life was relatively easy and secure. Such conditions produced virile
stock and a rich culture both materially and spiritually—a condition
found in broad valleys drained by the great rivers of California: the
Klamath, the Sacramento, and the San Joaquin. As is also the case with
specific plants and animals, Indians in less favorable sites lived
submarginally—a difficult existence, poor in material and spiritual
culture. Under such circumstances it takes just a small amount of
additional unfavorable influence to make existence impossible. On this
basis Kroeber explains the extinction or near extinction of poor
mountain tribes upon contact with the whites while the Indians of the
fertile valleys, although suffering more intensive Caucasian contact,
were able to survive in reasonable numbers. This is a specific exception
to the general observation made above that population decrease varied
directly with the degree of contact. There are examples in California;
the local one is the survival of valley Maidu and Wintun populations as
compared to the surrounding mountain people with poorer cultures: the
Yahi, Yana, Okwanuchu, Shasta, New River Shasta, Chimariko, and the
Athabascan tribes of the west with survival percentages today of up to
only 5% at best.

There is another factor which caused greater devastation of the
economically insecure mountain tribes. White settlers were able to use
to their own advantage some of the labor, services, and even food which
the valley Indians afforded them. Thus it was not to the interest of the
whites to wipe out these Indians. On the other hand, the mountain tribes
with a poorer economy were prone to steal livestock to supplement their
food supplies as they had no means to gain wealth to enable them to buy
from the whites. Such depredations were a major cause of retaliation by
white man in the form of bloody punitive attacks on Indians from whom
the settlers had nothing to gain.

Chapter IV
INDIAN TRIBES OF THE LASSEN AREA

Lassen Peak with an elevation of 10,453 feet above sea level is the
central high point of a somewhat topographically isolated mountain mass
of volcanic origin. The slopes descending in all directions from Lassen
Peak are clothed in coniferous forests, dotted with small lakes of
glacial origin, and drained by a few fish bearing streams flowing
radially from the mountain. There are also a few hot spring areas and
some barren expanses where recent eruptions have produced mudflows and
lavas. For the most part, game abounds in the Lassen highland, but the
winters are snowy and severe, making it unsuitable for Indians to live
there the year around.

As shown on the map, parts of the lands of four distinct tribes of
Indians lay within what are today the boundaries of Lassen Volcanic
National Park. Permanent homes and villages of Atsugewi, Yana, Yahi and
mountain Maidu tribes were at lower elevations in the Ponderosa Pine and
Digger Pine belts, and situated near streams. There food was relatively
easily available and winters were the least severe within the limits of
the respective tribal territories.

Each summer when deer migrated to higher elevations, the Indians also
moved toward Lassen Peak to hunt and to fish trout, spending the whole
summer in temporary camps.

There was some contact between the four tribes during their sojourns in
the uplands of the park area, but the activities of each Indian group
were pretty well confined to its own territory. The four Lassen tribes
did on occasion engage in small battles, but this was the exception
rather than the rule—generally speaking they lived harmoniously as
neighbors, and there was even occasional inter-marriage between tribes.

These tribes all had simple hill or mountain cultures which, in spite of
some difference of custom, were surprisingly alike. It is believed that
this is due to the fact that the four tribes all lived under very
similar conditions of environment—the same type of country in many
respects. The similarity of their cultures is all the more interesting
in that the Atsugewi were of the Hokan Family, speaking a Shastan
language. Yana and Yahi, also of Hokan stock spoke Yana languages. The
mountain Maidu were of the Penutian Family, speaking a Maidu language.

According to the best available figures, some of which are only
reasonable guesses, populations of the local tribes were probably about
as follows:

[Illustration: INDIAN TRIBAL AREAS OF THE LASSEN REGION
after A. L. Kroeber and T. R. Garth—note the boundaries of Lassen
Volcanic National Park dashed in above and left of center of the
map. Lassen Peak is at the junction of the Atsugewi, Yana, and Maidu
territories.]

ACHOMAWI
SHASTAN
OKWANUCHU
NORTHERN WINTUN
CENTRAL WINTUN
S. E. WINTUN
CENTRAL YANA
NORTH (YANA)
SOUTHERN YANA
ATSUGEWI
ATSUGE
APWARUGE
NORTHERN PAIUTE
NORTHEASTERN MAIDU
NORTHWESTERN MAIDU
SOUTHERN MAIDU
WASHO

1770 1910 1950

Atsugewi 1,000 250 75
Yana (north, central, s) 750 25 10
Yahi 275 5 none
Maidu (mountain) 2,000 800 300
Totals 4,025 1,080 385

Garth states that: “The Atsugewi are divided into two major groups,
the Atsuge or pinetree-people, who occupy Hat Creek Valley, and the
Apwaruge—from Apwariwa, the name of Dixie Valley—who live to the east
in and around Dixie Valley. Sometimes the Apwaruge are called
Mahoupani, juniper-tree-people, a name which reflects the dry and
barren nature of their territory....

“... certain cultural differences (existed) between the eastern and
western Atsugewi, who in most aspects of nonmaterial culture and in
language are one people. In the western area there was more abundant
rainfall and a fairly luxuriant growth of pines, oaks, and other
trees. Here the Atsuge subsisted largely on acorns and fish; made
twined basketry, using willow, pine root, _Xerophylum_ grass, and
redbud materials; and had bark houses and numerous other structures of
bark. On the contrary, in the eastern area, which is comparatively
arid and lacking in trees, the Apwaruge depended on the acorn less
than did the Atsuge and fishing was less important, to judge by the
scarcity or lack of nets, fish hooks, and harpoons; made inferior
twined baskets of twisted tule with a different twist to the weave; as
a rule had their houses covered with tule mats rather than with bark;
and were much poorer than the Atsuge. This cultural distinction
between the eastern and western areas is also found to the north among
the Achomawi.”

Dixon’s studies have revealed that the Maidu had no general name for
themselves, remarkable as this may seem. The name Maidu was first used
by Stephen Powers in 1877 in his volume “TRIBES OF CALIFORNIA”, a name
he arbitrarily applied to these Indians since the word meant “Indian” or
“man” in their language. The adjectives northwest or valley, northeast
or mountain, and southern or foothill are applied to identify the three
different cultures corresponding to the three distinct geographic
provinces inhabited by the Maidu Indians as a whole. In a number of
respects the culture of the mountain or northeast Maidu was more like
that of their northern neighbors, the Atsugewi, than it was like that of
the closely related southern and northwestern Maidu peoples. Obviously
the factor of environment or characteristics of the land occupied is of
extreme importance in creating such a situation.

Chapter V
INDIAN—PIONEER CONFLICT AND THE STORY OF ISHI

Conflict—prolonged, tragic, and violent—flared during the period when
Europeans wrested control of North America from the native Indian. In
viewing the struggle between Indian and white man, feelings run high
even today.

What was it when Custer’s contingent was wiped out?—when the Modocs
inflicted such heavy losses on the American troops?—when the Navajo,
Sioux, and others made their devastating raids on wagon trains and
pioneer settlers? These were just as much a part of the war as were the
exploits of Rogers’ Rangers, the indiscriminate slaying of Indian men,
women, and children in the Yahi caves on Mill Creek, and the
annihilation of large segments of Atsugewi and Yana tribes cornered at
points northwest of the present Lassen Volcanic National Park area. War
is never a pretty thing. Was the hit and run killing of white people by
Indians any less defensible morally than white man’s atrocities against
the Indians, or, for that matter, than commando raids and atomic
bombings of today? Our viewpoint on such matters in the past has all too
often been that might makes right, since we have always been on the
winning side. Until very recently we have followed the biased opinion of
the colonists and pioneers of these United States: whenever we won, it
was a glorious and righteous victory, but if the Indian emerged
victorious, it was regarded as a dastardly massacre. It is a viewpoint
readily understandable where a person’s loved ones are involved—but not
justifiable.

Our veterans of recent wars will vouch for the fact that white man’s
wars can be primitive and violent when life and limb are at stake. We
are hardly in a position to criticize the “cruel and sneaking” fighting
methods of the Indians. Was it not use of Indian fighting methods which
was so valuable to us in defeating the British in the colonial war for
independence?

Indians fought in the only way they knew—and a disheartening losing
fight it was for them with bows and arrows against rifles. For each gain
in weapons and technical know-how the Indians made, the whites made
many. True, it cost Americans much in the way of lives, anguish, and
money, but how small were these losses in comparison to those of the
Indians. American Indians, the undisputed owners of this continent for
thousands of years, were not only nearly exterminated, but in the end we
took virtually all of their land by force and with it took away the
means of self support as well without “due process of law”. We denied
the Indian the right of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness”—the very things for which we as a nation stand. In all
fairness, however, it should be stated that in recent years modest
monetary retribution has been made by the U.S. Government to some of the
surviving descendants.

S. F. Cook has pointed out that Spanish contact with California Indians
was a rather passive matter. Spanish penetrated deeply, but did not
settle on Indian lands of appreciable size. The Spanish were present in
small numbers, a population numbering perhaps 4,000 by 1848. To be sure
there was occasional bloodshed, but it was the exception in Spanish
California rather than the rule, for the Spanish regarded Indians as an
asset, a human resource which provided labor and even some food and
materials. The Indians were a respected element in the social and
economic structure of Hispanic California, having civic and legal
rights. Even under the Spanish, was there a great reduction of the
Indian population through limited warfare and displacement, but much
more importantly through disease. Nevertheless, by 1845 a more or less
satisfactory equilibrium seems to have evolved between the Spanish and
the California Indians.

In contrast the hordes of white immigrants who followed considered the
Indians entirely useless and there was no place for the latter in the
pioneers’ economy of material wealth. All good lands were taken from the
Indians arbitrarily and as quickly as possible. However, it must be
stated that there were exceptions to both the Spanish and Gringo
relations with the California Indians, but, in general, the foregoing
statements are accurate.

How the conflict of pioneer versus Indian affected the Atsugewi is
summarized for us by Garth as follows:

“The Atsugewi, because of their somewhat secluded mountain habitat,
were spared contact with white civilization until the middle of the
nineteenth century. Although there were vague reports of contact with
Spanish explorers or Mexican bandits, these could not be verified.
Peter Skene Ogden may have been the first white man to visit the area
(1827-1828). Besides the trappers, Fremont, Greenwood, and other
explorers probably skirted Atsugewi country. Peter Lassen passed
through Achomawi-Atsugewi country in opening the Pit River Route of
1848. He was soon followed by a stream of white migration from the
east which was devastating to the Indians and their culture.
Prospectors entered the Lassen region in 1851, and not long afterward
came white settlers. By about 1859 the Indians were felt to be a
menace to the whites in the area and were rounded up by militia and
taken to the Round Valley Indian Reservation. Unsatisfactory
conditions at the Reservation caused most of them to leave in 1863 and
return to their old haunts along Hat Creek and Dixie Valley.

“Joaquin Miller reports an uprising in 1867 of the Pit River and Modoc
Indians, who had made up old differences and were now fighting
together. A number of whites were massacred. Miller speaks of an
Indian camp being made on Hat Creek in the war that followed. It is
not thus improbable that the Atsuge participated in that war. After a
year or so of fighting the Indians suffered a final crushing defeat
and surrendered. This last engagement may be the one at Six Mile Hill,
spoken of by informants, in which a large number of their people were
cornered in a cave and massacred by soldiers. After this, many of the
Indians were again removed to Round Valley. Those remaining and some
who subsequently returned from the Reservation maintained friendly
relations with the whites. Today most Atsugewi live on allotments in
their old territory, the younger Indians often working for their white
neighbors or for the lumber mills. The census of 1910 gives a
population of 240 for ‘Hat Creek Indians’. This figure may also have
included the Dixie Valley Atsugewi, since they are not mentioned in
the census. The present population is probably half that or less.”

The Maidu also were decimated upon contact with white man. However, with
only rare exception, Maidu accepted rather passively invasion of their
territory with the attendant driving away of game and destruction of
fish in the streams by mining operations in gold rush days. However,
since the remnants of the Maidu were in the way of white mans’
developments, treaties were made in 1851 by which these Indians gave up
all claims to their ancestral lands and were taken to short lived
reservations in Amador, Nevada and Butte Counties, also later to the
Round Valley Reservations in the Coast Range. A great many Maidu soon
returned to their homes. In the late 50’s and 60’s a desultory war was
waged on the Maidu by California State troops which further reduced the
number of surviving Indians of this tribe.

The management of the University of California’s excellent informative
“UNIVERSITY EXPLORER” radio program series has given permission to quote
the following from its broadcasts. This material concerns the conflict
of the closely related Yana and Yahi tribes with the whites and the
fabulous story of Ishi. The script has been abridged and considerably
rearranged:

“... The Yana way of life was a strange one to the white observer, but
the tribes prospered under it until white emigration from the East
threw them into conflict with a new and unfriendly people. The
Indians, of course, resented the white incursion and revolted against
it. That happened in all sections of the country where whites
displaced Indians, but it would be hard to imagine a more inept way of
handling the situation than that used by the white men in the
Sacramento Valley. Some of the large land owners protected the Indians
of their holdings; among them were General John Bidwell, one of the
founders of Chico, (Peter Lassen on his Rancho Bosquejo between Mill
and Deer Creeks), and John Sutter, on whose property the Gold Rush
started. But they were exceptions. Most of the settlers apparently
believed the only way to handle the natives was to compete with them
in cruelty. One celebrated Indian-killer took great pride in a blanket
he had made from Indian scalps. The whites had learned scalping from
the Eastern Indians, but they themselves popularized it in
California....

“The Indians often plundered settlers’ cabins and stole livestock.
This was natural, since they regarded the whites as invaders.
Unfortunately, the settlers’ retaliation frequently consisted of
rounding up a gang of Indians and slaughtering them. And it didn’t
make too much difference whether they were the guilty Indians.
Professor Waterman wrote that the Yahi expressed their resentment of
the white men more violently than did the other Yana groups, but since
the Yahi moved around more and displayed greater skill in hiding out,
quite innocent groups of Indians often took the blame for the acts of
the Yahi. Professor Waterman cited the case of one white posse which
took to the trail following a series of Indian raids. The posse came
upon an encampment of Indians and shot about forty of them. But the
Indians had been camped in the same place for two nights, and the
whites later found a couple of almost-empty whiskey barrels there. It
doesn’t stand to reason, Professor Waterman pointed out, that Indians
skilled in warfare would be so careless after an attack on their
enemies.

“As the animosity between white men and red men grew, the atrocities
on both sides became revolting. White women and children were tortured
and killed by the Yana. But the anthropologists who have studied this
unpleasant phase of California history believe the whites invited such
savage assaults by their own brutal mistreatment of the Indians.

“... The Yana gradually took to the woods as it became obvious that
they were being outnumbered and decimated by the settlers in one
massacre after another. By the late 1860’s the Indians had been
reduced in numbers and intimidated to the point where they no longer
could be considered a serious menace to the people who had taken over
their hunting grounds. By then the Indians’ crimes were more on the
level of petty theft than major violence. The three Yana tribes had
become almost extinct as social organizations, but a fair number of
Yana-speaking individuals survived long after the turn of the century.

“With the Yahi tribe, however, it was a different story. For a long
time the Yahi—then called the Mill Creeks, because area around that
little stream was their principal hunting ground—for a long time, the
Yahi were believed to have been wiped out in a final massacre in
1865.... In 1871, a group of cattle-herders in Tehama County found a
spot where Indians apparently had wounded a steer. The whites used
dogs to follow the steer’s bloody trail, and cornered some thirty
Indians in a hillside cave. They promptly slaughtered the Indians,
including several children. The settlers’ peculiar idea of mercy was
pointed out by Professor Waterman’s informant, who noted that one of
the cattle-herders could not bear to kill the children with his .56
caliber rifle—‘it tore them up so bad’ he said. So he did it instead
with a .38 caliber revolver.... They call the rock shelter Kingsley
Cave after Norman Kingsley, the settler who ... supposedly ... shot
the Indian children. The Kingsley Cave site was apparently used for a
long time. Grinding tools of two different cultural periods were found
... (by University of California Archeological Survey staff
excavations currently investigating the site).

(The Yahi were thought to have been completely wiped out by this last
unjustified atrocity, but in 1908) “... surveyors for a power company
in the hilly country around Deer Creek reported they had caught a
glimpse of a naked Indian standing poised near the stream with a
double-pronged primitive fishing spear. Next day, other members of the
party were startled when an arrow came whistling through the
underbrush at them—a stone-tipped arrow like those used by the
supposedly extinct Indians. The surveyors kept on pushing ahead, until
they came upon a cleverly concealed camp in the tangled woods. There
they found a middle-aged woman and two aged and feeble Indians, a man
and a woman. The old woman, hiding under a pile of rabbit skins,
apparently wanted water, and the surveyors gave her some after the old
man and the other woman had hidden in the underbrush. The surveyors
also carried off all the blankets, bows and arrows and other articles
in sight; but when they returned next day to make some sort of
restitution, the Indians had disappeared. They were never seen again,
even though the University later sent anthropologists in search of
them....

“... with the dawn of a clear August day in 1911.... The butchering
crew of a slaughterhouse near Oroville were awakened ... by a furious
barking of the dogs at the corral. They rushed into the corral to find
a man crouching in the mud, surrounded by the slaughterhouse shepherd
dogs. The butchers called off the dogs to get a closer look at their
guest—and a most unusual guest he was.

“The man’s only clothing was a piece of torn, dirty canvas across his
shoulders. His skin was sunburned to a copper brown, his hair was
clipped close to the skull, and he obviously was suffering from severe
malnutrition. His body was emaciated and his cheeks clung to the bones
to accentuate his furiously glaring eyes.

“But the strangest thing about this man was his speech. It was like
nothing the butchers had ever heard.... The sheriff tried English and
Spanish, then several Indian dialects. But he was unable to draw any
intelligible response from his prisoner. For lack of a better place to
put him, the sheriff locked him in the jail cell reserved for mental
cases, even though the man from the slaughterhouse appeared to be more
lost than insane.

“The ‘Wild Man of Oroville’ made good newspaper copy, and clippings
about his mysterious discovery caused much excitement in the
department of anthropology at the University of California. It was a
good thing that the news reached the University when it did. The
frightened wild man was cowering in his cell, refusing to accept food
from his captors whom he obviously distrusted, while the sheriff
vainly tried to identify him.

“The late Professor T. T. Waterman was especially excited. So excited,
in fact, that he stuffed a few clothes in his suitcase, quickly picked
out a list of words from the files on California Indian languages, and
caught the first train to Oroville for an interview with the prisoner.

“The reason for Professor Waterman’s excitement was that he believed
the Oroville prisoner was a Yahi Indian. If this guess was correct,
Waterman would have a major anthropological find. For anthropologists
are concerned with origins, development and variegated cultures of
mankind; and if the frightened prisoner in Oroville turned out to be a
Yahi, Professor Waterman and his colleagues would have a living
encyclopedia of the language, customs, and habits of a people who were
believed to be extinct ... he might be one of the little band reported
at Deer Creek (in 1908), perhaps the man with the fishing spear.

“The task of determining whether the prisoner was Yahi was complicated
by the fact that no one knew the Yahi language. This doesn’t sound
like an insuperable stumbling block, until you remember that the
California Indian languages were numerous and distinct; there were
over one hundred dialects, many of them mutually unintelligible. These
dialects were classified into eighteen major language groups, which in
turn made up six entirely different language families. These six
language families apparently are completely unrelated—a strange
circumstance, when you consider that almost all of the languages of
Europe can be traced to common origins.

“However, Professor Waterman was fortunate in one respect. A fairly
extensive word-list had been collected from the dialect of the Nozi
Indians who had once lived just to the north of the Yahi and were
their nearest relatives. Both the Yahi and the Nozi belonged to the
Yana language stock, which stemmed from the widespread Hokan family.
So Professor Waterman relied on Nozi words to make the identification.

“At first, the prisoner in Oroville seemed as frightened of Professor
Waterman as he had been of all the other white men. Patiently, the
anthropologist proceeded through his list of Nozi words, but the
captive Indian apparently recognized none of them. At last, though,
the professor pointed to the wooden frame of the Indian’s cot, and
pronounced the word ‘si’wi’ni,’ which according to his list meant
‘yellow pine’. Immediately, the Indian relaxed. His harried, unhappy
look turned to beaming good cheer, and he acted as if he had found a
long-lost friend. Pointing to his cot, he repeated Professor
Waterman’s word ‘si’wi’ni’ several times, as if agreeing that, yes,
his cot was yellow pine. His own language differed from that of the
Nozi, but some of the vocabulary was the same. Professor Waterman had
struck upon one of the right words; later, he pronounced more familiar
words, and it was established that the Indian was a Yahi. He also
managed to explain that he called himself ‘Ishi’, which meant simply,
‘I am a man’.

“Professor Waterman was naturally elated with his new-found
acquaintance. The Butte County sheriff was equally elated to be rid of
his difficult charge, so Ishi was taken to the Museum, then located in
San Francisco, for further study and interrogation.

“Thus it happened that this human relic of the Stone Age came to live
at a modern university. The Regents of the University gave Ishi some
official status by appointing him an assistant janitor at $25 a month.
But his value to the University did not come from dexterity with a mop
and broom; he was valued because he could tell the anthropologists
about his people, preserving knowledge which otherwise would have died
with his fellow-tribesmen.

“Ishi adapted himself well to this new life, and he was a friendly and
popular fixture at the museum for five years. He picked up the white
man’s ways by watching the people around him; at his first civilized
dinner, he imitated his hosts’ motions and managed a knife and fork
far more skilfully than most of us can handle chopsticks in a Chinese
restaurant. He was delighted and awe-stricken by many of the
developments of civilization; but the things that impressed him most
were not what the anthropologists had expected. Electric lights,
airplanes, and automobiles made little impression; they were
completely beyond his range of experience, and he dismissed them as
‘white man’s magic’, worthy of little attention. The tall buildings in
downtown San Francisco did not startle him; as he explained, his own
country had cliffs and crags just as high. But what really amazed him
about the city were the enormous crowds of people on the streets. He
had seen people before, of course, but never more than twenty or
thirty in one place.

“In general, the things that Ishi considered most remarkable were
things which approached something in his own experience. He knew how
hard it was to start a fire by friction, so pocket matches were indeed
a wonder. Water faucets which could be turned on and off were likewise
marvelous; why, the white man could make a spring, right there in the
house! One of the first modern devices to catch Ishi’s babbled
attention was an ordinary window roller shade. He tried to push it
aside, but it flipped back; he lifted it, but it fell down. Finally
someone showed him how to give it a little tug and let it roll itself
up, and Ishi was amazed. A half-hour later, he was still trying to
figure out what had happened to the shade.

“Ishi and his hosts learned to communicate with each other fairly
adequately; he never became accustomed to formal grammar, but he
picked up a vocabulary large enough to express his wishes and his
comments about the things around him. Actually, the anthropologists
admitted, Ishi learned to speak English far better than any of them
were able to learn Yahi. They suspected that some of his vocabulary
was acquired from the school children who used to visit him, for it
included a fair sampling of most unacademic slang.

“There were some things Ishi didn’t like to talk about—the death of
his relatives and the last horrible years around Deer Creek before he
wandered to the Oroville slaughterhouse—were subjects he found too
painful. Besides, there was a tribal taboo against mentioning the
names of the dead. His close-cropped head, incidentally, was the
result of burning off his hair in mourning for his mother and sister,
in accordance with tribal custom.

“But the knowledge which Ishi passed on was rich and varied.... Among
the contributions for which Ishi is remembered are some of the finest
arrowheads and spear tips in existence; he made these for the
University Museum both of modern bottle glass and from the natural
materials.... In fact, Ishi was the source of almost all that is known
of Yahi life. He gladly described the customs of his people, and he
enjoyed chipping out Stone Age weapons and showing how they were used.
With primitive drawings, he tried to tell the story of the massacre
which wiped out most of his tribe....

“Ishi’s own life ended in March 1916, when he died of tuberculosis. He
was then believed to be in his 50’s. Those who knew him at the
University considered his death a great loss—not only because of what
he had contributed to anthropology, but because he had a natural
friendliness and dignity which made him a beloved personality.
Professor A. L. Kroeber once told me: ‘The manner in which he
acquitted himself, both from the scientific and social points of view,
was so admirable that everyone who chanced to meet him counted it a
privilege to be his friend’. And Ishi had the comforting knowledge
that his departure from this earth would not be a completely alien
one. Because he had passed on the elements of his culture, it was
possible to bury him with all the ceremony of his own people. His bows
and arrows were laid beside him, and some bowls of food were placed in
the grave so he would not grow hungry on his long journey to the Happy
Hunting Ground....

“Ishi was not only the last survivor of the Yahi ... but he was also
believed to (have been) the last representative of the Stone Age in
the United States.”

While not apropos to the subject of this chapter, “Pioneer Conflict...”
we digress with some quotations from Pope’s “Medical History of Ishi” to
give the reader a better understanding of this last of the Mill Creek
Indians, his character, and his beliefs.

“... Ishi himself later made the statement that he was not sick but
had no food. White men had taken his bow and arrows; game was scarce,
and he had no means of procuring it. He had strayed from his usual
trail, between Deer Creek and ... Lassen (Peak). The railroad on one
side and a large river on the other kept him from making his way to
the refuge of the hills. His fear of trains and automobiles seems to
have been considerable in those days.

“Upon being captured, Ishi, according to his own account, was
handcuffed, confronted by guns and pistols, and intimidated to such an
extent that he vomited with fear....

“About this time (fall, 1912) I became instructor in surgery in the
University Medical School, and thus came in contact with the Indian.

“From the first weeks of our intimacy a strong friendship grew up
between us, and I was from that time on his physician, his confidant,
and his companion in archery....

“The Museum (of Anthropology) is near the Hospital, and since Ishi had
been made a more or less privileged character in the hospital wards,
he often came into the surgical department. Here he quietly helped the
nurses clean instruments, or amused the internes and nurses by singing
his Indian songs, or carried on primitive conversation by means of a
very complex mixture of gesture, Yana dialect, and the few scraps of
English he had acquired in his contact with us.

“His affability and pleasant disposition made him a universal
favorite. He visited the sick in the wards with a gentle and
sympathetic look which spoke more clearly than words. He came to the
women’s wards quite regularly, and with his hands folded before him,
he would go from bed to bed like a visiting physician, looking at each
patient with quiet concern or with a fleeting smile that was very
kindly received and understood.

“ISHI’S MEDICAL BELIEFS”

“Women—Ishi had many of our own obsolete superstitions regarding
women. One criticism he made of white man’s civilization was the
unbridled liberty we give menstruating women. The ‘Sako mahale’, as he
designated them, were a cause of much ill luck and sickness. They
should be in seclusion during this period. In fact, he often commented
on the number of sick men that came to the hospital. I asked him what
he thought made so many men sick. He said it was ‘Sako mahale, too
much wowi (houses), too much automobile,’ and last but most important
of all, the ‘Coyote doctor’, or evil spirit.

“Dogs—Playing with dogs, and letting them lick one’s hand, Ishi said
was very bad. He assured me that to let babies play with dogs this way
led to paralysis. It is interesting to note that Dr. R. H. Gibson of
Fort Gibson, Alaska, has reported the coincidence of poliomyelitis
among the Tanana Indians and the occurrence of distempers in dogs.

“Rattlesnakes—Ishi’s treatment for rattlesnake bite was to bind a toad
or frog on the affected area. This is interesting in the light of the
experiments of Madame Phisalix of the Pasteur Institute, who
demonstrated the antidotal properties of salamandrin, an extract
obtained from salamander skin, and the natural immunity that the
salamander has to viper venom. Macht and Abel have obtained a similar
powerful alkaloid from the toad _Bufo nigra_, called bufagin, which
has some of the properties of strychnin and adrenalin. It has been
used as an arrow poison by South American aborigines. Experiments
which I conducted with salamandrin as an antidote to crotalin, show
that it has a pronounced protective and curative value in the
immunization of guinea pigs and in their cure after being bitten by
the rattlesnake. It is, however, too dangerous and potent a poison
itself to be of any practical value.

“When out camping we killed and cooked a rattlesnake or ‘kemna’. Ishi
refused not only to taste it, but also to eat from the dishes in which
it had been cooked. We ate it, and found that it tasted like rabbit or
fish. Ishi expected us to die. That we did not do so he could only
explain on the grounds that I was a medicine man and used magic
protection.

“Moon—Ishi held the superstition common among uneducated Caucasians,
that it is unwholesome to sleep with the moon shining on one’s face,
so he covered his head completely under his blankets when sleeping in
the open.

“Hygiene—Ishi had wholesome notions of hygiene. When out hunting he
has several times stopped me from drinking water from a stream which
he thought had been contaminated by dwelling houses above.

“His residence in the Museum caused many misgivings in his mind. The
presence of all the bones of the dead, their belongings, and the
mummies were ever a source of anxiety to him. He locked his bedroom
door at night to keep out spirits. When we stored our camping
provender temporarily in the Museum bone room, Ishi was not only
disgusted but genuinely alarmed. It was only after the reassurance
that the ‘bunch a mi si tee’ could not enter through the tin of the
cans that he was relieved.

“Surgery—On some of his visits to the University Hospital, Ishi gazed
through the glass-panelled door of the operating room and watched the
less grewsome scenes therein, wondering no doubt what was the meaning
of this work ... and his questions afterward, though few and
imperfectly understood, showed that he marveled most at the
anaesthetic and that he debated the advisability of such surgical
work.

“Once he saw me remove a diseased kidney. He viewed the sleeping man
with deep wonder. He seemed interested at the methods we employed to
prevent hemorrhage. For days afterwards he asked me if the patient
still lived, and seemed incredulous when I said he did. When he saw an
operation for the removal of tonsils he asked me why it was done. I
told him of the pain and soreness which was indicative of disease, and
necessitated the operation. He conveyed to me the information that
among his people tonsillitis was cured by rubbing honey on the neck,
and blowing ashes down the throat through a hollow stick or quill; no
operations were necessary.

“The only surgical operation with which he seemed familiar was
scarification. This was accomplished by means of small flakes of
obsidian and had as its purpose the strengthening of the arms and legs
of men about to go out on a hunt.

“Herbs—His own knowledge of the use of medicinal herbs was
considerable, as we learned later when he went back to Deer Creek
canyon with us on a three weeks’ camping trip, here he designated
scores of plants that were of technical, medicinal, or economic value.
But he put very little faith in these things. The use of herbs and
drugs seems to have been the province of old women in the tribe.

“There was a hole in the septum of his nose which he had used as a
receptacle for a small piece of wood, as well as for holding
ornaments. When he had a cold he placed in this spot a twig of baywood
or juniper, and indicated to me that this was medicine. It served very
much with him as menthol inhalers do with us. Its influence was
largely psychic but agreeable.

“Magic—The real medicine was magic. The mysteries of the k’uwi, or
medicine man, were of much greater value than mere dosing. Their
favorite charms seem to have been either blowing of smoke and ashes in
certain directions to wield a protective or curative influence, or the
passing of coals of fire through themselves or their patients by means
of sleight of hand. They also sucked out small bits of obsidian or
cactus thorns from their clients, averring that these were the
etiological factors of sickness.

“The principal cause of pain, according to Ishi, was the entrance of
these spines, thorns, bee stings, or, as he called them, ‘pins’, into
the human frame. The medicine man sucked them out, or plucked them
while they were floating in the air in the vicinity of the sick man.
They were then deposited in a small container, usually made of the
dried trachea of a bird, or of a large artery. The ends of this tube
were sealed with pitch or some form of a stopper and the whole thing
taken possession of by the doctor, thus keeping the ‘materia morbosa’
where it could do no further harm.

“The fact that I was able to do sleight of hand: vanish coins, change
eggs into paper, swallow impossible objects at will, and perform
similar parlor magic, convinced Ishi that I was a real doctor, much
more than any medication or surgery at my command. He came,
nevertheless, to our clinic whenever he had a headache, or a bruised
member, or lumbago, and accepted our services with due faith.

“ISHI’S PERSONAL HABITS”

“Sleep—... he slept between blankets in preference to sheets. He had
several flannelette nightshirts but he preferred to sleep naked....

“Clothing—... At first he was offered moccasins, but refused to wear
them. He wanted to be like other people. Usually he wore a bright
colored necktie and sometimes a hat, when he was going down town ...
cotton shirts and (cotton) trousers were his choice. He used a pocket
handkerchief in the most approved manner, and because of his frequent
colds he needed it often.

“Modesty—Ishi, strange to say, was very modest. Although he went
practically naked in the wilds, and, as described by Waterman, upon
his first appearance in Deer Creek Canyon he was seen altogether nude,
nevertheless, his first request after being captured was for a pair of
overalls. He was quite careful to cover his genitalia; when changing
clothes, assumed protective attitudes, and when swimming in the
mountain streams with us wore an improvised breech clout even though
his white companions abandoned this last vestige of respectability.

“Toilet—When well he bathed nearly every day, and he always washed his
hands before meals. He was very tidy and cleanly in all his personal
habits. When camping, he was the only man in our outfit who got up
regularly and bathed in the cold mountain stream every morning.

“Ishi was an expert swimmer.... He used a side stroke and sometimes a
modified breast stroke, but no overhand or fancy strokes; nor did he
dive. He swam under water with great facility and for long distances.
The rapids of Deer Creek were rather full yet he swam them, and
carried my young son hanging to his hair.

“When he was sick he resented being bathed except when ordered by the
nurse or doctor. Like many other primitive people, he considered
bathing injurious in the presence of fever. He never attempted to take
a sweat bath while in civilization, but often spoke of them. I never
saw him brush his teeth, but he rubbed them with his finger, and they
always seemed clean. He washed his mouth out with water after meals.

“His beard was sparse but he plucked it systematically by catching
individual hairs between the blade of a dull jack-knife and his thumb.
In his native state he used a sort of tweezers made of a split piece
of wood. He did this work without the use of a mirror.

“He combed and brushed his hair daily. He washed it frequently.... At
first he had no dandruff, but after two or three years’ contact with
the whites he had some dry seborrhoea, and began to get a trifle gray
at the temples ... he used grease on his scalp when in his native
state; whereas bay leaves and bay nuts he said were heated and reduced
to a semi-solid state, when they were rubbed on the body after the
sweat bath. Here they acted as a soporific, or, as he said, like
whiskey, and the person thus anointed fell into a sweet slumber. The
same substance was rubbed on moccasins to make them waterproof.

“On one occasion he contracted ring worm, probably from a wandering
cat. He was given a sulphur salve for this, and after its cure he
still used the ointment to soften his hands.... He was not susceptible
to ‘poison oak’ ... nor to sunburn. His skin bleached out considerably
while in San Francisco, and became darker when exposed to sunlight.

“... (he) seemed to have the same fondness for sweet-scented soap that
Orientals manifest.

“His personal belongings he kept in a most orderly manner, everything
in his box being properly folded and arranged with care. Articles
which he kept outside of this box he wrapped in newspaper and laid in
systematic arrangement on shelves in his room.

“In working on arrows or flaking obsidian, he was careful to place
newspapers on the floor to catch his chips. In fact, neatness and
order seemed to be part of his self-education.

“In the preparation of food and the washing of dishes he was very
orderly and clean.

“Diet—... After a certain period of this luxury (eating heavily) he
discerned the folly of this course and began eating less, when his
metabolism returned to a more normal balance. Part of this increase
was due to the large quantities of water he drank. Being unaccustomed
to salt, our seasoning was excessive and led to increased hydration of
his bodily tissues. He had a great fondness for sweets.... He tried
and liked nearly all kinds of foods, but seemed to have an aversion
for custards, blanc manges, and similar slimy confections, nor could
he be persuaded to drink milk. He contended that this was made for
babies, while he said that butter ruined the singing voice....

“Matches he took up with evident delight; they were such a contrast to
the laborious methods of the fire drill, or of nursing embers, which
he employed in the wilds.

“... His meat he boiled only about ten minutes, eating it practically
without seasoning.

“His own food in the wilds seems to have been fish, game, acorn meal,
berries, and many roots. Prominent among these latter was the bulb of
the _Brodiaea_. The Indian could go out on an apparently barren
hillside and with a sharp stick dig up enough _Brodiaea_ bulbs in an
hour to furnish food for a good meal. These roots are globular in
shape, with the appearance of an onion, ranging in size from a cherry
to a very small potato. The flavor when raw is like that of a potato,
and when cooked like a roasted chestnut.

“Alcohol—... Ishi himself had no liking for strong drink, although at
one time he purchased a few bottles of beer and drank small quantities
diluted with sugar and water. He called it medicine. His response to
my query regarding whiskey was, ‘Whiskey-tee crazy-aunatee, die man.’

“Tobacco—Occasionally Ishi smoked a cigarette, and he knew the use of
tobacco, having had access to the native herb in the wilds. But he
seldom smoked more than a few cigarettes a day, and frequently went
weeks without any. He disapproved of young people smoking. He chewed
tobacco at times, and spat copiously. Both of these indulgences,
however, he resorted to only when invited by some congenial friend.

“Etiquette—Although uncultured, he very quickly learned the proper use
of knife, fork, and spoon. His table manners were of the very best. He
often ate at my home, where he was extremely diffident; watched what
others did and then followed their examples, using great delicacy of
manner. His attitude toward my wife or any other woman member of the
household was one of quiet disinterest. Apparently his sense of
propriety prompted him to ignore her. If spoken to, he would reply
with courtesy and brevity, but otherwise he appeared not to see her.

“When he wanted to show his disapproval of anything very strongly, he
went through the pantomime of vomiting.

“Thrift—As janitor in the Museum, he was making a competent income,
understood the value of money, was very thrifty and saving, and looked
forward to the day when he could buy a horse and wagon. This seemed to
be the acme of worldly possession to him. He was very happy and well
contented, working a little, playing enough, and surrounded by
friends.

“ISHI’S DISPOSITION AND MENTALITY”

“Disposition—In disposition the Yahi was always calm and amiable.
Never have I seen him vehement or angry. Upon rare occasions he showed
that he was displeased. If someone who he thought had no privilege
touched his belongings, he remonstrated with some show of excitement.
Although he had lived in part by stealing from the cabins of men who
had usurped his country, he had the most exacting conscience
concerning the ownership of property. He would never think of touching
anything that belonged to another person, and even remonstrated with
me if I picked up a pencil that belonged to one of the Museum force.
He was too generous with his gifts of arms, arrow-heads, and similar
objects of his handicraft.

“His temperament was philosophical, analytical, reserved, and
cheerful. He probably looked upon us as extremely smart. While we knew
many things, we had no knowledge of nature, no reserve; we were all
busy-bodies. We were, in fact, sophisticated children.

“His conception of immortality was that of his tribe, but he seemed to
grasp the Christian concept and asked me many questions concerning the
hereafter. He rather doubted that the White God cared much about
having Indians with Him, and he did not seem to feel that women were
properly eligible to Heaven. He once saw a moving picture of the
Passion Play. It affected him deeply. But he misconstrued the
crucifixion and assumed that Christ was a ‘bad man’.

“Use of tools—He was quite adept in the use of such simple tools as a
knife, handsaw, file, and hatchet. He early discovered the advantages
of a small bench vise, and it took the place of his big toe in holding
objects thereafter.... Journeys were measured by days or sleeps ...
(he) was awe-struck when I took him to a sawmill where large cedar
logs were brought in and rapidly sawed up into small bits to be used
in making lead pencils. It would have taken hours for him to fell even
a small tree, and an interminable length of time to split it. But here
was a miracle of work done in a few minutes. It impressed him
greatly....”

In concluding remarks on Indian conflict with pioneer, a word concerning
Indian reservations will not be amiss. The author does best again in
quoting, this time from Kroeber:

“The first reservations established by Federal officers in California
were little else than bull pens. They were founded on the principle,
not of attempting to do something for the native, but of getting him
out of the white man’s way as cheaply and hurriedly as possible. The
reason that the high death rate that must have prevailed among these
makeshift assemblages was not reported on more emphatically is that
the Indians kept running away even faster than they could die.

“The few reservations that were made permanent have on the whole had a
conserving influence on the population after they once settled into a
semblance of reasonable order. They did little enough for the Indian
directly; but they gave him a place which he could call his own, and
where he could exist in security and in contact with his own kind....”

Despite certain undesirable features of Indian Reservations, the general
conclusion is that for a number of tribes survival has been considerably
greater today than would have been the case if the Indians had had to
shift for themselves in competition with the whites.

Chapter VI
HUNTING

Hunting was obviously a very important activity of the Lassen Indians,
not only for survival, but as a means of acquiring the comfort and
security which success brought. Also a good hunter was held in high
esteem socially.

Deer were most sought and the hunter went to considerable effort to get
“deer power” (a sort of guardian spirit) to possess him. This gave him
skill and good luck. Generally only men hunted, sometimes individually,
at other times in small or large groups.

Before going hunting tobacco was often smoked ceremonially with prayers
and singing while the shaman (medicine man) supervised and the hunters’
bodies were anointed with medicine. Weapons to be used were smoked over
a fire, while the hunters talked to their bows and arrows about the
coming hunt. Frequently Atsugewi, Yana, and Yahi hunters also cut
themselves until they bled. This was true especially if their
marksmanship had not been good of late. Cuts were made in the forearm
and charcoal was rubbed in. They often took sweat baths too before
hunting, but the Maidu did not. The latter, however, offered shell beads
to help increase deer power. Atsugewi hunters left offerings of paint,
tobacco, and eagle-down at certain spots in the mountains for luck.

After a youth killed his first game, Maidu and Atsugewi switched him, a
bow string being commonly used. Then the Atsugewi father talked to his
son, blew smoke on him, and sent him out alone into the mountains for at
least five days to seek power. Yana and Yahi youths were not permitted
to touch, skin, or eat any of their first kill of each kind of animal,
lest it spoil their luck. In these tribes the father skinned the animal
and dressed the hide, teaching his son how this was done.

After hunting there were often cleansing activities and ceremonies, and
usually a division of meat although a lone hunter could retain all of
it. It was considered quite bad to come home empty handed. After a bear
had been killed he was spoken to kindly and in sympathetic terms. Deer
eyes were often eaten to give good sharp eyesight to the eater.

In a popular method of deer hunting by all Indians of the Lassen area, a
deer head disguise was worn by the hunter. He approached his quarry
cautiously using screening bushes and moving his antlered head above
them to simulate a buck feeding. Sometimes the hunter carried brush
along in front of himself. The mountain Maidu always used the whole
deerskin for disguise. When close enough the hunter would shoot with bow
and arrow. Since this was a nearly silent weapon, there was no noise to
startle the deer, and so it was sometimes possible to slay two or three
deer on one occasion.

Atsugewi hunters might encircle a small brush covered or wooded
mountain. They set many fires, leaving non-burning gaps where bowmen hid
in holes. The deer were shot as they came out of the burning area.

Mountain Maidu sometimes concealed themselves in pits near deer licks
where they shot the animals in moonlight.

Another hunting method was to drive deer along fences built of brush or
stone or along ropes to which bunches of tules were tied as hanging
streamers. Strategically placed hunters in shallow pits shot the driven
deer as they passed through openings which had been left. Dogs were
frequently used in hunting out and in driving deer.

The brush deer-blind along a well traveled deer trail was used too, as
well as hanging a noose in the deer trail to snare the deer. Still
another means of taking deer was like that of the northern neighbors of
the Atsugewi, the Pit River Tribe or Achomawi. They employed a six or
seven foot deep pit about nine feet long dug with slightly undercut side
walls. This opening was covered and concealed with poles, brush, and
dirt. As the deer trotted along established trails over the disguised
pitfalls they fell through. Or, deer might be driven to such pits,
sometimes with the aid of converging walls or fences in conjunction with
pitfalls. Deer trapped in these pitfalls were killed by strangling from
above with ropes.

Another popular way to secure deer was to follow the animal for one or
more days. The pursuing Indian carried a small amount of food which he
ate to sustain himself while moving. The deer, although swifter afoot
than the hunter, was persistently followed at a steady pace. The animal
did not get a chance to feed properly nor to rest. At length the deer
became weakened to the point where the hunter could approach and shoot
it at close range.

If a hunter were fairly close to a deer and it was moving, he might
shout at it, causing the deer to stop momentarily out of curiosity. This
provided a better chance of bringing the quarry down with bow and arrow.
Deer were sometimes lured closer by whistling with lips, blowing on a
leaf or grass blade held in the hands, or by imitating the cry of a
fawn. A hunter is said occasionally to have been able to sing to a group
of deer, holding their attention while he cautiously approached within
arrow range.

If practical, deer or other game was killed by driving the animals over
cliffs. Elk, mountain sheep, antelope, and reportedly occasionally even
bison were hunted by one or more of the means. Except for the case of
mountain sheep, such animals were probably rare within the territories
of the tribes being considered.

Meat of such large game was prepared for eating after skinning by
roasting in the earth pit ovens to be described in succeeding chapters
or by cutting up and boiling. Much venison and the like was also stored
for winter use. In this case the meat was cut into strips and dried in
the sun or on wooden frames over fires. This was not a smoking, but
rather a drying process. Such jerked meat was stored in large, tightly
woven baskets. Meat fresh or dried was almost invariably eaten with
acorn mush.

Bear hunting was common among tribes of the Lassen area. The American
Black Bear is not aggressive and by no means always black. He is of
moderately large size and often is light or dark brown in color. Indians
liked to hunt the Black Bear in winter, two hunters entering the
hibernating den. One carried a torch and the other a bow and arrow. They
rolled a large block of wood in front of them and shot the bear at point
blank range, then quickly ran out. Wounded, frightened, and in a
semi-stupor, the bear usually stumbled over the wooden block. If he did
not die in the den, but came out, he was shot by other waiting hunters.
Mountain Maidu instead of entering the den smoked the bear out with
pitchy torches planted at the den entrance.

The California Grizzly was much larger, fiercer, and more aggressive.
This grizzly is now extinct, but was common especially in the foothill
and lower mountain slopes of California before the coming of the white
man. Grizzlies were normally engaged only by a large group of hunters
and after considerable ceremonial preparation. Hunters never entered the
den. Two stout poles were crossed in front of the opening with one or
two men holding each—a dangerous job. The bear was spoken to nicely and
urged to come out which he usually soon did. As the bear started to
climb over the poles at the den entrance, the Indians pushed up forcing
the bear’s body against the roof so that he could most easily be shot.
If this maneuver was not successful, a brave hunter enticed the bear to
pursue him while the others shot arrows into the grizzly. Especially
sharp and heavily poisoned arrow points were used on grizzly bear by the
Atsugewi.

It was believed that a man who drank fresh bear blood would be very
healthy thereafter, if he were strong enough. If he were weak, however,
drinking the blood would kill him promptly.

Mountain lion were tracked, sometimes with dogs, sometimes in the snow,
then treed and shot. Wildcats were generally killed in the same way. A
hunter might coax a mountain lion to leap at him by simulating a deer
feeding, using the deer head and skin disguise, but this was a dangerous
practice.

Except in the eastern part of Atsugewi territory where the Apwaruge
lived, rabbits were not plentiful. Yana, Yahi, and Maidu hunted them
more, driving cottontail, snowshoe, and jack rabbits into long nets and
clubbing them to death. In the winter rabbits were sometimes tracked and
shot with bow and untipped arrows.

Other small mammals were shot, caught by dogs, and dug, smoked, or
drowned out of burrows. A stick split at the end was thrust into a
burrow and by twisting was entangled in the creature’s fur sufficiently
to drag him out. Ground squirrels could be outrun and killed by stepping
on them. Skunks, badgers, rats, and more often porcupines were eaten—the
latter being clubbed or stoned to death.

Small and medium sized animals were also caught under stone or log
deadfalls which were propped up to drop on the victim while it was
traveling along a runway, crossing a stream on a log, or when the animal
pulled on a baited trigger. Similar placing was used for setting spring
snares which took advantage of bent tree limbs for power. Long fences
with nooses placed in gaps were used for rabbits, quail, and the like,
and on occasion for creatures as large as deer. Some nooses were even
operated by hand from a place of hiding.

Birds of all sorts were caught too, but live or imitation decoys were
never employed as lures. Woodpeckers were removed from the nest by hand
or else a noose was hung around the nest opening. Some birds were taken
in basketry traps. Waterfowl were shot with bow and arrow and the young
were run down. Eggs were also taken. Some ducks were speared at night
from canoes or driven into nets by use of a canoe with fire at one end.
Frequently nets or snares were suspended at intervals just above a
stream where waterfowl commonly alighted. Ducks and geese were also
driven into the traps in taking off from the water.

Grouse and small birds like robins and blackbirds were shot with blunt
or untipped arrows, usually of one-piece construction.

It is interesting to note that in contrast to other local tribes, the
Yana and Yahi tribes did not employ the following hunting techniques:
burning brush, using bird snaring booths, nets for ducks, geese,
rabbits, or deer, nor was game driven into enclosures or quail secured
by use of net traps or drive fences. Furthermore Yana and Yahi did not
believe that game was immortal.

[Illustration: Atsugewi Snare set on a log lying across a stream.]

It was not an uncommon practice, especially among the mountain Maidu, to
frequently burn off their lands to make for easier travel and to
minimize the possibility of ambush by enemies. The frequent “light”
burnings do not seem to have generated enough heat to have destroyed the
forests. Never the less this practice is not regarded as a wise
conservation as it is definitely injurious to tree and much other plant
reproduction as well as being destructive of organic material in the
soil, damaging the watershed and being unfavorable to certain animal
species, as well as accelerating erosion.

Chapter VII
FISHING

Fishes were one of the four important food categories consumed by
Indians of the Lassen region. Land-locked and other non-migratory
Rainbow Trout were abundantly available in mountain streams and in some
lakes. Steelhead Trout penetrated the territories of our four tribes
too. Salmon, however, did not go so far upstream, only rarely coming up
Hat Creek, for instance, into Atsugewi lands. For the most part this
tribe of Indians visited the Pit River to the north in the autumn. They
paid the Achomawi, through whose territory this fine salmon stream
flowed, for the privilege of catching salmon by giving up a share of the
catch to them. The larger streams in south Yana, Yahi, and mountain
Maidu country contained salmon and steelhead, but it seems that these
tribes also made bargains with the Valley Indians for salmon fishing
privileges or else made fishing forays to the Sacramento River.

[Illustration: Atsugewi Bow-type net. This kind was usually used in
small streams where it covered the full width of the stream bed.
Fish were commonly driven into it, then the handle was raised.]

Gill nets about three feet high and as much as 30 feet long were
commonly used. Spawning trout in the spring were speared in large
numbers. Although old informants have denied the practice,
Boonookoo-ee-menorra (Mrs. Selina La Marr of the Atsugewi) tells of
catching Rainbow Trout by hand from Manzanita Creek banks about fifty
years ago when her family came up in the summer to fish. Trout were
speared by the Atsugewi with two pointed or four pointed spears instead
of the common single pointed version. Bone or Serviceberry wood might be
used for the tips. Spears were used not only from stream banks, but,
especially at night, from a canoe equipped with a torch in front. One
man or more would spear the fish while a person, sometimes a woman,
paddled the craft from the rear. The torch consisted of four
mountain-mahogany sticks bound together with pitch down the center.

[Illustration: A northeast Maidu bow-fish net about forty inches
long. It was used for fish other than salmon. Northwest and southern
Maidu did not use such nets, employing seine nets instead (after
Dixon).]

It is interesting to note that the practice of shooting fish with bow
and arrow was not carried on by any tribes of the Lassen area, although
the eastern people of the Pit River Indians (Achomawi), the western
Shasta, Wintu, and foothill Maidu did do so.

Only Atsugewi, of the tribes we are considering, trapped fish in
converging weirs into which fish might be driven. In the autumn, streams
were sometimes diverted by damming. The fish trapped in the ponds
remaining were scooped out with baskets or nets. Mountain Maidu drove
fish into traps and caught lamprey eels in dip or scoop nets. Bow-type
nets illustrated in the text were used with the bow bent ends down
resting on the bed of the stream, the pole being raised to trap the
fish. The net was preferably as wide as the stream.

All local tribes fished with lines and hooks which were made by lashing
a sharp piece of bone to a section of twig, at an acute angle. Atsugewi
and mountain Maidu also used a “gorge” for angling. This was a slender
piece of bone two or three inches long fastened near the middle and
sharpened at both ends. Hooks were sometimes baited with meat,
grasshoppers, or large flies, but man-made “flies” as fishermen know
them today were not used. Sometimes meat or grasshopper bait was used by
Atsugewi on fish-lines without any hook. Atsugewi women occasionally
fished with baskets and with hook and line. Hooks were often tied in a
series on a line attached either on both banks of the stream or to a
pole secured in the bank or tied to tules or to brush, and left over
night. A series of basket traps was sometimes likewise stretched across
a stream.

[Illustration: A Klamath fish hook similar to those used by local
tribes. Single barbed hooks were also employed.]

Salmon fishing was done largely with harpoons which differ from spears
in having one or more movable barbs or toggles of bone. These opened
when the harpoon was pulled back (outward in the victim) thus securing
the catch all the more firmly. This was necessary for such large and
heavy fish as salmon. Yana tribes caught their salmon with either hook
and line or by spearing with a two pointed harpoon.

Natural falls were favored fishing sites. There Indians caught salmon
and steelhead trout as the fish attempted to scale the falls. Long
handled nets were used. Atsugewi went so far as to build scaffoldings to
assist either in this method of fishing or from which to harpoon large
fish. In the latter case many whitish rocks, where available, were
thrown into the stream to build up a light colored bottom for better
visibility in harpooning or spearing.

After the fish were caught they were killed by striking with a stick as
a general practice. Mountain Maidu sometimes killed fish by striking
their heads on rocks. The central Yana, interestingly enough, killed
fish by biting them!

In quiet portions of streams fish were poisoned by placing certain
pounded plant materials in the water. Yana and Yahi used crushed
Soaproot; Atsugewi used pulverized Wild Parsley. Wild Parsley
application made the water bluish, and caused the fish soon to rise to
the surface of the water floating belly-up. Where suitable quiet pools
did not exist in a stream, they were sometimes formed by the Indians
through temporary damming. Buckeye nut pulp, which is poisonous, was not
used in this area for poisoning fish.

Long basketry fish traps, usually constructed by men, were also
utilized. The design and proportions of these varied with the tribe.

Each of the Lassen area tribes had taboos which prevented youths, and in
the case of Atsugewi, their parents too, from eating the first fish each
youth caught.

[Illustration: Plan of Maidu open basketry fish trap (after Dixon)
several feet long. The pointed end was untied to extract the fish.]

Chubs and minnows, spurned by white man, were driven into nets and
eaten. At lower elevations, where waters were warmer and sluggish,
suckers provided a common source of food fish. The Indians also not
infrequently dove for crawfish and fresh water mussels. These were
gathered in net sacks by male Indians of all local tribes. Yana and Yahi
roasted mussels but did not boil them and never dried them for later
use. A flat rock might be carried on the shoulders to assist the diving
Indians.

Some fish were cooked by roasting over coals or by boiling. Most trout,
however, were cleaned, head and backbone removed, and then strung up on
poles to dry. No salt was used in the process. The dried fish was
carried to camp or village in large baskets. Dried trout was tied into
small bales for storage and placed in baskets or in pits dug in the
ground for safe-keeping. Salmon were usually cooked in earth pit ovens,
then dried and crumbed by Atsugewi and mountain Maidu for later use.
This was of necessity an autumnal activity. Yana and Yahi stored their
salmon in dried slabs, pulverizing it as needed.

[Illustration: Atsugewi basketry fish trap (after Garth).]

Chapter VIII
GATHERING AND PREPARATION OF OTHER FOODS

As has been pointed out earlier under “California Indians”, these tribes
had a common food pattern. Although there was some difference in the
relative importance of the four major types of food to the several
tribes due to varying availability, the California Indians ate (1) game,
especially deer, (2) fish, particularly salmon and trout, (3) roots and
bulbs which the women dug, and (4) fruits and seeds of a wide variety,
the most important of which were acorns.

Besides fish and venison, many kinds of flesh food were eaten by the
Indians of the Lassen area: fox, wolf, grizzly and black bear, skunk,
raccoon, porcupine, rabbit, owl, fish, fresh water mussel, and turtle
being most common. They also ate with apparent relish a variety of
insects and the like including crickets, grasshoppers, angleworms, red
ant eggs, and yellow-jacket larvae.

Game which was not eaten by either Atsugewi or mountain Maidu was
coyote, elk, antelope, and all snakes and lizards. The last two items
were almost universally shunned by California Indians. Many California
tribes including Yana and Yahi refused to eat dog meat, some of them
believing canine flesh to be poisonous. That mountain Maidu was one of
the few tribes which ate dog flesh whenever it was available is denied
by Dixon. Atsugewi ate it only as a last resort when rare, near-famine
conditions prevailed or during times of severe epidemic. Canine flesh
was believed by them to be a powerful and perhaps somewhat dangerous
medicine. Buzzards seem to have been about the only birds which were not
eaten.

Each tribe had certain taboos on eating game. An Atsugewi did not, for
example, eat wildcat, gopher, hawk, lamprey eel, or caterpillars.
Mountain Maidu did not eat mountain lion, badger, raven, or crawfish.

Heart of deer was taboo to all males among Atsugewi and to all children
and youths of the mountain Maidu. The foetus of all animals and also
deer fawns could not be eaten by any except Atsugewi, Yana, and Yahi old
men and old women. Animal foetus was, however, allowed as food to all
mountain Maidu adults. Bear foetus was skinned by Atsugewi and fed to
old women because it was so tender. Likewise, Yana and Yahi made foetus
soup for old folks to eat. Deer liver was taboo to Atsugewi boys and
youths. Taboo also among Atsugewi was the eating of fish and deer meat
together. Among mountain Maidu the eating of salt on bear meat was
prohibited. Many other food combinations were outlawed by these and
other California tribes.

Deer backbone was ground up and eaten dry by mountain Maidu or molded
into small cakes, then baked and eaten while Atsugewi would dry deer
backbones with meat still adhering, grind it up, and then boil the meal
before eating it. Yana also ate pulverized meal of other bones after
cooking. Marrow was relished; it was a special delicacy for Yana
children.

Securing of large game and fish and their preparation has been described
earlier.

Such animals as wildcat, raccoons, foxes, et cetera were skinned and
cooked in earth ovens by all local tribes. These were pits sometimes as
much as six feet wide and lined with rocks. A large fire was built in
the pit to thoroughly heat the rock lining, after which any unburned
debris was removed. The animal to be roasted was laid in the pit on a
layer of green pine needles, or various other leaves, depending upon the
tribe. A large heated rock was placed inside the body cavity and smaller
hot rocks were wedged under the fore and hind legs which were then all
tied tightly together. A flat heated rock might be placed on top of the
carcass and the whole was covered with pine needles and the like, and
finally with hot ashes and sometimes dirt. The roasting proceeded for
half a day or so. Blood and fat might be placed in the intestine
membranes of larger animals (especially wildcat) to form sausage and
cooked in ashes. Mountain Maidu also boiled blood for eating.

Quills of porcupine and hair of badger, squirrel, or other small mammals
might be singed off before cooking instead of skinning the animals.
Ground squirrels were sometimes merely gutted and then roasted in ashes
without further preparation. When Yana (and probably Yahi) did this,
they then skinned the ground squirrels after cooking and mashed the
whole bodies by pounding before eating them. Rabbits were roasted over
coals and broken into pieces for eating. Both mountain Maidu and
Atsugewi sometimes broiled small mammals on a single stick over coals.

Turtles were cooked alive in hot ashes. If they crawled out they were
pushed back in again.

Duck eggs were boiled in baskets using hot rocks—cooked they would keep
for a week or two. Yana tribes roasted quail eggs in ashes. Birds were
gutted, feathers singed off in flames and roasted on sticks or roasted
in oven pits. Roasting was invariably used for the large birds such as
ducks, geese, and swans.

Atsugewi practiced some fascinating gathering techniques in which they
were not unique. Insects were gathered by both men and women.
Grasshoppers and crickets not infrequently appeared in large numbers.
These were collected early in the morning while still sluggish with
cold. When very abundant they were scraped with sticks from branches of
bushes into large burden baskets. During the heat of the day
grasshoppers were effectively collected by singeing them. Some tribes
merely burned dry grassy fields after which the insects were easily
picked up. Atsugewi made a long willow “rope” to which many bunches of
dry grass were fastened. This was set afire and men carrying this
blazing band stretched tightly between them ran across open grassland
where the grasshoppers were numerous. The insects jumped into the flames
and were thus killed. Yana pulverized grasshoppers and other insects
without cooking them.

Atsugewi roasted crickets in the pit oven. These were then dried two
days and finally eaten or stored. If they had been stored, they were
pounded before being eaten.

Salmon flies were plentiful along Pit River and Lost Creek (outside of
the park). These were hand picked from the banks early in the morning.
The wings were removed and the bodies boiled before eating by the
Atsugewi.

When yellow-jackets, always carnivorous (meat eaters), were seen buzzing
about, Atsugewi would tie a white flower petal to a grasshopper leg.
When the yellow-jacket picked this morsel up and flew away with it
toward its nest, the Indians would run after the yellow-jacket which was
easy to follow on account of the conspicuous flower petal it carried
along. Thus yellow-jacket nests were found. A line was marked around the
nest area with the fingers. This line was supposed to increase the size
of the nest. Pine needles were then stacked over the nest and burned to
kill the winged insects. This done, the nest was dug up and roasted
alongside a fire, thus cooking the maggot-like grubs inside. These were
considered to be quite a delicacy. According to Dixon, mountain Maidu
young folks were denied this delicacy, but not so among the Yana. Dried
grasshoppers, crickets, and yellow-jacket larvae were foods often used
as items of trade.

Angleworms were collected by first driving a digging stick a few inches
into the moist soil, then moving the top about. The consequent
disturbing of the ground made the worms crawl out. Although other
California tribes made angleworm soup, Atsugewi, Yana, and probably Yahi
sometimes roasted angleworms between hot rocks. Maidu reportedly dried
worms for eating.

Red ant eggs were eaten by Indians too. Atsugewi baked them in earth pit
ovens, while mountain Maidu parched them with coals. Mountain Maidu also
ate certain caterpillars, but the other tribes of the Lassen area did
not.

[Illustration: A. Sharpened iron rod digging stick with pine cross
piece wrapped in coarse cotton cloth used for about forty years by
Mrs. Mullen of Hat Creek. Length about four feet.

B. Another recent mountain mahogany digging stick made by Mr. and
Mrs. Lyman LaMarr (Boonookoo-ee-menorra). The point of the green
wood was toughened in flame. Stick three and one half feet long.]

Indians of this region did not carry on any agriculture, that is they
did not plant crops for food or other purposes, but collected those
which grew wild. It was, however, a common practice to burn some areas
over regularly to stimulate growth of edible seed producing plants.
Women always gathered the vegetable materials and prepared them for use.

Roots and bulbs provided vital foods to the aborigines also. These were
procured with a digging stick. In this region it was blunt at the top
with a tapered point at the digging end. Atsugewi fastened a short cross
piece on top to serve as a handle. The digging stick was made by this
tribe of green mountain-mahogany wood with the digging point hardened by
scorching in the flame. After the coming of white man, the same design
was retained, but an iron rod replaced the mountain-mahogany digging
shaft.

In use, the digging stick was thrust into the ground next to the plant
whose root was to be secured. The handle portion was worked sideways a
couple of times, then pulled downward toward the operator. The point
very effectively brought the root out of the ground. Roots were
customarily tossed into a large cone-shaped carrying basket which was
held in place on the digging woman’s back by a chest band over her
chest. Some of the load in the basket might also be supported by a band
from the basket over the Indian woman’s forehead.

Roots were cleaned by rubbing (sometimes with sand) in a shallow
bowl-shaped basket of a rough coarse mesh weave of willow ribs, like
that used for cleaning acorns. The whole was dipped in water frequently.
Rubbing usually continued until the skins were entirely removed.

The most important item of this type collected in large amount for food
is known as epos locally, or “peh-ts-koo” among the old Atsugewi. The
plant belongs to the parsley family and stands one to two feet high.
Actually, probably more than one species was eaten by Indians of the
Lassen area. These plants are not unlike except in detail. All had sweet
carrot-like taproots about two inches long. Garth states that Atsugewi
ate the species _Pteridendia bolanden_ which apparently corresponds to
the botanists’ _Perideridia bolanderi_ or _Eulophus bolanderi_; also
probably _Carum_ or _Perideridia oregona_ and _californica_. Common
English names for epos are squaw root or yampah. Epos roots were dried
and stored, then ground up for use. This food item was made into either
soup or bread. The finished product had a fine sweet meaty or nutty
taste, and was held in high esteem. Obviously this constituted an
important vegetable in the diet.

At least two kinds of camas bulbs and _brodeia_ bulbs were roasted in
the earth pit oven, ground to pulp, shaped into cakes, and rebaked.
These were then either eaten or dried and stored. The latter process was
not employed by mountain Maidu. If the baked camas cakes were stored,
they would be soaked with water before eating. Camas cakes were not made
into soup.

Tiger lily bulbs were roasted in earth pit ovens and eaten immediately.
They were a highly prized food.

Wild onion was used too, but usually with other root foods as a
flavoring.

The foregoing are but a few of the most extensively eaten roots. Many
others, especially those of the lily and parsley families, were used by
tribes of the Lassen region.

Yana tribes robbed gophers of stores of edible roots and bulbs. These
were found by probing for burrows and digging out the animals’ food
storage chambers. Men usually did this, which is an exception to the
general rule that women only collected vegetable materials.

Acorns were probably the most important single food of California
Indians. Surprisingly, this was true even in eastern parts of the
territories of the Atsugewi (Apwaruge), mountain Maidu, and others where
acorns were scarce or wanting entirely. Indians frequently traded for
acorns or made long journeys for them. Acorns of the black oak were
generally preferred over other kinds. Nearly all varieties were used for
food on occasion, however. It is interesting to note that Modoc and
Klamath Indians were exceptions in not using acorns for food.

In the fall, usually in September, acorns were gathered by women after
the ripe nuts had been knocked from the oaks with long poles, or by men
and young agile girls climbing the trees to strike the fruit with
straight sticks or staves. To aid in climbing large smooth tree trunks,
Atsugewi men used sapling ladders on which part of branches were left
attached to serve for footholds. Mountain Maidu on the other hand used a
very unique two poled ladder with buckskin rungs. Acorns were carried to
villages by women in stages, using baskets about the size of nail kegs.

First spring food gathering each year was marked by rites in which the
shamans, or medicine men, conducted praying ceremonies. Atsugewi
conducted three of these. In May first epos roots were gathered and sung
over by shamans. They examined the roots and prophesied whether the
women who had dug them were going to be sick. Those who were going to be
sick dug roots all day. In the evening these were dumped into piles and
women shamans sang over these for half the night to make the threatened
women healthy. Each woman gatherer participating then took home the
roots she had dug leaving some for the shamans, who cooked and ate them.
A second first food ceremony consisted of a ceremonial feast of fruit
and vegetable materials with fish which the men brought. In the third
such rite, root digging women threw away the first roots they dug that
season and prayed to the effect: “Don’t make me poor. Give me good luck.
You may have this one.”

In autumn, mountain Maidu held their first fruit ceremonies. Large
groups of women went out to gather acorns. Acorn mush was made
immediately of the first batch collected. The shamans ate some and
prayed. Portions of this batch were then eaten by the rest of the
assemblage. After that it was all right for anyone to gather and to use
acorns of the new crop.

Local tribes stored acorns in the shell either indoors in large baskets
or outside in pits or in large hoppers or granaries covered with bark.
The details of these varied with the several tribes. Maidu except for
the “mountain tribe” and Yana shelled, split, and slightly dried some of
their acorns, and placed them in basketry storage bins lined with
broadleafed maple leaves. Maidu ate twelve different kinds of acorns,
but the favorites were the black oak (_Quercus kelloggii_), _golden cup
oak_ maul, or canyon oak (_Quercus chrysolepis_), and sierra live oak
(_Quercus wislizenii_) acorns.

In preparation, acorns were cracked by up-ending each on a flat rock and
striking the point with any convenient small stone. Sometimes small
acorns were cracked with the teeth. Though usually a woman’s job, young
folks and men might help with the task.

[Illustration: Basaltic lava mortar from Yana territory, about ten
inches high.]

The thin brownish skin which covers the acorn kernels was removed by
rubbing vigorously in rough porous baskets made entirely of willow ribs.
Water was not used. Indians of the Lassen area did not employ stone
mortars for grinding acorns as was the practice in other parts of
California. Stone mortars were always found, not made, and were used for
ceremonial purposes, in the belief that these had been made by Coyote.
However, Maidu families cherished portable stone mortars. They were kept
buried at some distance from the dwelling, and dug up for occasional
inspection. Bed-rock acorn pounding holes are not found in this region
either except for the Maidu area. Instead, acorn meats were placed in
hopper baskets lacking bottoms. This basketry mortar hopper rested with
the small open end down on a heavy flat stone. The pounding basket was
held in place by the Indian woman’s knees as she sat in front of and
straddling it. In one hand she wielded a stone pestle, flat on the
grinding end. With the other hand she stirred the acorn material so that
the coarse pieces worked toward the center to get the full impact of the
pounding. The hopper basket was not always used, by the mountain Maidu,
the pounding often being done merely on a flat rock slab, the woman’s
free hand continually brushing the acorn material back to the center.
Acorn meal was ground until it was as fine as flour. The coarse pieces
were separated from the fine by a process which employed a flattish
piece of wood or bark a foot or so across. Sometimes a basketry plaque
was used. A portion of ground meal was placed on this tray which was
held firmly at one side and inclined toward the operator. The other edge
of the plaque was shaken, causing the coarse material to roll into a
container held in the lap for repounding while the fine flour remained
on the plaque. A small brush, generally made from the pounded and dried
root of the soap-plant, was used to brush the flour off and into the
cooking basket. Mountain Maidu, according to Voegelin, actually did sift
acorn meal through open-work baskets though this was not a common
practice even among members of this tribe.

White oak and some other acorn flour could be used for cooking without
further preparation. Atsugewi preferred black oak acorns which had to be
leached to remove the bitter tannic acid before using. To do this the
flour was placed in a shallow depression on clean sand over porous
earth, usually, but Yana used loosely woven baskets for the purpose, and
in recent times it has become common practice to place cloth flour
sacking over a screen or sieve. Cold water was poured over the meal
until it was nearly free of bitterness. Warm water was then employed
briefly, but hot water was never used, for it would make the flour tend
to jell. Sand was removed from the bottom of the flour by touching the
bottom of a handful of the moist material to water. The flour held
together, but the sand grains dropped off. The flour could be dried and
stored at this point, but was usually used as it was prepared.

Portions of about two or three quarts of acorn flour were placed in
cooking baskets a foot or more in diameter. Water was added and then hot
stones were dropped in. These smoothly rounded stones, of any shape and
from one and a half to three inches in diameter, had been heated in an
open fire. They were quickly dipped into water to remove ashes before
being put into the mush cooking basket. The method of handling these
cooking stones seems to have varied. Present day Atsugewi say a small
looped stick was used, but old informants stated that two forked sticks
were employed. Stirring had to be continuous lest the cooking stones
scorch the basket. Atsugewi used any convenient stick for this, but Yana
had a small oak paddle. After boiling a short while the acorn mush
became light greyish or brownish in color; when cooled it jellied quite
firmly. Acorn mush was commonly eaten warm with meat, from small
individual baskets. Spoons were unknown in the Lassen area so acorn mush
was eaten with index and second fingers. Mountain Maidu made their acorn
mush of a more liquid consistency so that it was often consumed by
drinking.

Acorn bread was made by using less water and adding a small amount of
reddish iron-bearing or blackish salt-bearing soil by Atsugewi, but
mountain Maidu left this ingredient out. The paste was molded into
biscuit or loaf-shaped forms, wrapped in leaves and baked all night in
earth pit ovens. Yana sometimes added red soil to their acorn bread
making it brightly colored. Usually black oak acorns were used for bread
by the Yana tribes and white oak for soup.

That acorns are a fine food is indicated by the following analysis of
the uncooked meal. The proportions vary somewhat, but not importantly
among the several kinds of acorns used: 21% fat, 5% protein, 62%
carbohydrate, and 14% water, mineral, and fiber. In cooked acorn mush
the proportions remain the same relatively, except, of course, for the
greatly increased water content.

Buckeye nuts, not used much by Atsugewi, were important to other Indians
of California, especially those residing at lower elevations. These
fruits were gathered when ripe, then shelled, pounded and soaked in
loosely woven baskets until the poisonous juice was leached out. The
pulpy mass was next squeezed to remove excess water. Unlike acorn meal
buckeye pulp was eaten uncooked. Yana crushed their buckeyes with their
feet and leached the material in creeks, though sometimes hot water was
used.

Nuts of digger pine and sugar pine were highly regarded as food. Men
climbed trees and picked digger pine cones or shook limbs to dislodge
sugar pine cones. The cones were placed on end and covered with dry
grass which was burned, ridding the cones of pitch. After this heat
treatment, sugar pine nuts came out easily when cone scales were pulled
back. After singeing the heavy digger pine cones were hit with rocks to
obtain the large nuts they contained.

The white sweet crusty deposit occasionally found on the bark of sugar
pines was relished as candy by Atsugewi. However, it had a laxative
property which mountain Maidu recognized and reputedly employed as such.

A variety of small plant seeds also provided tasty nutrition. Several
members of the sunflower family including balsam root species and mules
ears, and others were used by all local tribes. Such seeds were usually
collected by beating them with paddle-shaped basketry seed beaters into
burden baskets. They were then parched with coals in flat trays, placed
in flat baskets and worked about with stones until freed of skins. Seeds
were winnowed by tossing them up allowing wind to carry hulls and skins
away. The seeds were then pulverized with a small stone or muller, being
rolled or rubbed on a larger rock slab generally referred to as a
metate. Such seeds were eaten dry by Atsugewi, Yana, and Yahi without
grinding, or the flour might be moistened and molded into cakes about
the size of biscuits and eaten without further cooking. However, Yana
also cooked certain sunflower seeds and the yellow blossoming heads of
the small (_Helianthella_) sunflower were themselves cooked and eaten.

Clover tops were collected in summer and eaten fresh by all local
tribes. Mountain Maidu also baked them in earth pit ovens, then dried
and stored the material to be recooked in winter for making soup.
Atsugewi cooked clover roots in ovens. Young thistle stalks were eaten
raw as was the foliage of several carrot-like plants. Mushrooms, fresh,
roasted, or dried were eaten also. Young soap-plant stems were eaten
fresh or baked and dried for winter use by Yana tribes.

Manzanita berries were gathered by all Indians of the Lassen region in
July and August. These berries were knocked into burden baskets with a
stick. They were dried, stored in pits, pounded when needed, and sifted
as fine meal. This was moistened and molded into biscuit-sized cakes and
put away until wanted. Either fresh flour or the cakes were eaten plain
or put into water and drunk. One investigator reported fermentation of
manzanita cider and its use as a mild intoxicant, but this appears to
have been the exception rather than the rule. The drink, of
lemonade-like character, was usually consumed fresh. Manzanita cider was
conveyed to the mouth by dipping a deer tail sop into the liquid, and
then by sucking it. Small cakes were made of a mixture of manzanita and
wild plum flours. Yana and Yahi also ate manzanita berries as such
either fresh, or roasted and dried.

Red berries of skunk or squaw bush were gathered in midsummer, washed,
dried, and stored. They were pounded into flour in a mortar basket,
mixed with manzanita flour and drunk. Elderberries were mashed and mixed
with manzanita flour and stored as cakes.

Wild plums were prepared by removing seeds. These were then eaten fresh
or dried for storage.

Chokecherries and service berries were put into baskets when ripe and
mashed. The paste was eaten without cooking.

Gooseberries, huckleberries, currants, Oregon-grape, buckthorn, juniper,
thimble, and elderberries were eaten fresh, too, but juniper fruits
might be dried and pounded into flour and stored.

Another item used as food was salt which mountain Maidu and Yana
gathered locally in mineral form. The Atsugewi also imported it from
Round Mountain in North Yana territory or made expeditions to this site
to gather the dark salt material from a certain marsh. This salty earth
was shaped into black loaves and dried. It was not only used for
flavoring, but the black soil was also eaten as such by some
individuals. Atsugewi had a local source of salt, however, by collecting
fine whitish crystals in the early mornings from the blades of salt
grass which was run between the fingers. Atsugewi used salt for salmon
and venison in cooking, but not in drying processes.

Pine pitch was chewed, but Atsugewi also used milkweed chewing gum.

As for eating customs, Atsugewi ate three meals each day. Mountain Maidu
just prepared two real meals. Hands were washed after eating deer and
bear meats. Mountain Maidu wiped faces and hands with bark and grass
after eating.

There was a well defined division of labor among California Indians. Men
would carry water for unusually long distances or heavy logs for
firewood, but women usually carried water, wood, acorn and root crops,
and the like. In the case of moving camp, however, men carried the
heaviest burdens. The most important division of labor was the
delegation to men of all activities concerning animals and animal
products, and to women all pertaining to vegetable materials. Women, for
instance, collected materials for basketry and made all the baskets,
except that men often made basketry fish traps and nets. Women dug roots
and cooked all food except meat which men normally cooked. Exception to
this rule was necessarily made when men were away on hunting trips or at
war. Men usually built the houses, made moccasins and skin clothing too.

Among Atsugewi and mountain Maidu only men made fire, but this was
accomplished by both sexes among the Yana and Yahi.

CHAPTER IX
HOUSES AND FURNISHINGS

The Atsugewi used earth-covered lodges as their permanent winter
dwellings. These varied in size from about nine feet in length, for a
single family, to more than thirty feet in length for a chief’s house
which was usually larger than other houses. Most frequently houses were
about twenty feet long and somewhat narrower, being occupied by three to
five families. The earth lodge was elliptical in shape with one center
post planted firmly in the earth floor somewhat back of true center.
This supported beams running to two smaller secondary posts and to earth
shoulders which resulted from excavation of the entire floor to a depth
of about three feet. On the beams other poles or rafters and bark slabs
(usually of incense-cedar) were laid. The whole sloping roof was then
covered with pine needles and a layer of earth.

The main entrance was through a hole about in the center of the roof.
Over this a heavy mat was placed in bad weather. This opening also
served as a smoke hole. A ladder made of two poles with cross pieces
tied on with serviceberry withes was used inside.

[Illustration: The Northeast (mountain) Maidu earth lodge plan used
only three primary posts plus secondary entrance posts.]

logs or poles
a fireplace
b mainpost with forked top
c front posts with forked tops

A secondary entrance of small size, used by children, was built
horizontally at ground level on the south (front) end of the house. It
projected tunnel-like a short distance beyond the lodge outside wall.
The main purpose of this ground-level opening was to act as a ventilator
duct to supply draft for proper burning of the cooking and house warming
fire which burned in front of the center post. At night the ventilator
duct was closed. This reduced air supply, causing the fire to burn very
slowly. Glowing coals developed as a result. These produced reduced but
adequate heat for the occupants who slept with their feet to the fire.
Men did all of the house construction work except for excavation. The
women did this with digging sticks and wooden or basketry scoops with
which they threw the dirt out of the pit. Excavation of the floor of the
lodge not only made it easier to construct a strong house, but
contributed materially to the warmth of the standard winter house.

[Illustration: Typical winter house of the local permanent Indian
villages at lower elevations.]

There was no furniture as such. Each family used an assigned portion of
the house, and cooked its own food, but utilized the central communal
fire. A thin layer of grass, carefully kept away from the fire, covered
the floor. The Indians slept on the floor on mats made of tule. During
the day these and the sleeping blankets were rolled up and provided the
only seats. However, sitting usually consisted of squatting on the
floor.

Blankets of deer and elk skin were generally used. Atsugewi also used
loose tule or grass blankets and all our tribes employed both woven
rabbit skin and patchwork rabbit or fox blankets. Yana in addition to
all the foregoing utilized bear skins; sometimes they removed the hair
from their blankets.

Atsugewi pillows were of bundles of leaves or grass while those of the
mountain Maidu were harder, being merely piles of small poles, blocks of
wood, or rocks.

Interior earth walls of the houses were sometimes hung with tule mats or
skins fastened with pegs to prevent dirt from sloughing off and rolling
onto the floor. A few shelves might also be provided by laying wooden
slabs on sticks driven into the dirt walls.

[Illustration: Atsugewi bark house]

There were other less substantial winter houses consisting either of
small double lean-tos of bark slabs or conical houses on frameworks of
slender poles and with shallow excavations. Some dirt was thrown against
the outside walls for added warmth. Lazy people, who were usually
consequently poor in the necessities and comforts of normal Indian life,
lived in this more flimsy type of house. Also, women when indisposed
repaired to such huts. A doorway was left in the siding to be closed by
a tule mat in these little houses. They were also equipped with small
smoke holes for central fires.

Atsugewi summer houses as such really did not exist. Summer camps were
little more than circular enclosures of brush, juniper, or other conifer
limbs or of rock. These were ten or fifteen feet across with openings to
the east. There was no roof, although branches and bark slabs might be
put over crude frames in rainy weather. If a person were caught in a
sudden shower he might make a temporary shelter by leaning bark slabs,
if available, against a large rock or log lying on the ground.

Atsugewi did not have any separate sweat houses nor dancing or assembly
chambers, but used the larger earth lodge houses for these purposes. The
largest belonged to chiefs and to other well-to-do Indians. Heat for
sweating was provided directly by fire and not by production of steam as
was the case with Plains Indians who threw water on hot stones. In
recent years, however, after introduction of the horse, Atsugewi learned
the latter technique and also constructed Plains Indian type sweat
houses of one to three person capacity. These were dome shaped, and
built of willow poles set in the ground in a circle. The tops were bent
over and tied down, and this framework was covered with skins.

Old type sweating was for men only, but Indian women—usually wives—also
sweated with men in the new style separate sweat houses. Old time
Atsugewi purposes in sweating were for gaining success in hunting, in
gambling, and for general good luck. Some praying was done, but there
were no formalized ceremonies or dances amongst the Atsugewi. Men
sometimes slept in sweat houses.

In the case of all local tribes sweating was followed by a cold plunge,
if available nearby. Lacking this facility, a cold sponge bath was
taken.

The mountain Maidu earth lodge for dwelling and sweating was similar to
that of the Atsugewi. However, northeast Maidu earth lodges “koom” were
simpler and smaller than those of northwest and southern Maidu. Three
posts, often forked were used in place of 10 or 11 employed for valley
lodges. Excavation was about three feet deep, circular in plan, and from
18 to 40 feet across. A large flat stone was placed upright at the foot
of the mainpost between it and the fire in the center. The vertical
walls of the excavation were usually covered or lined with vertically
placed whole or split logs or with bark slabs. Logs were lain
horizontally on the three posts as indicated on the accompanying sketch.
Radial rafters supporting the roof were placed on these beams and
sloping downward to the ground surface outside as well as to two small
posts at the small openway or ventilator passage. Cross poles were
placed horizontally on the rafters and on these, large pieces of bark,
branches, and pine needles were successively laid. Lastly, a heavy
covering of soil 8 to 20 inches thick was heaped on the structure. On
top in the center a smokehole was left, large enough to serve as the
main entrance originally, but after the coming of white man, the
smokehole was made smaller, and, instead, the originally small
ventilator tunnel which sloped from floor level up to the ground surface
outside was enlarged, thus supplanting the smokehole as the main
entrance. Originally a ladder of two poles with cross pieces tied on
with grapevine or other withes gave vertical access from the floor to
the smokehole entrance. Dixon reports that a notched log was sometimes
used for the purpose among mountain Maidu.

The koom or lodge was occupied from November to March and was situated
on the edges of wide meadows in mountain Maidu areas. At lower elevation
occupancy was more or less continuous.

Mountain Maidu did not have separate sweat houses. They always used a
large earth dwelling lodge for the purpose. This was similar to the
Atsugewi practice. These Maidu did, however, have a formalized sweat
dance. Also different from the Atsugewi was the practice of men using
the sweat house for gambling, handicraft work, and competitive singing.

The “hoe-bow” of the mountain Maidu was a hut, 8 to 15 feet in diameter
and excavated 12 to 15 inches deep. Two main poles were securely tied
near the end. From the resulting “V” at the top, shorter poles were laid
to a pair of slender posts about three feet high and set about three
feet apart along the edge of the excavation. Against this frame
branches, bark, and leaves were piled and earth was heaped around the
bottom. The doors of all such bark huts opened to the south and were
hung with a skin or tule mat.

The rude summer shelter or shade provider was just like that of the
Atsugewi.

Information on Yahi house details are somewhat scanty, but in all
probability they were small conical bark-covered huts while some larger
earth lodges were built to house several families—in general similar,
but perhaps smaller than those of the other tribes of the Lassen area.
The large pretentious lodge, constructed solely for sweating and
ceremonies, of the Sacramento Valley tribes seems to have been lacking
among all of our local tribes.

The common bark hut dwelling of the Yana was apparently built over a
circular depression two feet deep, the top of the house rising about six
feet above the ground. It was probably like the mountain Maidu huts,
being a series of poles resting on the edges of the excavation. These
met and were tied at the top to form a cone of low slope, although some
informants claimed that the posts were set so firmly that tying together
was omitted. The frames were covered with pine and incense-cedar bark
slabs leaving a smoke hole near each apex. Earth was probably banked on
the lower sloping walls. Entrance was never through the smoke hole as in
the case of Atsugewi and some mountain Maidu earth lodge houses, but by
means of a small door at ground level on the south side. The entrance
was protected by a little covered way extending outward three feet from
the house wall, and decked over by a gable roof of low pitch. A ramp of
low pitch extended from the floor of the house through this antechamber
to the ground level outside as no steps were constructed.

The Yana lodge houses were not numerous. The ground plan was long,
usually wedge or oval in outline and designed for several families, each
with its own fire. As with the other tribes discussed in this booklet,
such buildings also served as sweat houses. A ladder consisting of a
notched log extended down from the smoke hole to the floor. One, two, or
three center posts with radiating rafters and shorter side posts were
employed. The Yana followed the Atsugewi practice of providing each
earth lodge with a south facing, ground level, tunnel-like ventilator
entrance of small size. It is possible that Yana did have a few special
sweating lodges of the same design, but the matter is debatable. During
sweating Yana men talked and played; the main purpose of sweating was to
make men strong.

It has already been pointed out that all four tribes which used what is
now Lassen Volcanic National Park did so only during the summer. During
their high mountain sojourn, the local Indians did not live in houses as
such. There, residence during the three or four summer months was in
temporary camps, usually roofless circular areas to accommodate several
families. These were fenced in with brush and were entered by one or
more openings somewhat in the same manner as campsites reserved for
visitors at their permanent villages at lower elevations. Four-posted
horizontal roofs, to provide shade, were sometimes constructed too. Yana
seem to have made a lean-to or hut with grass and bark covering for
summer roofs.

Chapter X
HOUSEHOLD TOOLS, IMPLEMENTS, AND WEAPONS

Implements for grinding foods were important. Mountain Maidu, in fact
all Maidu tribes, ground some acorns on flat bed rock. When the
resultant holes which eventually developed in the rock surfaces became
deep, they were abandoned as the acorn meal tended to pack into hard
lumps at the bottoms thereof. A heavy flat stone grinding slab was most
frequently used. However, all Lassen area tribes had portable stone
mortar bowls too. The Atsugewi and mountain Maidu did not make these nor
did they use them for grinding food. Such portable stone mortars were
found, evidently having been fashioned by more ancient tribes.
Supernatural powers were ascribed to these mortars, and they were used
only by shamans or medicine men. The Maidu thought that stone mortar
bowls were made by Coyote at the time of creation and scattered over the
world for the use of mankind. Others believed the mortars to have been
“first people” originally, who were turned to stones in this form upon
the coming of the Indian people at which time other “first people” were
transformed into animals.

[Illustration: Northeast Maidu soapstone bowl six inches wide—a rare
article (after Dixon)]

As has been described under the preparation of acorn mush, local tribes
used the flat stone pounding slab under an open bottomed hopper basket,
most commonly. The hopper basket of the Atsugewi and mountain Maidu was
usually of twined construction and bound often with buckskin about the
basal edge. Mountain Maidu sometimes employed their coiling technique in
making the acorn pounding basket. It was from this tribe, at the turn of
the century, that Atsugewi learned to make their pounding hopper baskets
of the stronger coiled construction.

[Illustration: Maidu stone axe head, 5 inches long (after Dixon)]

[Illustration: One of several seed beater types used locally]

Pestles of stone were long, smoothed, and sometimes flattened on the
sides. This resulted from use of these implements also as rubbing or
mulling stones for processing small seeds on flat slabs without
employment of basket hoppers. The pestles were always without the
ornamentation used by certain other California tribes. The pounding end
of the food grinding pestles are ever so slightly convex—their grinding
surfaces are nearly flat. This is in contrast to pestles used in the
deep bowl-shaped portable stone mortars for ceremonial purposes. The
grinding ends of these pestles were strongly rounded, nearly
hemispherical in shape.

The muller or small seed crusher used on the flat grinding slab without
a hopper basket was of oval or rectangular shape, and it too was
unornamented.

Small brushes used in miscellaneous food preparation were made of
pounded dried soap-plant bulb fibers.

Hot rocks for cooking were usually handled with two sticks. None of our
tribes used spoons. Crude obsidian knives with, or more commonly
without, bone handles were used for many chores.

Yana used split cobble stones for cutting and scraping operations. Their
stone knives sometimes had wrapped buckskin handles.

Bone awls, usually with wrapped handles, were commonly used for sewing
buckskin and other hides. Atsugewi are said by some to have had both
eyed and open notched needles of bone for sewing skins and tule mats.

The wooden shuttle for net weaving was a stick notched at both ends and
was used by all of the local tribes. A squarish wooden net mesh spacer
permitted nets to be properly made.

Mountain Maidu used deer antler wedges for splitting wood while Atsugewi
used wooden wedges—especially of mountain-mahogany. Wedges were usually
driven with simple wooden clubs, though rocks might be employed for the
purpose.

Drills for boring holes in shell work and for making pipes and the like
were used by Atsugewi only. Such drills were wooden shafts with stone
points. These were rotated by rolling the shaft between the palms of the
hands. Where the drill was not in use, holes were made in pieces of wood
with live coals. Sometimes unfinished clamshell money was received in
trade perhaps at a discount. Such pieces were strung tightly onto a cord
and the whole string was then rolled between two flat stones thus
grinding the shell edges to make the well formed disks characteristic of
clam shell money.

[Illustration: Soap-root fiber acorn meal brush about 6 inches long
(after Dixon)]

[Illustration: A lava pestle, flat ended food pounder, about 10
inches long]

Fire making drills were of greater importance. All local tribes employed
them. Those of this area were one-piece hand rotated affairs which did
not utilize the labor saving drill bow of the midwest. A long buckeye
wood stick about half an inch thick was twirled on a notched block of
incense-cedar or juniper wood. A bed of dry shredded grass and
incense-cedar or other flammable tinder was used to nourish the spark
into flame. Both sexes made fire among the Yana and Yahi, but unless the
men were away, Atsugewi and mountain Maidu women did not make fire.
Buckeye was uncommon or lacking in the areas of the latter tribes, so
this material had to be traded from the Yana and Yahi. Buckeye fire
making sticks commanded quite a price, a piece two feet long often
selling for ten completed arrows. Since fire making required much effort
and skill, fire was rarely allowed to go out. A “slow match” consisting
of a piece of punky wood in which the fire smouldered was usually
carried along.

[Illustration: Maidu bone awls or basket “needles” about 6 inches
long]

It was as true in prehistoric America as it is today that weapons were
essential to existence. Weapons were necessary not only for
warfare—whether aggressive or defensive—but for the securing of game for
food since domestication of animals was not practiced.

The bow and arrow was the only important weapon of California Indians.
Local bows were rather short and quite broad in cross-section. We quote
Garth’s “Atsugewi Ethnography” on the subject as follows:

“... The best bows were made by the Atsuge, who had a supply of yew
wood ... along the western borders of their territory. The Paiute were
anxious to trade for Atsuge bows and considered them much superior to
their own. In making the bow a piece of yew wood was selected, split,
and shaved down with flints and pumice stone to the required form and
thickness. After it had been wrapped in green grass and roasted in hot
ashes, the bow was bent to required shape (recurved tips with a slight
incurve at the middle), which it retained when it cooled off. Sinew,
taken from the back of a deer, was softened by chewing and was then
glued on the back of the bow in short strips, which were rubbed out as
flat as possible with a smooth piece of bone. Salmon skins were boiled
to make the glue.

[Illustration: Yahi making fire by twirling buckeye rod on
Incense-cedar block]

[Illustration: Maidu fire drill of buckeye (right) about 28 inches
long. In the two inch wide Incense-cedar slab note the cut notches
with a deeper twirling hole at the head of each.]

“The designs painted in green and red on the backs of bows are among
the few examples of masculine art. The painting was done with a
feather tip. The sinew for the bowstring ... was chewed to make it
soft and then it was made into a two-ply cord by rolling it with the
open hand on the thigh. After salmon glue was rubbed in to make the
fibers stick together, the string was stretched by tying a rock to one
end and allowing it to hang down from some support. A tassel ... of
mole skin might be attached to the end of the bow for decoration....

[Illustration: Indian Jack Harding after photo by Williams

“Montgomery Creek” Indian, part white—good archer

An Atsugewi type bow characteristically short, broad, sinew backed
and held at 45 degree angle in shooting. Note the painted
decoration]

“... Flint tipped arrows ... were made of cane or rose and had
foreshafts of Serviceberry, or they might be entirely of Service wood.
Cane arrows ... with a sharp-pointed foreshaft of Serviceberry were
commonly used for small animals and birds. Such arrows might be
unfeathered ... (an informant) recalled a bird arrow ... with a barbed
wooden point. Deer-bone pointed arrows were sometimes used for killing
deer and other game. Voegelin reports that these arrows were also
sometimes barbed. Flint-tipped arrows were about thirty inches long
... arrows for small game were somewhat shorter than flint-tipped
arrows ... the wood was ordinarily dried before it was used. The end
of the Serviceberry foreshaft was cut into a dowel which was inserted
in the soft pithy center of the main shaft, the juncture being wrapped
with sinew. A notch one-fourth of an inch deep was cut in the butt. A
laterally notched obsidian arrow point was inserted in the split end
of the foreshaft and bound on with cross lashings of sinew. The
binding was ordinarily waterproofed with pitch.

“Two small grooved pumice stones were used to smooth arrow shafts. The
foreshaft was painted red as an indication that poison had been
applied to the point. Other bands or stripes of color toward the nock
end of the arrow served as ownership marks ... the stripes might run
spirally as on a stick of candy ... all kinds of colors being used for
painting arrows. Feathers were split along the midrib and were glued
to the shaft, about a finger’s width below the butt, with pitch. Sinew
wrapping bound down each end of the feathers, three of which—about
four inches long—were used to an arrow. The edge of the feather was
burned smooth with a hot coal. Feathers of hawks or similar birds were
used on ordinary arrows, but for the finest arrows—those to be used
for bear and deer—eagle feathers were employed. An arrow wrench of
bone or wood was used for straightening arrows; or they might simply
be straightened by using the teeth as a vise. A flat antelope horn
might be perforated and used as an arrow wrench.... (John La Mar) had
a small triangular stone with a hole in the center ... which, he said
was heated in the fire and used for straightening cane arrows.

[Illustration: Maidu bow 40 inches long and two inches wide, deer
sinew backed and painted with powdered greenish rock from Oregon
mixed with Salmon glue. Two arrows are obsidian tipped. (after
Dixon)]

“Although the flint points themselves were considered poisonous, an
arrow poison was often used for larger game as well as in war. The
usual method of making poison was to take the liver or pancreas of a
deer and allow it to rot; the material was then smeared on the arrow
point....”

Rattlesnake poison was also employed; however none of the poisoned arrow
concoctions were very effective except to start infection of wounds
inflicted by arrow points so treated.

[Illustration: Painted Atsugewi bows (after Garth)]

a. Goose Valley, design in red (Apwaruge)
b. Goose Valley, design in red (Apwaruge)
c. Drawn by Dave Brown (Atsuge) with outer lines red, inner lines
green

Arrow points found in the park area, in the territory of both Atsugewi
and mountain Maidu are most frequently of obsidian, but sometimes are of
a dense dull black basalt lava. The term flint is a very loose one,
being applied to obsidian, chert, opal, chalcedony, and even to the
dense basalt, noted above, in common usage.

Mountain Maidu imported yew wood as this did not commonly grow in their
own territory. This tribe, however, also manufactured its own bows. In
practically all respects bow and arrow design and execution were
identical to that of the Atsugewi. Those of Yana and Yahi were similar
too. All tribes of the Lassen area fashioned arrow points with barbs. In
addition mountain Maidu flaked points without barbs but with basal stems
for attachment were made.

MOUNTAIN MAIDU STONE POINTS

[Illustration: Dull black obsidian much more convex on one side than
on the other. From near Corral Meadow; one and one half inches.]

[Illustration: Black obsidian near Little Willow Lake; one and one
half inches long.]

[Illustration: Dense black basalt from Terminal Geyser; one and five
eighths inches.]

[Illustration: Black obsidian near Little Willow Lake, one inch
long.]

ATSUGEWI KNIFE (?) AND ARROW POINT

[Illustration: Black obsidian spear point or knife from south shore
of Summit Lake; four inches.]

[Illustration: Dark gray banded point from Northeast shore Snag
Lake; two inches.]

SOUTHERN YANA POINTS

[Illustration: Dark gray obsidian point from Battle Creek Meadows.
Note unusually strong asymmetry in two planes; one inch long.]

[Illustration: Coarse gray lava knife (?) from Battle Creek Meadows;
Three and one half inches long.]

The bow was most frequently held in shooting at an angle of about 45
degrees with the arrow on top. Mountain Maidu used that style, too, or
else held the bow horizontally with the arrow on top except in case of
war when the arrow was held on the underside of the bow. Gifford and
Klimak reveal that northern and central Yana held the bow horizontally.
Sapir and Spier found that the Yana tribes proper (not Yahi), however
held bows vertically in shooting. All tribes considered except Yahi used
the primary release of the arrow in shooting. In this method the arrow
was held between the index and third fingers, which caught and pulled
back the string. The thumb held the other side of the arrow. The Yahi,
on the other hand used the Mongolian release; grasping the arrow with
the thumb and unbent first joints of the first and second fingers.

[Illustration: Maidu bone arrow point flaker about ten inches long
(after Dixon)]

“... the arrow was let fly between the index and third finger of the
left hand, which held the bow. Many arrow points were uniface and
curved slightly to one side.... A hunter, when shooting at a distant
object, turned the arrow so that the point curved up; when shooting an
object close by, he turned the arrow so that the point curved down. A
hunter carried at least one arrow in his left hand with his bow. Extra
arrows were carried in a quiver ... (made of) coyote, raccoon, or
other skins. Ordinarily the hunter carried his quiver on his back, but
if he wanted to be able to reach the arrows easily, he hung it on his
... shoulder so that it fell under his left armpit. Arrows were taken
from the quiver with the right hand.”

Inside the quiver, at the bottom, a cushion of dry grass was placed to
prevent the stone points from chipping each other.

[Illustration: Maidu arrow-straightener and smoother of sandstone
about three inches long (after Dixon)]

YAHI STONE POINTS

[Illustration: Nearly colorless obsidian south of Sulphur Works;
three quarters inch.]

[Illustration: Off-white chalcedony point south of Sulphur Works
area; one and one half inches.]

[Illustration: Black obsidian one and one quarter inches long and a
full one half inch thick.]

[Illustration: Three inch point of coarse gray lava from Mill Creek
Canyon.]

[Illustration: Black obsidian. South of Sulphur Works, one and one
half inches.]

[Illustration: Yana arrow points one and one half to two inches
long. The materials used are mostly black obsidian, also dark grey
and buff obsidian. One is of dense black basalt.]

[Illustration: A pair of Yana arrow smoother and straightening
stones made of porous glassy (pre-Lassen?) dacite pumice, length
about two and one half inches]

War clubs were not used. Atsugewi claim to have had a stone axe,
sharpened by chipping and lashed with sinew to a split oak or
mountain-mahogany handle a foot or so long. It was used for chopping
roots and small trees on occasion, but the stone axe was certainly not
widely used by California Indians, and even among Atsugewi it may have
been unknown until the coming of white man, or knowledge of it may have
been gained from Plains Indians after the advent of the horse. The
tomahawk, so important to Indians of eastern and midwestern North
America, was unknown to California Indians. Trees were normally felled
and cut by controlled burning.

Four-foot spears, tipped with large flaked stone points for fighting at
close quarters, were used by all local tribes on occasion, but were not
numerous. Only the Yana are believed to have thrown the weapon; the more
common usage seems to have been by energetically thrusting it.

Knives or daggers as fighting implements were made of chipped obsidian
but were quite rare. A short, crude, one edged, stone knife was used
widely as a general utility implement, but not in combat nor in killing
game. Yana Indians also employed a mussel shell knife for light delicate
work around camp. Atsugewi and mountain Maidu sometimes affixed wooden
handles to their obsidian knives. These two tribes also fashioned knives
of sharpened bone and horn.

[Illustration: A wooden arrow straightener from northern California
(Yurok)]

[Illustration: Atsugewi stone arrow-straightener]

[Illustration: Mountain Maidu arrow quiver made of an inside-out
small mammal skin.]

[Illustration: Atsugewi cased fox skin quiver made by slitting
animal’s skin along its hind legs, turning skin inside out, and
finally sewing the mouth and eye openings shut.]

[Illustration: 4½ inches 7 inches
Maidu stone knives of obsidian, one with a wooden and sinew handle
(after Dixon)]

[Illustration: A warrior in stick armor and fur helmet]

Of equipment for warfare, Garth states:

“Defensive armor included rod armor ..., gowns ... of dried elk or
bear skins, and skin helmets which came down over the forehead and
ears, ‘so a man could just see out of it’. The skin armor extended to
the ankles or lower; it was worn over one shoulder so that it
protected only the side of the body turned toward the enemy. Rod
armor, made of serviceberry withes twined together with buckskin
string, was high enough to come up to the neck under the chin and
extended two or three inches below the belt. The Plains Indian shield,
although found among the Surprise Valley Paiute and other Paiute
tribes to the east, was lacking among the Atsugewi,” and all other
tribes of the Lassen area.

Chapter XI
BASKETRY AND TEXTILES

The outstanding art of the Indians of California was their basketry. In
fact the excellence of California basketry generally is not exceeded
elsewhere in North America. Size varies from that of a pea to that of a
bushel basket. Both weave and ornamentation were very diversified.

Basketry of the Lassen area, especially that of the Atsugewi and
mountain Maidu, was of good quality. Both coiled and twined types of
basketry (to be described below) were made by mountain Maidu, but the
Atsugewi did not learn the art of coiled basketry from the Maidu until
the early 1900’s. Yana and Yahi wove both types but twined baskets were
by far the more numerous. This is due to the fact that these tribes were
akin to the twining tribes of the north. Close contact with the
neighboring Wintun tribes of the Sacramento Valley resulted in the
addition of limited amount of coiling technique in their basketry making
over the years.

[Illustration: Technique of the three willow rod (or rib) coiled
basketry (after Otis T. Mason). Note that the lashing strand anchors
the three new ribs “a”, “b”, and “c” to the top rib “d” of the
preceding three “d”, “e”, and “f” group]

[Illustration: Simple twined basketry technique employs two weft
(lashing) strands, but when overlaying with another material is done
two or more layers will make up each of the strands “a” and “b”
(modified from Otis T. Mason)]

Coiled basketry itself had some technical variations with which we shall
not concern ourselves. The coiling technique was characteristic of the
central and southern part of the California area. Mountain Maidu used
three willow rods in a parallel group which ran as a core in a
continuous spiral starting at the center of the basket. This was the
warp element. The bundle of three willow ribs was lashed to the
preceding basketry by a strand or weft (filler) of the inner bark of
redbud. This was accomplished by poking an awl through the preceding
row, and separating the stitches. In doing so, the awl was passed under
the topmost of the core or warp of three coiling willow ribs. A redbud
bark strand was then slipped through the awl hole, thus lashing the
three loose willow ribs down by passing the strand around them and
through the next awl hole in the preceding row. Recent Atsugewi coiled
basketry technique is similar in all details, having been learned from
the Maidu.

[Illustration: Variations of the simple twined basketry technique:
a, method of starting the round root-cleaning basket; b, detail of
side wall of basket showing open work weave. (Garth)]

Twined basketry consisted of willow ribs radiating from a common center.
These twigs were the warp. The weft of filling and binding stitches were
split pine root strands. Dixon states that mountain Maidu sometimes dyed
pine root black by burying it in mud mixed with charcoal. Pine root was
tightly woven in to make the bottom of the basket which was normally
undecorated. More and more willow ribs were added as the basket became
larger. The willow ribs were curved up when willow rib additions were
decreased. As the sides began to be built up on these twined baskets,
each pine root stitch, both inside and outside, was covered with a
whitish strand of bear-grass or squaw-grass. The tops of baskets were
often left unfinished after the unused willow warps were clipped off.
The basket did not unravel in use. However, the best baskets were
finished by adding a marginal strengthening ring of choke cherry or
willow which was bound to the basket body firmly and neatly, usually by
wrapping with strands of redbud bark. During weaving willow withes were
fastened inside of the basket to help it retain its shape, but these
were removed upon completion of the basket.

[Illustration: Side outline shapes of Maidu baskets (after Dixon).
The plan of virtually all Maidu baskets was circular. Twined storage
baskets are up to three feet in diameter for holding seed, meal,
etc. Open twined construction was used for storage of whole acorns,
fish, and meat. Flatish circular basketry plaque was for “vibration
sifting”.]

_FOOD BOWL _STORAGE
DIPPING COOKING_
GENERAL UTILITY_

_FOOD BOWL _STORAGE
DIPPER COOKING_
GENERAL UTILITY_

_COOKING_ _STORAGE
COOKING_

_FOOD BOWL _STORAGE
DIPPER COOKING_
GENERAL UTILITY_

_COOKING_ _BURDEN_

_FOOD BOWL _STORAGE
DIPPER COOKING_
GENERAL UTILITY_

_TRAYS or large BASKET COVER_ _TRAY or BASKET COVER_

Some utility baskets were undecorated, being made merely of pine root
and willow, or, if coiled, of redbud and willow. However, most baskets
bore some designs. They were all named and were inspired by the objects
of nature about these outdoor peoples, and not the product of their
imaginations. Nevertheless, the designs are quite stylized, often to the
extent that recognition of the inspiration is difficult or impossible.

In the case of twined baskets the designs were made by substituting
outer redbud bark for squaw-grass to produce a dull red instead of the
white overlaid stitches of the rest of the basket. As a result of the
double twining technique the designs were seen equally well on the
inside and the outside of each basket. Black designs were of overlaid
maidenhair fern (_Adiantum pedatum_) stems. However, mountain Maidu also
used common bracken fern (_Pteris aquilinum_) for black designs. Indians
to the north of the Atsugewi used roots and stems of certain sedges
treated with charcoal and mud or with ashes and water to produce
basketry materials of black and of warm henna-brown coloration
respectively. These were used on occasion by Atsugewi. The bear-grass,
redbud, and maidenhair fern decorative materials were most commonly used
by all tribes of this area. Atsugewi are the only local Indians to have
used feathers to adorn their baskets. They used the shiny iridescent
blue-green feathers from the necks of male mallard ducks. This was not
common, however, and by no means used as often nor developed to the fine
art and diversity of the famous Pomo feathered basketry of the Clear
Lake region of the California Coast Range. Atsugewi are also believed to
have occasionally adorned some basketry work with shell beads and
porcupine quills, but this must have been quite rare or more examples
would have survived to the present day.

Outer bark of redbud almost always decorated coiled baskets.

Concerning Maidu basketry Dixon states that the vast majority of the
articles are of the coiled type, twining technique being used only for
burden baskets and hopper or grinding baskets. For the radial ribs of
the former they used shoots of hazel (_Corylus rostrata_ var.
_californica_) when available. He points out too, the frequent use of
the feather, quail-tip, and arrow-point designs not only among the
mountain Maidu, but among all Maidu. A characteristic of this group of
Indians also, in contrast to other local tribes, is the tendency to
confine one design to a basket rather than combining designs. Maidu
employed a wide variety of designs. Many of them represent animals and
plants. A considerable number of Maidu patterns exhibit a more or less
obscure realism which becomes apparent only after one is informed as to
what the design means. The Maidu show a tendency also toward arrangement
of design elements in spiral or zigzag lines.

[Illustration: Atsugewi basket, twined and overlaid with bear-grass
and maiden hair fern.]

[Illustration: Maidu hopper, pounding, or milling basket of twined
construction on rock mortar slab. Diameter about eighteen inches
(after Dixon).]

[Illustration: Atsugewi general utility basket of twined
construction with lizard foot design. Underside shown to reveal dark
(actually tan-colored) area of bare split pine root weft without
bear-grass or maiden hair overlay.]

[Illustration: Coiled type Atsugewi hopper basket with flying geese
design. View shows pounding hole in bottom of basket, in this case
bound with buckskin.]

Dixon noted that “mussel’s tongue” (the fresh water mussel) is one of
the unique and peculiar basketry designs used by the Atsugewi.
Representation of intestines and deer excrement are also worthy of
special mention for this tribe. Other common Atsugewi designs in
basketry decoration are lizard, deer rib, owl’s claw, and flying geese,
as well as arrow-point. Two or more different designs are often combined
on a single basket. Among Atsugewi and Achomawi there seems to be no
restriction of certain patterns to baskets intended for special uses.
Like mountain Maidu, zigzag and spiral arrangements are preferred,
horizontal bands being rare. Curiously an Atsugewi design is often given
different meaning by different individual Indians. This is in contrast
to the uniformity of interpretation of a given design by all the Maidu
individuals, normally.

[Illustration: Maidu open twined “tray” or plate-like basket about
ten inches long (after Dixon)]

Yana tribes frequently substituted another material for willow ribs. The
identity of this warp is not certain. Reliable students believe it to be
hazelnut twigs, but to my knowledge that plant is scarce indeed even in
the foothill territory. Yana and Yahi had some other peculiarities in
their basketry. Designs were sometimes wrought in a negative way, that
is by merely leaving off overlay so that the design was thereby defined
in exposed pine root weft. Sapir and Spier found that these tribes also
used alder bark for dying basketry decoration materials a red-brown. A
reddish color was produced on peeled shield fern stems by passing them
through the mouth while chewing dogwood bark. They dyed pine roots, too,
on occasion with a red soil or with the powdery filling of spores from
the inside of a fungus obtained from certain coniferous trees. These
variations of basketry decoration do not seem to have been used by the
Atsugewi and mountain Maidu.

[Illustration: Maidu fish-teeth design on coiled basket.]

[Illustration: Mountain Maidu geese-flying design on coiled basket.]

[Illustration: Atsugewi lizard’s claw or lizard’s foot design.]

[Illustration: Mountain Maidu mountains designs on twined baskets.
The right hand treatment may be repeated in reverse to the right
making a symmetrical pyramid shaped design outline.]

[Illustration: An interesting unsymmetrical flower design.]

[Illustration: Atsugewi intestines.]

The basketry described above was all close-woven. In fact, so closely
were the twined baskets made that they held water with little or no
leakage even without linings of pitch or any other substance. There was
no pottery of any kind in central or northern California.

The art of basketry included also a third type—loose or open weaving,
sometimes of tules. The latter were also used extensively for making
mats for a variety of purposes. Open weaving at other times was done
with willow withes, split juniper twigs, or of another material
tentatively identified as hazel. Fish traps, carrying baskets, some
storage baskets, and bags were not infrequently of this type of
construction.

All basketry materials had to be well soaked in water, as they were
brittle when dry. After weaving and upon drying these materials set in
place, making the basketry firm, strong, and resistant to unraveling.

Collection of basketry materials was more arduous and required greater
know-how than might be suspected. Willow withes were only taken from the
particularly strong and supple shoots from Hinds or valley willow
(_Salix hindsiana_) which grows along stream banks up to 3000 foot
elevations and also from the similar sandbar, river, or grey willow
(_Salix fluviatilis_ variety _argyrophylla_) which also lines streams,
often growing in sandbars. These species are recognized by their long
very narrow silvery leaves and a grey bark, furrowed when mature. Willow
twigs were collected when the leaves were off of the stems in the spring
and in the fall. At other times the twigs were more brittle. Spring
picked willow withes “slipped” their bark easily, but those collected in
the fall had to be scraped to remove the bark. The willow ribs were
further dressed by scraping to uniform size.

Pine roots of either ponderosa pine (_Pinus ponderosa_) or digger pine
(_Pinus sabiniana_) were usually used. However not all trees had roots
of suitable strength and flexibility, so that it was necessary to “shop
around” for good roots. This involved digging holes to reach the roots
and then testing these by tugging on small strands until suitable roots
were located. Roots three or four inches in diameter were then cut off
with a small obsidian axe, if the individual were so fortunate as to
possess this rarity, or by using a sort of bone pick, or, more commonly,
by slowly burning through the green root with a small fire. Root lengths
of about four feet were gathered, taken home, and there roasted in hot
ashes. This made the pine roots very soft. They were then split into
quarters with digging sticks or stone choppers and finally were pulled
apart into thin strips using hands and teeth. The resulting half inch
wide strips were tied into bundles for storage. In use, these strips
were well soaked in water. Pine root strands of proper width were easily
split off by hand. The finer and smaller the basketry to be done,
naturally, the narrower was the material split for making it.

[Illustration: Atsugewi twined basket, deer-rib and arrow point
designs. Both are frequently used.]

[Illustration: Pit River (used by Dixon to include Atsugewi) popular
mussels’ tongue designs.]

[Illustration: Mountain Maidu mountain-and-cloud design on coiled
basket.]

[Illustration: Atsugewi pine cone design]

[Illustration: Atsugewi deer-gut design on twined basket—also a
popular pattern.]

[Illustration: Another Atsugewi version of deer-gut design on twined
basket.]

[Illustration: Pit River (applied by Dixon to include also the
Atsugewi) deer excrement designs.]

[Illustration: Atsugewi flint design]

The chief overlay material—already mentioned—was what we call bear-grass
or squaw-grass. In truth this is not grass, but the leaf of a lily, the
well known bear-grass of Mount Rainier National Park, scientifically
known as _Xerophylum tenax_. This grows only in limited areas in this
region, hence Atsugewi had to make long trips on foot to obtain it. In
recent years, at least, bear-grass was to be found only in the territory
of the Shasta and of the mountain Maidu: a few miles west of Mount
Shasta and near Greenville in Plumas County. Bear-grass could be
collected only during about two weeks in mid-July. Earlier it was too
tender; later it was too brittle “like hay”. Only new central leaves of
each plant were plucked. The heavy mid-rib had to be removed from each
leaf with an awl before use.

Maidenhair fern frond stems were picked in August.

Redbud twigs collected in the spring would “slip” the red outer bark
easily in a thin layer. This was used for overlay pattern making on
twined baskets. The white inner bark, or, more properly, sapwood was
then stripped off for binding material and as the white lashing weft for
coiled baskets. In the case of fall-collected redbud twigs the red outer
bark adhered to the sapwood. This was used as the lashing strand or weft
where red designs were desired on coiled baskets.

Apwaruge, the eastern division of the Atsugewi, often made baskets of
tules. These were more flexible, softer baskets than those made by the
westerners, the Atsuge, and so there was considerable exchange of
baskets between the two divisions of the Atsugewi.

Atsugewi occasionally made openwork baskets from split juniper too,
especially for low scoop-shaped, round, or oval baskets for fishing,
root cleaning, et cetera, but as indicated earlier, willow ribs were
used for this purpose also.

[Illustration: (Yana) dogs ears]

[Illustration: Probably Yana House design]

[Illustration: Maidu quail tip design widely used but only on coiled
baskets.]

[Illustration: (Yana) crane’s leg]

[Illustration: (Atsugewi) meadow lark]

[Illustration: (Achomawi) flying geese or pine cone
(Yana) pine cone]

[Illustration: Maidu earthworm design on a coiled basket.]

[Illustration: Maidu bushes design on a coiled basket.]

[Illustration: Mountain Maidu duck’s-wing design on a coiled
basketry plaque.]

[Illustration: (Maidu) diamond
(Yana) wolf’s eye]

[Illustration: Mountain Maidu eye design.]

[Illustration: (Atsugewi) flint or arrowhead]

[Illustration: (Maidu) watersnake (?)
(Yana) bushes]

[Illustration: (Yana) bats]

[Illustration: Maidu design, probably sugar pine tree.]

[Illustration: A continuing zig-zag arrow feather design widely and
frequently used by Maidu in coiled basketry, sometimes this was
combined with the quail tip pattern.]

[Illustration: Single and double arrow point designs—the most
commonly used of all Maidu patterns. It was relatively easy to make
and very versatile.]

[Illustration: (Maidu) big tongues
(Yana) intestines]

[Illustration: (Maidu) quail tip
(Yana) root digger]

[Illustration: (Maidu) mountain
(Yana) root digger hand]

[Illustration: (Maidu) earthworm
(Yana) intestines]

[Illustration: (Maidu) mountain
(Yana) root digger hand]

[Illustration: (Achomawi) mountain or bear’s foot
(Yana) root digger hand]

[Illustration: (Maidu) vine
(Yana) geese]

[Illustration: (Maidu) rattlesnake
(Yana) geese]

[Illustration: (Wintun) sucker tail
(Yana) long worms in rotten wood.]

[Illustration: (Yana) wolf’s eye]

Basket styles varied little among the several tribes of the Lassen
region. Bottle shapes were never made until after the coming of white
man. Cooking baskets were bowl-shaped with high, convexly curved sides,
sometimes nearly globular in form. Baskets from which food was eaten
individually and general utility baskets were similarly shaped but
smaller. Boiling baskets were sometimes without decoration; their
dimensions of height and width were about equal. Storage baskets also
had about the same shape, curving less, sometimes, but were large, being
three feet or more in size. Some were of open work, but usually they
were of close or tight weaving.

Flattish bowls or somewhat curved trays were used for food platters as
well as for winnowing, parching, and cleaning foods by chafing. Some
were of open weave made of willow or hazel (?) only while others were
closely woven.

Basketry acorn grinding hoppers also called milling baskets or pounding
baskets, were usually regular twined baskets of suitable size and shape:
wide mouthed bowl or funnel-shaped. Having no central point from which
to start the warp, because of the open bottoms, hopper baskets were
started by twining three pine root wefts about the bases of many willow
warps to make a circle about five inches in diameter. Additional warps
were built up on the radiating ribs, proceeding then in the normal
manner of twining. Twined hopper baskets were usually reinforced by
lashing one or two strong rings of willow or serviceberry withes. They
might also be bound with buckskin along the bottom edges for improved
strength and durability as well as to decrease loss of acorn meal during
the pounding process. In recent years both mountain Maidu and Atsugewi,
also used coiling technique in making hopper baskets, for which purpose
it is well suited.

A recent innovation among Atsugewi has been the covering of bottles with
basketry and also the weaving of oblong shaped closely twined and coiled
baskets, as well as goblet shaped creations.

According to Garth, the seed beater “... was a paddle-shaped implement
from one and a half to two feet long with a willow warp and open work
twining, also of willow (spaced at three quarters of an inch between
rows) across the blade. The handle was wrapped either with willow
strips or with buckskin.”

Another important use of basketry was in the construction of cradle
boards, or more properly, basket cradles. These are generally known to
present day Americans by the incorrect term papoose baskets. The cradle
basket is discussed under the heading “Birth and Babies”.

[Illustration: (Yurok) flint
(Yana) zigzagging]

[Illustration: (Maidu) quail-tip
(Yana) “sitting up in a series”]

[Illustration: (Maidu) vine
(Yana) “braided”]

[Illustration: (Yana) mussels]

[Illustration: (Maidu) earthworm
(Yana) “braided”]

[Illustration: (Yana) mountains]

[Illustration: (Yurok) “sitting”
(Yana) “zigzagging and turning back”]

[Illustration: (Yana) wolf’s eye]

[Illustration: (Yana) trout or salmon tails]

[Illustration: (Yana) flint]

[Illustration: (Yana) guts]

[Illustration: (Atsugewi) skunk’s ear]

Beautifully made basketry caps for women, finely twined, spreading
bowl-shaped affairs were made by all tribes of the Lassen area. These
were nicely decorated on the bottoms—or rather tops—as well as on the
sides, a feature lacking on all other types of local baskets. Another
unique feature of the basketry cap was the fact that the inside of the
hat was abraded by rubbing so that none of the pattern remained visible
because all of the overlay on the inside had been worn away. It is
suspected that this made the inside of the hat less slippery on the hair
so that it did not slip off the head so easily. Removal of the
decoration from the inside of the basketry cap in no way altered the
appearance or permanence of the outside decorative patterns.

Mats were woven of viscid bulrush, more commonly called tule stalks
(_Scirpus lacustris_ or _acutus_). According to Voegelin, Atsugewi
sometimes sewed these together by piercing them with bone needles.
However the more usual method of manufacture was that of lashing
together the ends of parallel tule stalks laid next to each other. This
was done with double cords or strands in the regular simple twining
manner which shows up well in the sketch of Atsugewi tule leggings. Such
mats were extensively used as bed mats or mattresses, as earth wall
coverings, as doorway and ventilator hole hangings, and so on by all of
the tribes of the Lassen region. Mountain Maidu also employed
broad-leaved cat-tail (_Typha latifolia_) or narrow-leaved cat-tail
(_Typha angustifolia_) for such purposes on occasion. This tribe also
appears to have used a string weft in making at least some of the mats.

Chapter XII
TANNING, CORDAGE, AND GLUE

Mountain Maidu buried bear skins in wet ground, but hides generally were
soaked about a week in water by local Indians. Mountain Maidu used ashes
to help dehair skins other than deer, but this was not a practice common
to other tribes. Stone, or more frequently, shaped deer rib or pelvic
bones were used as dehairing scraper tools on skins. The hide was draped
over an inclined post and was soaked and squeezed occasionally during
the process of scraping.

The tanning agent was a cooked soup of animal brains, particularly those
of deer. This material might first have been mashed, mixed with dry
moss, and then molded into small cakes for drying and storage. The deer
brain agent was well rubbed into the cleaned, soaked skin. It was then
allowed to soak overnight in the tanning solution. The next day while
drying the skin in the sun, the operator stretched and worked the hide
with his hands to make it soft and pliable.

Among Atsugewi the skin was then smoked over a fire of moist rotten logs
or green juniper boughs burning in a shallow pit. The skin was laid on a
domed framework of willow branches arched over the fire. The hide was
turned occasionally to insure uniform treatment. Mr. Garth believes that
this smoking process was recently learned. It was not generally
practiced by neighboring tribes, but produced superior buckskin which
resisted stiffening as a result of subsequent wetting. Even Atsugewi did
not smoke other skins.

[Illustration: Nets. a, b, stages in net making; c, tule float; d,
net shuttle.]

Men did all this work as well as the hunting, skinning, and fashioning
of garments from hides. Skins were sewn with bone awls and deer sinew
thread which was made by rolling fine deer sinew strands on the thigh
with the open hand.

[Illustration: Net making shuttle about fourteen inches long (after
Dixon)]

[Illustration: The usual Maidu knot for nets (after Dixon)]

[Illustration: Carrying net]

Like other local tribes, the Maidu used many woven skin blankets. These
were fashioned from one inch strips of rabbit fur, especially, but also
of the skins of wildcat, cougar, geese, or crows. These were not tanned
so that upon drying they twisted or curled like the strands of a rope
with the fur or feather side out. Ends were tied together to form a long
fur or feather covered rope. This was wound about two poles set upright
in the ground six feet or so apart to form the warp for the blanket.
More of the same material was then woven up and down as weft to produce
a soft and very warm skin blanket which was also quite durable. When
bird skins were employed a cord core was threaded thru the center of the
twisted strands before weaving for greater strength.

Mountain Maidu also did feather work like that of the Atsugewi, however
foothill and valley Maidu did so to a greater extent and of a more
elaborate nature.

Willow, serviceberry, and redbud withes, and at lower elevations,
lengths of wild grape vines were used for tying purposes. However,
Indians also had need for strong and more versatile and more durable
string, cord, and rope. These were usually made from vegetable fibers.
Atsugewi and mountain Maidu used Indian hemp and milkweed but not nettle
or iris fibers as did some other tribes. When mature, but before they
became old and brittle, the plants were collected and dried, stripped of
leaves, and the flesh was scraped and pounded off leaving the free
fibers. String was made by placing two small bundles of fibers parallel
and close together on the thigh of the leg. These were rolled up into
two strands side by side with one stroke of the open hand moving either
up or down the thigh. On the return stroke the two separate and now
twisted strands were twisted together into one string. Stout cord was
made by repeating the process, substituting two strings for the two
bundles of loose fibers this time. To make rope the process was repeated
several times, successively doubling the cordage product. As the cordage
strands were twined together, the product was held in the left hand, the
rolling being done by the right hand on the right thigh.

Nets of good quality were fabricated in a variety of mesh sizes, the
uniformity of which was controlled by use of squarish wooden blocks.
Shuttles to hold the string for net tying were straight pieces of wood
notched at each end and into which the strand was wrapped. As has been
pointed out, nets were used chiefly for hunting, fishing, and carrying,
although small nets were often worn in the hair by men.

Adhesives were important in the economy of the Indians too. Pine pitch
and glue made from the skins of fish were used. A solution of the latter
was mixed by the mountain Maidu with certain internal organs of fish and
boiled vegetable materials to improve the quality of their glue.

Chapter XIII
TRANSPORTATION

It was the lack of transportation rather than the existence of any which
was important to the aboriginal Americans. This was responsible for the
degree of isolation which was required to produce the variety of customs
and languages in most parts of the “New World”. Introduction of the
horse in historic times materially changed the habits of Plains Indians.
Likewise the somewhat aggressive Modoc tribe to the north of the Pit
River, whose conflict with the whites has been memorialized in Lava Beds
National Monument today, became mobile, even prior to the gold rush
days, through use of the horse. As a result the Modocs made a number of
hit and run raids upon Atsugewi and other tribes and were able to carry
off slaves. This was not the traditional mode of warfare.

Transportation among Indians was by foot or by water until recent times.
California Indians did not use dogs as beasts of burden as Plains
Indians did and as the Eskimos still do. Women did general hauling; men,
however, did most of the really heavy carrying. Women used the conical
burden basket extensively, but the men did not. Both sexes used the
buckskin pack strap which in the case of mountain Maidu passed over the
top of the head. Atsugewi pack straps went over the forehead and also
over the shoulder across the chest. The brimless basketry cap or hat was
used with the packstrap especially among the women. Heavy loads were
frequently carried by men upon the shoulder; such burdens were often
rolled in mats or animal skins.

Carrying nets made of twisted fibers were commonly employed by men and
women among local tribes. Atsugewi used a folded buckskin bag sewed at
the edges, with a handle on top, and opening at the side. Yana
manufactured an open-work carrying basket too.

In this region loads were never carried on the head, but on occasion
might be suspended on a pole and carried between two men. The mountain
Maidu also used a litter for the sick, but Atsugewi carried sick persons
in burden baskets on their backs.

In rough country crude trails were sometimes built, but this was not a
common practice. Generally trails as such were not constructed, but
where they existed they had developed as the result of long use along
logical routes, in much the same manner as deer and other game trails
develop.

To cross streams advantage was taken of logs which had fallen of natural
causes. On occasion single logs were felled by burning to serve as
bridges. Yana at lower elevations frequently had large streams to cross
and smaller trees to utilize. Two logs might be felled parallel and
cross sticks lashed on with grapevine for better footing.

[Illustration: Boat Types of Native California (not to scale). a,
Yurok (northwestern California) river canoe; b, Klamath
(northeastern California) canoe; c, tule balsa.]

[Illustration: Distribution of Types of Native California Boat.]

a, Dugout canoe
b, Dugout canoe
c, Tule balsa

[Illustration: Atsugewi dug-out canoe on Hat Creek]

In swimming most Indians used a pseudo-breast stroke or swam on their
backs with a frog style stroke. Atsugewi also did a “dog paddle” keeping
arms under water. Mountain Maidu used swimming techniques which embraced
principles like those of white man’s side stroke and crawl. They jumped
into the water feet first in preference to headfirst diving. When
swimming under water to collect crawfish or mussels a rock was often
tied loosely to the back.

Water transportation was not of the same degree of importance to the
tribes of the Lassen region that it was to Sacramento Valley, Coastal,
and Northwestern Indians. Nevertheless Atsugewi used sharp or blunt
ended canoes while that of the mountain Maidu had a shovel-like prow and
stern. These were made from pine logs, usually windfalls about two feet
in diameter and had a capacity of two to four persons. The logs were
hollowed out by controlled burning so that the walls were an inch or two
thick. Pitch was rubbed onto portions needing more burning. Water or mud
were used to check burning and the charred wood was scraped out with
rough angular stones. Local dugout canoes were rather crude affairs.
Cracking of the wood was prevented by keeping the boats wet. They were
propelled by an unadorned poling rod or by a single bladed square-ended
paddle about three feet long. A raft, consisting of three or four logs
lashed together, was used as well by all local tribes and propelled by
poling.

Atsugewi had another type of craft: the tule balsa—a five foot long
raised prow affair made of bundles of tules lashed together. It might be
poled or else pushed by a swimmer. Often this raft-like boat was towed
by a rope of willow. Atsugewi occasionally ferried children or goods in
baskets, while among mountain Maidu swimmers carried children on their
backs and carried goods in one hand, raised above the water level,
swimming with the other hand.

Chapter XIV
DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PETS

We are apt to think of Indians, especially Plains Indians, riding horses
as part of the natural prehistoric scene, yet this was not the case.
Although fossil remains in the rocks show clearly the development of the
horse over a period of several millions of years on this continent, the
horse, the camel, and the rhinoceros—to mention but a few of the
spectacular mammals—became extinct on the American continents before the
advent of prehistoric man. American Indians had never seen a horse until
the coming of the Spanish to the New World in 1540. Likewise domestic
cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens were unknown to the aborigines.

The dog was widely distributed, however. Some tribes had large as well
as small dogs of a variety of colors. In the Lassen area the dogs were
all about the size of small coyotes, mostly with fairly short hair, but
there are some reports of long haired dogs. Typically the dogs had small
rather erect and pointed ears. Coloration was chiefly fawn colored to
brown. Amongst Atsugewi, dogs were usually quite numerous, but certain
villages seem to have had only a few. In such cases and among the
mountain Maidu, who generally had only few dogs, they were borrowed for
hunting. Dogs were almost always named.

Dogs served to warn their owners of the approach of strangers to the
village or camp. Mountain Maidu taught their dogs not to bark, but to
“sniff” conspicuously as a signal of stranger approach.

Tribes of the Lassen area did not normally keep dogs in their dwelling
houses. Atsugewi built separate, domed, bark-covered dog houses, and
mountain Maidu built two kinds of shelters for their dogs. One was a
subterranean earth-covered dog house, and the other a conical affair of
bark slab type construction.

Dogs were widely used in hunting. They were efficient in catching
rodents and other small mammals such as ground hogs. They were also
useful for treeing mountain lions and were adept at bringing down
wounded deer by jumping up and seizing the deers’ ears.

Dogs were not often eaten by tribes in this section of California. Upon
death, dogs were not buried, but the bodies were merely thrown out.

Upon death of the dog’s owner, among Atsugewi, the dog was retained by
the widow, but among mountain Maidu the dog was suspended in a tree
because “It makes dog’s spirit glad”! Although not being generally
considered in this account, it is curious that among Modoc and eastern
Achomawi dogs were burned at the deaths of their owners.

Bear cubs were commonly kept. Atsugewi also kept fawns and other small
mammals as pets. Birds of various sorts were kept by certain tribes.
Atsugewi plucked or cut wings of birds, especially of eagles whose
feathers were prized for arrow making, and for ceremonial and decorative
purposes.

Chapter XV
CLOTHING

The members of all tribes, especially the Yana and Yahi, went bareheaded
much of the time. However, basketry caps nearly hemispherical in shape
and of fine tightly twined weave were worn regularly by Indian women.
The caps were probably worn to prevent chafing of the pack straps
originally, but Atsugewi women wore them most of the time. Such hats
were well decorated with overlaid designs typical of the tribes under
consideration. Those of Yana and Yahi were usually of tule with black
and white overlay. Mountain Maidu made some coiled basketry caps, not
infrequently employing tules or reeds.

Men of all our tribes wore fur headbands on occasion and among Atsugewi,
fur or buckskin caps too, especially in winter, when shallow bucket
shaped skin hats of coyote, raccoon, mink and the like afforded
protection against the rather intense cold.

Eyeshades attached to a band around the head were worn by some Yana
women so as not to see their sons-in-law! Atsugewi men and possibly
others might wear side blinds when spearing fish at night to keep torch
light out of their eyes.

Children up to about six years of age ran about naked, and often the
older men and women did likewise, particularly among the Maidu.

Buckskin dresses were worn to some extent by the women of most local
tribes. The mountain Maidu dress was tied at both shoulders and tied or
belted at the waist. The garment was provided with flaps over the upper
arms but lacked sleeves. Buckskin dresses were worn by some Indian women
rich in worldly goods, and usually for special occasions. Recent
buckskin dresses, of course, are sewn on sewing machines, neatly
tailored, and follow the general pattern of the conventional dress,
including regular sleeves.

In normal everyday garb Indian women were naked above the waist. A
wrap-around skirt, or, more frequently two narrow or wide aprons were
worn. Sometimes one apron went around the hips, being tied in back and
provided with a buckskin flap which covered the wearer’s buttocks. The
Indian women’s aprons were commonly made of shredded incense-cedar,
willow, or juniper bark, or of tules. In the case of Yana and Yahi
women, frequently grass or shredded, spring-gathered, broad-leaf maple
bark were used. The latter was a favorite valley Maidu skirt material.
The double aprons might however be made of whole buckskin or of strips
or cords of buckskin, and in winter furs might be used for the purpose.
The double apron is recognized as the standard garb of California Indian
women. That of the Maidu was often very narrow, being not much more than
a front and a rear tassel.

[Illustration: A beautiful old Shasta buckskin woman’s wrap-around
apron ornamented with tan, black, and red vegetable fiber bound
slitting in the manner of coarse modern hemstitching, with strings
of olivella shells and shaped abalone pendants, and finished on the
bottom with long buckskin fringes. The garment is much like the more
pretentious aprons described for Atsugewi.]

[Illustration: Detail of ornamentation on the Shasta buckskin apron]

[Illustration: Mountain Maidu woman’s tassel-type of shredded bark
apron, about twenty two inches long. Some such aprons were
considerably wider (after Dixon).]

[Illustration: Woman’s basketry cap probably Atsugewi or Shasta.
Note the design placed on top as well as on the sides of the basket,
in contrast to other types of baskets. The bottoms of which are
devoid both of design and overlay materials and so present an
unadorned pine-root surface.]

Women’s casual aprons and other clothing were not highly ornamented, but
“dress-up” clothes might be fairly elaborately trimmed. Fringing of
buckskin, spangles of shell money and ornaments, strings of shell beads,
pine nuts, deer hoofs, and special white grass fringes commonly
decorated their better clothes.

In the summer some men, and particularly old ones wore nothing at all.
Most others wore very little clothing besides a sort of loin covering of
buckskin or fur which went between the legs and was held in place back
and front by a belt about the waist. A crude buckskin shirt without
sleeves was sometimes used.

During winter above aprons, skirts, or loin covering other garments were
worn. Then men commonly wore the sleeveless buckskin shirt. Both sexes
usually wore robes of woven rabbit skins (usually imported by the
Atsugewi), or made of deer or bear fur and worn with the hair side
inside. Or else the robes were of a patchwork of small mammal skins sewn
together. These same robes were frequently used for bedding at night. As
a matter of fact almost any sort of skins available might be used as
robes. These were tied on in a variety of ways. The wearers must have
presented a rather motley appearance. On occasion small poncho style
robes with a central hole for the head and neck clothed the upper bodies
of local Indians during cold weather.

[Illustration: Atsugewi fringed buckskin dress of pioneer period]

[Illustration: An Atsugewi legging made of lashing tules together
with a simple twining stitch]

[Illustration: Maidu buckskin moccasin about eleven inches long
(after Dixon)]

Thumbless mittens were made of cased skins of weasels, rats or small
cottontail rabbits and tied at the wrist with a thong. Atsugewi also
utilized their fur-lined quivers as muffs when hunting.

California Indians spent much of the time barefoot, but wore buckskin
moccasins at war, on long hunts or journeys. Different styles were made
by each of the local tribes. None, however, were normally decorated.
Mountain Maidu also made moccasins of fur with the hair side in, and
Atsugewi stuffed pounded grass or grass into their footwear or wore
grass or tule slippers inside their moccasins during the winter. Maidu
put soft grass or sedges in their moccasins for added warmth. An extra
sole of tougher leather such as elkskin was sometimes sewn onto the
moccasin, but this was not customary.

Occasionally open sandals held on by three or four thongs were worn by
Atsugewi and Yana.

[Illustration: Maidu snowshoe with raw-hide lashings]

[Illustration: Snowshoe of about eighteen inches in diameter (after
Dixon)]

Knee length leggings of various materials were common in winter. These
were tied on with buckskin strips at ankle and knee. Yana used
hip-length pantleg type leggings held on with waist bands. Atsugewi
sometimes employed fur pieces, twined tule, or spiral wrap-around fur
strip leggings. Maidu used deerhide leggings with the hair side inside.
These went from ankles to above the knees where they were tied, and were
held close to the leg by an outside spirally wound thong from top to
bottom.

Snowshoes were a necessity too in the rigorous climate of even the lower
portions of the areas inhabited by tribes of the Lassen area,
particularly in those of the Atsugewi and mountain Maidu. Snowshoes of
the former Indians were circular in plan; those of the latter were oval.
Snowshoes were fashioned from small green wooden limbs shaped while hot,
and then crisscrossed with strips of buckskin or hide with the fur side
down for better traction. Atsugewi used green juniper limbs for the
purpose. Since the whole foot was bound firmly to this footgear, there
was no heel play as in the case of white mans’ snowshoes.

Chapter XVI
BEAUTY AND PERSONAL GROOMING

Of Atsugewi standards of beauty Garth states: “The ideal woman was
short but plump and solidly built so that she could do much work. A
slim woman was considered too weak, and a very tall woman was made fun
of and called lohkata (stick woman). Heavy breasts, a straight slim
nose, large eyes, long black hair, and small feet were all admirable
qualities. A girl with big feet was likely to be lazy, also a small
foot was desirable because it would not take so large a moccasin. A
mother pressed her girl child’s foot together to make it slender. The
ideal man was of average height and was heavy set. If a child had a
flat nose, his mother pinched it and tried to give it a higher bridge.
Bow legs, it was said, might be straightened by the mother when the
child was young. Also a child’s ears were pressed against his head; if
the ears stood out, this was thought to indicate poor hearing. A slim
hand indicated a lazy person; a short stubby hand signified a good
worker.”

Garth also comments to the effect that evidently the ideals of Indian
beauty had a very practical basis. The same general criteria of beauty
and desirability of women seem to have prevailed among the other tribes
of this region also, but Yana preferred a rather flat and broad faced
feminine beauty.

The hair of both men and women among California Indians was generally
worn long. The tribes of the Lassen area were no exception. However,
bangs on the forehead were known. Boys and girls let their hair hang
loosely, except that Atsugewi sometimes cut small boys’ hair short to
make it grow better later.

Women usually parted their hair in the middle wearing it in two hanks,
one hanging in front of each shoulder. Each was tied with a piece of
rawhide. Women of Yana tribes often used strips of otter or mink fur for
the purpose as did some Atsugewi. Yana women might add further
decoration in the form of a small string of shell beads. Atsugewi women
might paint their scalps at the part in the hair with red paint.

The male Indian tied his hair in a bunch which hung down the back. All
local tribes, except mountain Maidu, seem also to have frequently used a
small mesh hairnet made of plant fibers with a buckskin band to hold a
man’s hair in a sort of roll at the back of his head. Maidu called the
net wee-kah. In preparation for war or for the hunt Yana men coiled
their hair on their heads with well defined top knots. For dances and
other special events, male Maidu and Yana, if rich, wore mesh bonnets
thickly covered with white eagle down feathers tied in so that the net
strands were not visible. Bone hairpins were sometimes used among Yana
and mountain Maidu men.

[Illustration: Men’s hair net type of cap worn by adult males of all
Lassen area tribes, the wearer’s long hair being piled on top of the
head when worn as in upper sketch (after Dixon) with the loose
excess net allowed to fall straight down behind.]

_NET_
_BUCKSKIN_
_DRAWSTRING_
_CORD_

Adults cut their hair off with stone knives to show grief and mourning
when relatives died. Both men and women cropped their hair closely, but
mountain Maidu women sometimes only trimmed it off to shoulder length.
Singeing instead of cutting the hair was sometimes resorted to.

For combing the hair, Atsugewi might use a single stick, a pine cone, or
a teasle burr. Mountain Maidu might use stiff pine needles, but the item
most commonly used by all tribes for the purpose was the porcupine tail.
The animal’s tail was skinned out, stuffed with grass, and sewed shut at
the open end. Sharp ends of the porcupine quills were blunted with hot
stones.

Hair was not dyed in this region. It was, however, rubbed with animal
fat or bone marrow to make it look nicer by aboriginal standards.
Atsugewi are said to have perfumed their hair on occasion with aromatic
plant foliage. Hair and body lice were not uncommon; these were hunted
and removed by hand. Maidu washed their hair frequently with common
soaproot (_Chlorogalum pomeridianum_).

Faces of adults were painted for a number of occasions. Black was used
to some extent by both sexes to prevent sunburn and snow-blindness if
long exposure in the bright sun were expected. Although Yana men and
women used red and white paint when dancing, among our other tribes face
paint was used chiefly by men for dances and ceremonies.

[Illustration: Porcupine tail comb about ten inches long (after
Dixon)]

Paint pigments were mixed with animal fat, especially deer grease, or
with marrow and applied with the fingers. It was smeared on upper arms,
legs, chest, and cheeks. Atsugewi and mountain Maidu blackened their
eyebrows. Red pigment was either red soil, usually roasted or burned to
make the color brighter, or the spores from a fungus which grows on the
bark of fir trees. The fungus material was dried over a slow fire to
prepare it for use. Black pigment was universally charcoal. Ashes were
not used as white pigment. Students of local tribes state that chalk was
employed for white paint. However, chalk is lacking in the Lassen
vicinity and it is highly probable that the suitable and readily
available white diatomaceous earth deposits were used for this purpose
instead. Atsugewi also used blue color which was obtained in rock form
by trade with their northern Pit River or Achomawi neighbors.

The light beards which started to grow on male Indians’ faces were
universally removed completely by plucking with the fingers.

Earlobe and nose piercing was generally practiced by both sexes. Among
Atsugewi rims of their ears as well as the lobes were perforated in some
instances.

Tattooing was occasionally done by Yana, but not as commonly as among
Atsugewi where women not infrequently wore tattooed vertical lines
across their mouths. Both sexes commonly tattooed their cheeks with
horizontal lines or with two or three lines radiating from the corners
of the mouth. Arms and legs were also tattooed to a certain extent. The
mutilation was done by rubbing charcoal into cuts which had been made
with stone knives or by rubbing charcoal on the skin and then pricking
it with bone awls or porcupine quills. However, even among Atsugewi,
tattooing was by no means universal. Mountain Maidu women were sometimes
tattooed with three, five, or seven vertical lines on the chin.

Earrings were worn by nearly all men and women. Atsugewi employed bone
rings, clamshell beads, feathers and even painted ear ornaments.
Mountain Maidu and Yana usually used bone or wooden ones, plain or
decorated with feathers or shells. Abalone, like other sea shells, were
received only in trade and were fashioned into pendants for ears or
noses.

Nose piercing consisted of making a hole through the septum of the nose.
This practice was popular among all local tribes. It was done to permit
the wearing of jewelry although Yana ascribed a deeper meaning to the
custom as well. They believed that no person would go to his equivalent
of heaven unless the nose septum was pierced. Hence this was done to the
dead and a stick inserted if it had not been done in life. Two-pointed
bone nose-pins were popular inserts as were long narrow dentalium
shells, or nose pendants of beads. Only among mountain Maidu were nose
ornaments highly decorated.

[Illustration: Portion of Atsugewi (probably) necklace of dentalium
shells (one and one fourth inches long) and glass trader beads.]

[Illustration: Maidu necklaces: bear claw and insect perforated
acorn.]

[Illustration: Atsugewi necklace of clamshell disks and digger pine
nuts which are a full half inch long.]

Necklaces were common adornments too, but local tribes did not use
bracelets. Items used for necklaces were perhaps bear teeth and bear
claws among Atsugewi and Yana. More commonly, certainly, and used by all
of our tribes were olivella shells, shaped pieces of abalone shells,
small animal and bird bone rings or tubes, clamshell discs, long
tooth-shells (dentalia), and Digger Pine nuts which had been parched
until blackened. Their ends had then been rubbed off or holes bored
through ends or sides and cleaned out. Yana also made mussel shell disks
locally, not only for necklaces but as ear pendants. In later years all
tribes used glass trader beads, usually interspersed with native items.

Maidu, especially their tribes of the lower elevations, went in for
elaborate feather decorations and headdresses. Valley Maidu even had
feather cloaks for ceremonial use.

Chapter XVII
WEALTH

Among local tribes wealth was the direct result of skill and industry
and was highly regarded by all. A person’s social status in the tribe
varied directly with his wealth. Lazy persons not able to properly care
for their own needs were considered as bums and looked down upon by all
other members of the village. With wealth went a certain amount of
power. Chiefs, although empowered by heritage, were always well to do,
and the wealthiest men in smaller units acted in the capacity of
head-men.

As with modern man, money among Indians was an arbitrary medium of
exchange, yet it was of more practical value to the Indians than our own
coins are to us. Their money was prized not only for what it would buy
in material things, but as possessing important decorative value as
well.

The long tooth-shell or dentalium was used whole and unmodified. It was
the currency of the northwest California coast. The money of central and
southern California was the clamshell disk. This was cut, smoothed into
disk shapes about half an inch in diameter, and each was perforated with
a central hole by means of which this money could be strung onto cords.
In no case did local tribes travel the California coast to obtain these
shell coins. Instead, this item found its way to Indians of the interior
through progressive or step-by-step trading from coastal tribes through
intermediate aboriginal traders.

As we might expect, dentalia, having a northern origin, were secured by
Atsugewi not from their neighbors to the south, but from the northern
Yana in exchange for buckskins, arrows, wildcat skin quivers, and
woodpecker scalps. The mountain Maidu did not have dentalia at all.

Except for the central Yana custom of measuring the length of strings of
clamshell disks, amounts of money were determined by counting and not by
measuring length on arm tatoos as was so commonly the case in other
parts of California. Skins of small mammals which had been skinned by
making only one slit in the hind quarters and whose mouth openings had
been tied shut, served as purses.

All of our tribes used clamshell money. Among Yana clamshell disks were
not as valuable as dentalia, and they were more common also among
Atsugewi, the dentalia being used more for decoration than as money. The
tribes of the Lassen region generally received the finished clamshell
money; almost never did they manufacture this, although they did work
traded abalone shell into jewelry pieces.

Material wealth or treasure other than weapons, skins, baskets, and food
also consisted largely of imported seashells. Whole olivella shells were
commonly used as dress ornaments and also for paying shamans for
services. Bone cylinders, columellae of shells, and especially polished
cylinders of the mineral magnesite were highly prized. These might be
used as the central piece of a necklace in the same manner that we might
utilize a precious gem.

Chapter XVIII
CEREMONIAL DRESS

All local tribes used the beautiful salmon colored feathers of the
Red-shafted Flicker, a woodpecker also known to us by the name
Yellowhammer. A headband of the bird’s feathers—the stiff quills—was
worn on the forehead. Mountain Maidu doctors wore this item also as a
belt. In addition Atsugewi made a full feather band which was worn in a
variety of ways including hanging down the back. This was usually used
only by the shamans.

Another ceremonial item was the California or Acorn Woodpecker scalp
headband. This usually had a buckskin strap base, however, mountain
Maidu glued these gay feathered patches onto fur bands, Yana wore
woodpecker scalps on buckskin as belts.

Mountain Maidu made belts of bands on which the showy greenish feathered
neck skins of male Mallard Ducks in mating plumage were strung.

For ceremonial use it was generally customary to tuck small tufts of
feathers into the top of the hair. Among Atsugewi, chiefs only used
eagle feathers for this purpose. This tribe also fastened single
feathers into the crown of buckskin caps in a radiating manner, and also
onto strips hanging down the back. Sometimes feathers were tipped with
small white feathers to make the former even more decorative. Feathers
were also fastened to head nets in a number of ways which differed
somewhat among our tribes. Among Atsugewi, women wore these on occasion,
but generally it was the males who decked themselves with feathers.
Feather plumes of various sorts, employing either twisted buckskin or
stick bodies, were also in general use.

Chapter XIX
TOBACCO AND SMOKING

The knowledge and use of tobacco are among the important elements which
our own culture of today has inherited from the Indians of North
America. Of what benefit this has been is a debatable matter, but its
effect has been profound, both on our customs and our economy.

Local tribes used simple one piece wooden pipes of tubular design for
the most part in smoking tobacco. Atsugewi and mountain Maidu commonly
employed elder and other woods with a pithy and easily removed center.
Although not otherwise being considered in this account, the Shasta
Indian technique of pipe making is mentioned here because of its
uniqueness. These folks hollowed pipe stems by soaking the end of a
suitable stick in salmon oil. The larvae of the salmon fly were then
introduced, and these worm-like creatures, eating the nourishing fishy
core, would bore their ways lengthwise through the center of the
heartwood where most of the salmon oil was concentrated. The Yana
habitually used the wood of ash as pipe stock. Mountain Maidu found but
did not manufacture a few simple stone pipe bowls also of tubular
design. These had considerable spiritual significance and were treated
with great care. Garth states that Atsugewi also had short stone pipes,
tubular in shape, to which elder or rose wood extensions up to eleven
inches in length were applied. Stone pipes were apparently not common in
the Lassen region, however.

[Illustration: Steatite stone pipes were used without wooden stems,
each between three and four inches long. The holes in such pipes
were made by tapping a deer antler piece in the depression
containing some sand, a slow but effective boring process. This was
commonly done by Valley tribes.]

[Illustration: Yana reddish porous lava (dacite?) pipe, broken half,
both sides shown. Note funnel-shaped depression in the bottom of the
outside (lower half)]

Pipes were used at social gatherings, after sweating, and at bed time.
The pipes of the local tribes did not have any bends or curves. These
straight tubular pipes were therefore most conveniently smoked when the
Indians were reclining on their backs thus keeping the tobacco from
falling out. Pipes were normally passed around, and used only by the
men. However, women shamans of the mountain Maidu also smoked them.
Shamans regularly used pipe smoking in ceremonies, especially when
healing the sick.

Tobacco grew wild and burning of brush was performed in certain
localities to promote the growth of _Nicotiana_ plants. Tobacco was not
cultivated, but mountain Maidu did collect and scatter seeds in
favorable areas. Tobacco was prepared merely by collecting the leaves
when fully developed but still green, then drying, preferably in the
shade, and finally crumbling the cured leaf in the hand. Tobacco was
carried in buckskin pouches usually. Atsugewi often added manzanita and
deer grease to their smoking tobacco. Indians of this region did not
chew tobacco nor did they eat it with lime as was the custom elsewhere
in California. Native tobacco is quite strong.

Chapter XX
MUSIC AND ART

Music of local tribes was limited indeed. It was usually made by men.
Only Atsugewi among the Lassen tribes possessed the drum, and this is
believed to have been of recent introduction. It was a tambourine type:
flat, cylindrical, a foot or so across, and with buckskin shrunken over
one end.

The shamans of all tribes used cocoon rattles. These were made of large
cocoons from which the moth pupae had been removed through a small hole.
Pebbles or seeds were then inserted and usually five or six
cocoons—among Atsugewi as many as thirty—were tied onto the end of a
wooden handle and dried. Cocoon rattles were considered dangerous and
were usually kept hidden out of doors, being used by shamans only when
doctoring.

A single split stick clapper was employed generally for all types of
singing and dancing, not being reserved for any special type of person
or ceremony.

Deer-hoof rattles were made from the small hard “dew-claws” from the
backs of deer legs. About twenty dew-claws were tied loosely with thongs
to a strip of buckskin which was then wrapped about a stick with a plain
handle. The deer-hoof rattle was operated by vigorously jerking it
lengthwise, in and out. It was used exclusively in the important puberty
rites when girls attained womanhood.

[Illustration: Deer-hoof rattle, length about ten inches (after
Dixon)]

[Illustration: Maidu split-stick clapper, twenty inches long]

[Illustration: Maidu cocoon rattle eight inches long]

[Illustration: Maidu bird-bone whistles]

[Illustration: Atsugewi deer-claw rattle]

[Illustration: Universal split-stick dancing rattle]

[Illustration: Maidu cocoon rattle]

[Illustration: Flute and bull-roarer of local manufacture]

Atsugewi and Yana employed hunting bows as musical instruments by
holding one end in the mouth and plucking the string with fingers.
Mountain Maidu did so too, but like the others only for their own
amusement.

Bone, cane, and elder whistles were blown at dances. Flutes, the most
tuneful of Indians’ instruments, were not played at ceremonies or at
dances, curiously enough, but just for self amusement, or in the case of
mountain Maidu also for courting pretty girls. Flute melodies were
supposed to tell stories, but words were not sung to help the
interpretation. Yana made a six-hole flute; other tribes of the Lassen
area used a four hole model. In all cases they were open, reedless
instruments blown at an angle across one end. The flute was most
frequently made of elder wood—mountain Maidu burned the holes into it
with live coals.

Except for basketry designs art as such is virtually non-existent. A few
simple designs were painted onto hunting bows, and some nose and ear
pendants might be considered jewelry art forms, but of the lowest
development. The application of face and body paints and tattooing were
also simple examples of Indian art.

There appear to be no cliff or cave paintings in the vicinity of Lassen
Peak, but they are abundant in Lava Beds National Monument about 75
miles to the north. A different matter is that of petroglyphs which, in
California, usually have been made by striking or pecking smooth rock
surfaces with small hard stones. Some of these are to be found in the
Atsugewi and central Yana territories at lower elevation. However, these
symbolic markings were not executed by the local tribes. Atsugewi
believe them to have been made by mythological characters. It appears
that the petroglyphs must have been made by the predecessors of the Hat
Creek and Nozi Indians, for these people claim no knowledge of even the
meaning of the rock writings. Shortly before going to press the first
petroglyph known to come from the Lassen vicinity was found in the
territory of the Southern Yana. The site is one where numerous obsidian
chips and arrowpoints have been found on a gently south sloping, open
forested portion of Lassen Volcanic National Park headquarters area at
an elevation of almost 5000 feet and situated slightly west of the
village of Mineral and just north of the north edge of Battle Creek
Meadow.

This find on a 10 inch boulder appears to be of ancient origin. The
surface has weathered considerably yet not so much that the character of
the carving has been altered. It is apparent that the quarter inch deep
grooves have been made by rubbing rather than by pecking with hard
rocks. This is all the more interesting since the boulder bearing the
carving is of a tough hard and site lava. It is indeed unfortunate that
the significance of this Battle Creek Meadows petroglyph is unknown. The
authorities venture the opinion that the stone may have been used in
puberty ceremonies. If so, whether by the Southern Yana or their
predecessors we do not know either.

[Illustration: Battle Creek Meadows petroglyph about nine inches
long. The eye-shaped area A is a smooth flat one eighth of an inch
below the level of the rest of the rock surface. The grooves
bounding it are more than one quarter inch deep and of V-shaped
cross-section while the other markings are much shallower troughs
with rounded bottoms some being quite vague. B, C, D, and E indicate
deeper rounded depressions. F is a smooth and very uniform slightly
concave area.]

Chapter XXI
GAMES AND SOCIAL GATHERINGS

Heavy betting on games was the rule. Games were commonly played between
neighboring villages or even on occasion with neighboring tribes.
Gambling was an important element in these contests and large sums were
bet. Sometimes nearly all of a person’s or even of a group’s possessions
were at stake. Evaluation of the stakes in white man’s terms is
difficult, but they are said frequently to have been of the order of
several hundred dollars or even as much as a thousand dollars. Important
games lasted more than one day—perhaps three or four days. The players
caught brief rests only and were completely exhausted by the time the
playing was over. Singing was the usual accompaniment and high quality
rendition at games was much admired. Cheating was rare, maybe because it
was supposed to bring subsequent bad luck.

Most games were guessing games. There was considerable variety in the
character and number of gambling stones or wooden sticks used, the
manner of shuffling and other details. The sticks were shuffled and then
concealed in the hands of one or several players on one side. The
opposition had to determine the location of the marked stick or the
arrangement of several. There were many spectators and excitement ran
high. Women occasionally participated along with the men who were the
main contestants. Counting sticks might be supplied to each side in
equal number at the beginning. More often, however, the sticks were all
placed in a common pile at the outset, the successful side taking a
counting stick with each win. These scoring sticks were taken and
surrendered as the tide of the game changed until one side had all. The
game was won at this point.

Ball games were played too. The ball was of buckskin stuffed with hair.
The object was to kick the ball between the other team’s goal posts.
Kicking ball races over given courses and back, or around a lake shore,
were also indulged in. In some contests the men and youths on opposing
sides would engage in restraining each other so that a number of
individual or group wrestling bouts developed on the playing field.

[Illustration: Yana gambling bone, four inches long]

There were foot races of distances either short or up to fifteen miles
or so in length. Also archery contests and wrestling matches were held.
In wrestling the object was to throw the opponent to the ground;
tripping was not allowed. Contests in which heavy rocks were tossed,
somewhat in the manner of today’s shot-put, and heavier rocks carried in
competition over a designated line were other games in which the
Atsugewi engaged.

Shinny was played by women and children as well as by men, but adult
sexes played separately in all of our tribes except Yana. Among them
only men participated in this game. Mountain Maidu had three players on
a side; Atsugewi had five players. Straight shinny sticks curved at the
striking end were used and the puck was a hide affair. Mountain Maidu
used a double ball puck. An attempt was made to keep the puck in the air
in play. The object, of course, was to get the puck to go between the
opponents’ goal posts. The Yana used a puck of two bones linked by a
string several inches long. Running with the puck on the stick as well
as hitting, and throwing it down the field were permitted.

Children improvised a number of games in the same manner as our own
children do today in copying their parents. They played house with
limbless but dressed dolls, made and used toy bows and arrows, and made
sling shots, too. They commonly tried juggling two stones in one hand,
spun acorn tops by hand, and in some instances noise makers such as
wooden buzzers and bull roarers were used. In play, loud noise was not
condoned, however.

Small feasts might occur at any time and were perhaps the most important
social gatherings of Atsugewi. They were usually sparked by a temporary
abundance of food. Dancing was not included.

[Illustration: Child’s acorn top]

Mr. Garth describes the Atsugewi “... grand occasion ... held only when
a large supply of food had been accumulated, was the bagapi or ‘big
time’.... The chief called a meeting to decide on the date and then sent
his people to various places for deer and other foods. Knotted strings
(rokuki) with a knot tied for each intervening day before the festival
were sent to other villages. By untying a knot each day other chieftains
knew when to start for the host’s village. The host chief stood on the
roof of his earth lodge and welcomed the visitor, calling each chief by
name: ‘Don’t fall down. Step carefully. I’m glad you have come to see
me. Don’t be in a hurry.’... Toward evening the visitors might give a
dance, after which the host chief called everyone to eat. Large baskets
containing acorn mush, meat, sunflower seeds, and other foods were
placed on the ground. The host proffered baskets of food to each
visiting chief who in turn then distributed the food to his people. In
winter two tribal groups on opposite sides of the sweat house might have
a competitive sweat dance, vying to see which could endure the heat
longest. In summer the sweating was usually omitted, and games of chance
were begun. In the several days that followed, foot racing, archery,
weight lifting, and other contests were indulged in. Large bets were
made by opposing sides on the outcome of each contest, and the losing
side at the end of the week’s festivities often had little property
left. Surplus food was divided among the guests before they departed.”

Chapter XXII
DANCES

Mountain Maidu had more dances and more types of dances than other
tribes of the Lassen area. Tribes of the Sacramento Valley had many more
and more complicated dance ceremonies than ours did.

Mountain Maidu had formalized sweat dances which were performed inside
large dwelling lodges at night and were participated in by both sexes.
As in the case of Yana, only one man, the leader, sang and hit the
central pole rhythmically with a split stick rattle. The dancers
performed simultaneously but in one spot until they were exhausted and
took a cold swim afterwards.

Of the less ceremonial Atsugewi sweat dance, Garth states:

“... Men danced naked except for circlets ... of twisted grass around
the waist, head and upper arm, and occasionally from one shoulder
diagonally across the chest.... Three or four lines of black or white
paint might be drawn across the chest and upper arm. Women wore a
skirt and only a small amount of paint. The dancing took place in the
combination sweat, dance, and dwelling house of the chief or head
man.... The fire was built high with dry mountain mahogany ..., pine
..., and sometimes with willow ..., all woods which burned without
much smoke; the ventilator door was closed and the dance began. The
one singer sat in a corner and beat time with a split stick rattle....
Each of ten or twelve dancers might approach close to the fire to show
his ability to endure heat, pick up burning brands, one in each hand,
and alternately hit one upper arm and then the other with the brands.
The heat often became so intense that water had to be thrown on the
center post to prevent its catching fire. There was rivalry to see who
could stay inside longest, and after a time one man after another
emerged and dived into the icy water nearby or rolled in the snow.
There might be sweating three or four nights in succession on the
occasion of a communal hunt.”

Mountain Maidu held a dance gathering each spring for Black Bear and
Grizzly Bear. They believed that this dance had been done by animals in
mythical “before Indian times”. This gathering lasted three days and
nights, but the actual dance was in progress only one day and night.
Only women danced but men participated in the ceremony dressed in bear
robes. There was much feasting too.

The pre- and post-war dances are discussed under the chapter on war.

Chapter XXIII
POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF TRIBES

Tribes, as we think of them, were non-existent as political units, and
hence there were no tribal chiefs, but there were village chiefs, in the
California province.

The self governing unit was always a village or a group of small closely
adjacent villages. This is the political unit which was governed by the
chief. Villages might consist of from four to about twenty-five earth
lodges and bark huts with populations of from twenty-five to a hundred
or more persons. Influential leaders, usually of much wealth—but not
necessarily so—were recognized as head-men, exercising considerable
authority over the smaller villages or separated groups of houses near
villages. However the head-man’s authority was subservient to that of
the chief.

Chieftainship was inherited through the father’s lineage, the oldest son
being the first in succession. However, if the son were too young to
take over, the deceased chief’s brother was temporarily in charge. The
qualities of good character and knowledge were also important
qualifications for chieftainship, and a chief could be deposed if he
were not a good one. Tenure was normally for life, dependent upon
satisfactory behavior and performance of his responsibilities.

The chief’s relatives hunted and fished for him, but he fed visitors and
provided most of the food for feasts. The chief always directed
community economic activities such as group fishing, deer hunting, and
root digging expeditions. For this reason chiefs had to know much about
game, fish runs, ripening seasons, et cetera, and had to possess good
judgement to insure success of group undertakings. Chiefs also spoke to
their people mornings and evenings, and at ceremonies and the like.
Chiefs furthermore declared days of rest when chores were done about
home. Another function was to arbitrate quarrels among the people.

Mountain Maidu villages had assistant chiefs besides, who were sons or
brothers of the chiefs. This assistant advised the chief and substituted
for him as the occasion demanded. A specific duty of his was the
division of food at ceremonies.

Some chiefs had secondary female chiefs who in the case of the Maidu
were daughters, among Atsugewi the chiefs’ wives. A woman in this
capacity supervised preparation of food for feasts and in Atsugewi
villages might give orders to men.

Atsugewi chiefs appointed clowns at ceremonies who were paid. Appointed
messengers were a part of every chief’s staff. They were selected on the
basis of both willingness to serve and ability. Maidu had about six
messengers per village while the number varied among Atsugewi.
Messengers were good speakers, reliable men, and were discharged if they
failed in their duties. These included not only message running, but
among Atsugewi, tending fires at ceremonies. For Maidu chiefs,
messengers welcomed guests and traveled about gathering news and
scouting. Special fire tenders were appointed in this tribe.

Atsugewi chiefs seem to have possessed greater prestige and authority
than those of the mountain Maidu, the Yana, and the Yahi. The decisions
of Atsugewi chiefs were final, but these had to be diplomatic if the
chief were to remain popular. If a chief were unpopular some of his
people would move to another village leaving the first chief’s community
numerically weaker. Chiefs were generally well obeyed by rich and poor
alike. In return, chiefs unfailingly had the interests of their people
at heart. Atsugewi chiefs, specifically, set examples of industry,
behavior, and judgement for their people. No doubt this was generally
true of the chiefs of units in other local tribes too.

Because of the greater popularity, prestige, and consequently larger
following of some individual chiefs, they were considerably more
powerful than other chiefs in the same tribe. Such men were influential
to some extent beyond the boundaries of their own territories.

Chapter XXIV
WAR AND PEACE

Wars were commonly small scale encounters and might be either within
tribes or between tribes. Atsugewi were not often aggressive. Most
tribes at one time or another had differences with neighboring tribes,
but friendly relations were usually re-established soon. Certain tribes,
however, were repeatedly or traditionally enemies, as for instance,
Klamath, Paiute, or Modoc against Atsugewi; Washoe against mountain
Maidu; Achomawi or Wintun against the Yana tribes; and mountain Maidu or
Wintun against Yahi. Tribes sometimes helped each other in wars, and
either payment or reciprocal aid was usually forthcoming.

Causes of hostilities in the Lassen area were usually revenge for
murders (if uncompensated), abduction of women and children, or insults
to chiefs. Mountain Maidu, Yana, and Yahi also waged wars on account of
poaching, rape, alleged witchcraft, and the like. All able bodied men
normally went to war, but mountain Maidu left some at home to protect
the women.

Chiefs generally did not participate in the fighting although they often
went along on the war expedition. Instead of leading the battles
themselves, chiefs appointed special warrior leaders who were principal
targets of the opposition. Such battle leaders were often head-men, but
always were men competent to lead the fight and who had good arrow
dodging power.

Shamans habitually went to war, but did not fight actively except on
occasion. They were busy singing during battle and urging the warriors
on or exhorting supernatural help. The Atsugewi shaman reportedly
“stayed behind a tree all the time giving out his power”.

Preparation for war consisted of practicing dodging arrows, shooting
arrows, in some cases at effigies, and in dancing. The main purpose of
the preparation was to incite enthusiasm for the fight. This was so
successful that quite a commotion developed in the community, to the
extent that such incidents occurred as warriors with knives chasing
women and a man shooting his own dog with an arrow! Preparatory war
dances were held outside near the villages. Both men and women
participated and shamans sang. Mountain Maidu sustained their dances for
several days. Warriors spoke to their arrows addressing them as persons.
Atsugewi men painted themselves with white and black stripes on faces,
limbs, and bodies. Yana used red and white war paint. Mountain Maidu
wore head nets and bands. Dried untanned skins of bear, elk, and such
were worn at dances as well as in battle, as were waistcoat armors of
strong vertical sticks lashed together. Leather helmets were worn by
some warriors.

The enemy was usually attacked just at dawn using the element of
surprise to the fullest extent possible. Some battles were pre-arranged
in which a number of participants faced each other in well formed lines.
Such conflicts were subject to “calling off” if too many men were
injured or killed. Serious raids, however, did not give quarter and men,
women, and children were killed. Booty was taken and scalps, too, were
stripped from fallen victims. Scalps were later burned by Atsugewi, but
mountain Maidu dried human scalps on frames. This tribe also took entire
heads from bodies on occasion. Prisoners were taken too: Atsugewi not
infrequently adopted captured children. Captive women might be
mistreated and raped, then killed. Adult prisoners might escape with
relative ease because there was no suitable way to confine them
permanently, and some were returned voluntarily.

While the war party was away on its expedition, the women at home danced
individually in the manner of the war dance. They sang and prayed to
help the men at war. Atsugewi women dancers carried feathers, bows, and
arrows, but rattles were not used in these morale dances.

Upon return of the war party a victory dance was held in or near the
village in the open air. Men and women danced independently, but
together at the same time. Atsugewi men painted themselves red and white
instead of the black and white used for the pre-war dance. They wore
headdresses of all sorts and the warriors carried their bows, arrows,
armor, and other fighting gear while dancing. The victory dance took
place around a fire. Next to the fire Atsugewi planted a short pole on
which the new scalps were displayed while mountain Maidu danced with the
scalps secured to hand-carried sticks. It is worth noting that while
some readers may consider this gloating over human scalps to be a
primitive morbidity, it is true that often white men—the very pioneers
we eulogize—took and coveted human scalps themselves.

Warriors, particularly those who had killed adversaries, purified
themselves by swimming, rubbing aromatic plants on their bodies, praying
for luck. They did not eat meat for from a few to many days, depending
on the tribe. Among Atsugewi they also sweated with the same end in
view, and women brushed the men’s bodies with plant materials to aid the
purification process.

Surprisingly, the eating of hot foods and any form of meat was taboo to
wounded warriors. This seems strange, since these are the very foods
which we consider beneficial to injured persons.

When an attack appeared likely upon an Atsugewi village, the whole
population retired to high ground which was easily defended. Such sites
were prepared in advance and might be considered crude forts as they
were surrounded by rock walls and provided with shelters for the
non-combatants.

In intertribal wars there was usually no compensation as such made where
the encounter had been motivated by the satisfaction of securing
revenge. In the case of feuds or murders within the tribe payment was
made to relatives of the slain. If persons on both sides were slain
compensation was made for all the dead. The chief or head-man supervised
the peace negotiations. Payment was usually in beads or money, but
Atsugewi sometimes paid off in women or in the amount of the usual price
of a bride. In this tribe too, the amount of compensation was made
according to the wealth of the victim. A poor man’s life was not
considered to be worth as much as a rich man’s. Atsugewi had a
settlement dance meeting in which both sides were present and wore
fighting regalia. These dancers disarmed themselves after the payment
had been made.

Chapter XXV
BIRTH AND BABIES

The natural function of birth obviously varied only in details of
handling the situation, delivery assistance, disposition of the
afterbirth, and methods of cutting and treating the child’s umbilical
cord. The baby was born in a separate hut which contained a trench
heated with coals. These were covered with grass and pine needles or fir
boughs. On this warm green bed the woman lay at least a part of the time
during labor and also after delivery.

Children were desired and a barren woman was looked down on socially.
Inability to produce children was grounds for divorce. The behavior of
both parents during pregnancy was believed to closely affect personality
and health of the child.

After giving birth, the mother remained in isolation for from nearly a
week to a month or more. Many taboos were imposed upon her. Bathing in
streams and sweat baths, eating fresh or dried meat or fish, grease, and
often salt were forbidden to her. Most tribes of the Lassen area also
prohibited combing of the mother’s hair by herself during the period of
isolation. Also taboo was scratching herself with her hands, making
baskets, preparing food, or traveling.

[Illustration: Front and side views of Atsugewi cradle basket for a
very young baby. (tseh-nay-gow)]

[Illustration: Atsugewi young baby carrying basket or teseh-nay-gow]

There were restrictions on the father of the newly born child too. Among
Atsugewi and Yana he stayed with the mother, but mountain Maidu fathers
stayed away for periods of a week or less. Immediately after the birth
had taken place, the father ran to the woods to break up and bring home
quantities of fire-wood. Hunting and fishing of all kinds and traveling
were taboo for several weeks in most cases. Atsugewi and mountain Maidu
new fathers were also forbidden to smoke and gamble, and like their
wives, were denied eating fresh or dried fish, meat, and grease for
varying periods up to a month. Release from taboos occurred with
sweating and bathing among Atsugewi and mountain Maidu. Fathers in these
tribes also gave away the first kill when they resumed hunting.

The mother generally massaged the infant to improve the shape and
proportion of nose, face, limbs, and torso. Shedding of the baby’s
umbilical cord was an important event which the Indians wished to occur
as soon as possible. A variety of odd practices to this end were
employed. The occurrence of the event relieved the parents of some, or
in other cases of all, the post birth taboos. Among most of our tribes
the dried cord was saved until the child reached manhood or womanhood.
It was customarily secured to the cradle basket, but frequently was
subsequently lost. Earlobes might be pierced in early infancy especially
if the child were prone to cry much.

[Illustration: Atsugewi older baby carrying basket or yah-birr-dee.
Note the rounded bottom on A, a modernization. Partial illustration
B shows old style construction with a pointed bottom for thrusting
into the ground.]

Two cradle baskets were used. Mountain Maidu made two of similar oval
shape, but the first and smaller one was without a hood. Atsugewi and
Yana tribes made two different types, but both with rounded carrying
handles and sunshades on top. These were constructed of willow ribs,
pine root, and buckskin. The first small basket was called tseh-nay-gow
by Atsugewi and was used for several months. It was short and with a
distinctly rounded basketry shelf or lip at its lower end. The larger
baby basket was called yah-bih-dee and was practically identical to that
of the mountain Maidu. This was made of the usual twined basketry
materials, but was of different construction. Willow ribs were lashed
onto a sturdy one-piece forked branch frame, the joint being at the
bottom. The base or stem of this Y-piece stuck out below for several
inches being sharpened so that it could be stuck into the ground near
the mother in camp or when she was out digging roots in the fields.
Boo-noo-koo-ee-menorra tells of an interesting modification of the
yah-bih-dee today. Its frame is now simply rounded at the bottom instead
of having the pointed end described above. “Most people have cars now a
days” she says, “and that point poked a hole through the seat of the
car. So now we make the round kind.” Our visitors to Lassen Volcanic
National Park are always interested in names of the “papoose basket”.
This term and the words moccasin, wampum, and so on are no doubt of
Indian origin being the actual words or reasonable facsimiles thereof
used by some eastern tribe for the objects concerned. English speaking
Americans have adopted these names as meaning those particular articles
for all Indian tribes. It may be recalled that earlier in this book, it
was pointed out that each tribe had its own distinct language and so,
obviously, each tribe would have had its own distinct names for these
objects. Hence there is no all inclusive “Indian name” for the cradle
basket or anything else.

[Illustration: Maidu baby carrying basket about thirty five inches
long.]

The baby was wrapped in tanned buckskin or soft furs, normally wildcat
by the Atsugewi. A pad of grass or padded bark was placed on the cradle
board or basket and then the child was lashed into the tshe-nay-gow with
buckskin straps in a sitting position on the sill with its feet hanging
down. Most tribes used dry grass, pounded until soft, for diapers, but
mountain Maidu used skin material for the purpose. Babies were kept in
the cradle baskets until they were able to walk. The cradle frame was
carried on the mother’s back with a tump-line passing over her forehead
or chest. A series of larger cradle baskets were made as the child grew,
usually three before the child was allowed to crawl or walk.

The newborn infant was never fed the colostrum from its mother. The baby
was either let go without food or given a cooked meat gruel for
nourishment for the first two days or so until bonafide milk was
produced in the mother’s breasts. Children were nursed as often as they
wished and until they were quite large: even three or four years old.

Names were given to children usually at the age of about a year. Yana
waited even longer, however, until ages of four to six years before
giving real names which for this tribe were habitually of a hereditary
nature. In the meantime, temporary descriptive nicknames were given.
Many real Atsugewi names had meanings, while those of mountain Maidu and
Yana normally did not. Nevertheless, Yana and to a certain extent other
Indians too, might acquire additional nicknames and descriptive names
later in life, even in adulthood.

Twins were unwanted among all local tribes, probably because of the
double care and feeding responsibilities involved. Mountain Maidu
thought that twins were bad luck and actually feared them. It was
generally believed that twins were caused by the mother having eaten
twinned nutmeats. These, therefore, were carefully avoided.

Killing newborn babies whether illegitimate, twins, crippled, or when
the mother died in childbirth, was practiced only on very rare
occasions. Certainly infanticide was not the rule among any of the local
tribes, but of course was practiced in certain other areas.

[Illustration: Yana baby cradle basket for young baby.]

Chapter XXVI
ADULTHOOD RITES

A girl’s attainment of puberty or womanhood was an event of obvious
importance and it was recognized as such by all tribes of the Lassen
region with extensive formal ritual and ceremony for each individual
girl. Only the more important and generally employed taboos and rites
are noted below. There was considerable variation in details of such
matters even among the four tribes with which we are dealing.

The girl was secluded in a separate hut for from three to six days and
sometimes during the nights too. The taboos she observed during this
time were much like those imposed on a mother giving birth, but were
even more extensive. The young lady must eat from her own special
baskets, not cross streams, avoid contacting men—especially hunters,
refrain from gazing at the sun or moon, et cetera. Among things she must
do were to wear a basketry cap, or special head bands among some tribes,
and have her hair put up in two knobs wrapped over her shoulders. This
had to be done for her as she was not allowed to touch her own hair.
Carrying the deer-hoof rattle she must run races with other girls, and
dance much also, scratch her head only with a special scratcher, have
her earlobes pierced if this had not already been done, and frequently
her nose septum was punctured too, being kept open by insertion of a
round stick. Among Wintun tribes of the Sacramento Valley some taboos
lasted for from one to three years!

For several nights public dances were held which lasted all night. Since
there was no special ritual for anyone but the girl for whom the dances
were held, these ceremonies were of a joyous nature and were popular and
well attended. In the middle of the night food provided by the girl’s
family was served to all present. Singing with deer-hoof rattle
accompaniment was carried on all night. Intimate affairs between couples
were not unusual during such dances. During the daytime as well dances
were held, but these were of short duration and participated in chiefly
by the women of the village. At the end of the ordeal the girl bathed
and was given new clothes, ending her taboos.

There was no formal ceremony when boys attained manhood except that the
youths were generally sent alone into the neighboring mountains for
several days to seek special “powers” to give them skill and luck in
certain pursuits such as deer hunting, archery, fighting, shamanism, and
the like.

During menstruation all women had to observe many taboos too. These
included eating alone and living in seclusion. They could eat no meat or
fish, fat, or salt, and must not cook. They must avoid sick persons and
hunters, and could not scratch themselves except with the scratching
stick. At the end of the taboo periods of four or five days, they
usually bathed in streams for purification.

Curiously, wives’ menstruations had to be observed by their husbands in
a number of ways. Most common was prohibition of smoking, and they must
eat lightly. Among mountain Maidu the husband could hunt and fish, but
could not eat any flesh; among Atsugewi the reverse was true.

Chapter XXVII
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE

Marriage itself was not formalized with any ceremony. It was common
practice for parents to arrange marriages when children were young and
these arrangements, which involved some exchange of gifts or payment,
were usually honored later. Most other marriages were arranged by
parents later when the children had reached maturity and generally these
recognized the children’s wishes. Both of these types of marriages were
the basis for extensive exchange of presents and visits, details of
which differed among the several tribes. In addition there was almost
universal payment for the girl—about ten strings of clamshell disks was
standard. The boy and girl became husband and wife simply upon starting
to live together, but the new status was usually marked by a feast
participated in by the families concerned. Generally there followed a
period of residence of the couple with one or both of the in-laws. On
occasion marriages grew from intimacies with no parental negotiations,
but such matches were not well regarded by the community.

Indian men frequently married women from other villages and occasionally
even women from other tribes.

If a wife died her sister was generally obliged to marry the widower.
Likewise, if the husband died it was customary that his brother would
marry the widow. A wise institution was the relationship of the husband
and wife with their in-laws. Neither could speak to nor hand things
directly to the in-law of opposite sex, or in some cases even to the
brothers and sisters of the in-laws; such things had to be done by a
third party. In some instances the mother-in-law even avoided looking at
her son-in-law even though she might like him. Such arrangements no
doubt prevented many arguments and quarrels, but as far as their own
evaluation of these customs were concerned, the basis lay in the belief
that a bear might eat either or both of the violators of the in-law
taboos.

The practice of having more than one wife at a time was common. One man
might have three or four wives, but rarely had more than two at a time.
Rich men or head-men and chiefs were most apt to have more than two
wives.

Divorce was simple indeed. The man just sent the girl back home if she
were barren, lazy, promiscuous, or the like. If he had good reasons for
wanting to get rid of his wife, her purchase price might be refunded by
her family, or else the ex-wife’s sister might be sent to him in
exchange, or, sometimes, in addition with no additional payment. On the
other hand, the wife might leave her husband if she had been badly
mistreated, or if the husband did not provide enough meat and clothing
for the family or if he were unfaithful. In divorce the children were
divided. Usually, but not always, the girls remained with their mother
and the boys with their father. However, divorce was not common among
Indians of this region.

On the whole, morals were high and sexual deviations were infrequent,
although the whole range of such practices were known to the aborigines.
It appears beyond argument that divorces, moral laxity, and sexual
aberrations increased with the coming of white man.

Chapter XXVIII
DEATH AND BURIAL

Atsugewi and mountain Maidu left the corpse in the house for one day.
They prepared it for burial by dressing it well and adding bead
necklaces, then wrapping it in a hide. Yana did the same, washing the
body first, and although also adorning the corpse with jewelry, they
always removed decorative nose ornaments, replacing these with simple
sticks. According to Voegelin, Atsugewi removed the body for burial
prone and feet first through the wall of the house, but Garth states
that the body was removed through the southern ventilator passage or
through the regular entrance way in the roof.

The mountain Maidu, Yana, Yahi, and usually the Atsugewi bent the body
into a position called flexed. The arms were folded across the chest and
the knees were drawn up against the stomach before wrapping the corpse
in a robe which was then sewn shut. The mountain Maidu sometimes put the
wrapped cadaver into a large basket. Voegelin was of the opinion that
Atsugewi buried their dead lying flat on their backs, and if so, always
with the head toward the east. It is thought that this prone burial
might be a recent innovation learned from white man.

Mourners among all of our local tribes wailed aloud and brought gifts
for the dead. Women, especially the older ones, mourned vigorously. To
quote Garth again on Atsugewi, of their mourning he states:

“The deceased’s close relatives mourned the hardest, but friends might
also mourn——‘to make them feel better.’ Mourners cried and rolled on
the ground, throwing dirt and hot ashes in their faces and hair. Some,
in their grief, tried to commit suicide, and a close watch had to be
kept over them to prevent their doing so. Favorite methods were to
swallow small bits of (obsidian) or to eat a certain kind of spider.
Mourners were warned not to cry around the house near the body but to
go to the hills to cry, and also not to look down when crying or to
cry too much. Otherwise they were subject to bad dreams in which
spirits would plague them and possibly kill them. A mourner might
acquire power at this time. A widow, with possibly a sister to help
her, would wail for a time at daybreak and again in the evening. This
lasted for two or three months, sometimes longer. A widower seldom
cried more than two or three weeks. The widow visited places at which
she had camped with her husband, broke up utensils left there, burned
down the brush where he was accustomed to cut wood, and piled up rocks
where they had slept together. A widower behaved in similar
fashion.... If death occurred in a village, no entertainments could be
held for a time; otherwise relatives of the deceased had the right to
break things up and throw them around. A man would not sing or attend
a ‘big time’ gathering until at least a year after death of a close
relative.”

If the lodge were to be lived in again, after a person had died in it,
Atsugewi brought in juniper boughs, and these were burned to purify the
house. Bark huts, however, were always burned down after an occupant had
died.

Mountain Maidu children were kept away from the dead and from the
funeral proceedings. In that tribe and probably among all local tribes,
if the deceased were rich the funeral would be much larger and more
pretentious than if the person had been poor. In the former case the
ceremony was followed by a feast. Other tribes buried the dead in the
evening generally within twenty-four hours after death, but Yana waited
three or four days. Mountain Maidu grave diggers put grass in their
mouths. Small shallow graves sufficed for poor people, in fact, among
Atsugewi, at least, poor people were often buried in small depressions
in lava flows and covered over with convenient rocks.

Enroute to Atsugewi burials no one was permitted to look back, and water
was sprinkled along the path to prevent the dead person’s spirit from
returning to the village. At the grave the dead were asked aloud please
not to look back, for if they did other members of their families would
die soon.

Cremation, that is, burning of corpses was rare among tribes of the
Lassen area. At the battlefield and in other instances of death far from
home, especially in the case of mountain Maidu, burning was done
occasionally. After this the bones were collected, wrapped in buckskin,
and then buried.

The flexed bodies of the dead were always placed in graves facing
eastward. Widows customarily attempted to throw themselves into the
graves, but were restrained from doing so. A basket of water was
invariably placed next to the body, and most personal property of the
deceased was broken and also placed in the grave. The amount of property
so disposed of varied with the tribe. Mountain Maidu and especially the
Yana tribes put practically everything in the grave. The latter even
went so far as to include many gifts of a nature not normally associated
with the sex. Aprons and baskets, for instance, might be placed in a
man’s burial. Among Atsugewi the relatives retained some of the property
of the deceased. Atsugewi might place some food on the grave and mark it
with a vertical stick, but it was not tended later, and the site was
generally soon lost.

In winter a person might be buried shallowly in the floor of a living
house. Next spring the house would be torn down and the dirt walls caved
in. There was variation not only between, but within tribes as to the
final disposition of houses of the deceased. They might be burned down,
a common practice, or they were torn down, abandoned, temporarily
deserted, or torn down and rebuilt. If to be lived in again,
purification of some sort was always practiced, either by burning
juniper boughs in the house, smoking tobacco, bringing in aromatic
plants, or treating the main beams. Among Yana tribes the family seems
to have habitually abandoned the house right after the funeral and to
have burned the whole thing including property and food of all the
inmates, retaining only the barest necessities of life such as sleeping
robes.

Among Atsugewi all mourners had to deny themselves meat and fresh fish
for one day; then they sweated and swam after the funeral. Mountain
Maidu mourners, including all persons who had had any part in the
funeral, had to undergo four or five days taboo on eating all flesh.
They also had to eat alone and from separate dishes, do head scratching
with special sticks only, were allowed no hunting, gambling,
intercourse, or smoking. Purification of those persons contaminated by
participation in burial included swimming and washing every day that the
taboos were in effect.

Only Atsugewi, of all local tribes, are said to have practiced suicide,
though unquestionably it did occur on occasion among all California
Indians.

Mentioning the name of the deceased in the presence of his relatives was
considered very poor taste, and was actually forbidden in some cases.

It was forbidden that the widow touch the corpse, so that relatives had
to prepare the body for burial. After the funeral, the widow always cut
her hair off closely. If an Atsugewi, she made a belt out of it, and the
hair belt was then often decorated with shells. In all local tribes the
widow traditionally covered her whole head and face with pitch and
covered this with white diatomaceous earth or black charcoal. Touching
her head or face (the whole body for mountain Maidu) with fingers was
taboo; she could do this only with the scratching stick which mountain
Maidu widows wore around the neck. Raggedy, ill-looking clothes were
worn by the survivor, and Atsugewi widows put pitch on old basketry caps
to be worn. A mourning necklace was worn at all times, made of lumps of
hard pitch strung onto a fiber string. This was worn until remarriage,
which was usually two or three years for Atsugewi and one to three years
for mountain Maidu. Pitch on the face and head was normally left on
until it wore off of its own accord.

The mourning conduct of grieving men who had lost their wives in death
was not nearly so lengthy or as rigorous as was that of widows. Widowers
cut their hair too, but among Atsugewi the only other observance
required was abstinence of flesh eating for a day. Mountain Maidu
widowers spent one sleepless night out in the mountains. Widowers did
not generally sing at dances and at “big times” for about a year, but
this was not compulsory. The Yana are said to have stayed away from
dances for two or three years.

Parents mourning the loss of children cut their hair slightly and placed
some pitch on hair or faces. The Atsugewi mother observed a three day
meat taboo and the Maidu father went to the hills to seek power.
However, loss of a baby in birth or before its navel cord dropped off
was considered a more serious situation. Such bereaved parents gave all
of their belongings away in order to make a fresh start.

Anniversary mourning rites were not conducted in the Lassen region. An
exception was the rare instance among Atsugewi when a child was sick at
a time just three years after the death of its parent. Under such
circumstances a shaman sang over the child and the whole remaining
family and relatives mourned, later washing themselves. With respect to
the general lack of mourning anniversaries it is of interest that the
foothill (northeast) Maidu held elaborate annual burnings for several
years after death of relatives. At these great mourning dance ceremonies
large quantities of valuable possessions were burned as sacrifices to
honor the dead.

Chapter XXIX
COUNTING, TIME, AND PLACE

Counting on the fingers was usual practice. Mountain Maidu started with
their thumbs while Atsugewi began on the little finger of one hand and
counted across to that on the other hand, and toes were used for the
purpose too. To help in counting, tribes also employed sticks to
represent groups of numbers: Atsugewi used sticks to represent 1’s, 5’s,
10’s, and hundreds. Yana frequently used a stick to represent the unit
20. This is presumed to be a natural unit because it is the sum of all
of a person’s fingers and toes.

Time of day, of course, was not expressed in any unit like our hour, but
roughly by the position of the sun in its daily course overhead. Seven
to nine positions were referred to descriptively in this respect plus
early, mid, and late night.

Phases of the moon were most practical and were universally used as a
longer measure of time. The succession of new moon cycles were named and
an old man in the village customarily kept track of these by memory. As
might be expected from this system, in which there was no recording,
arguments ensued over just which moon or “month” was currently in
effect. One full course of the moon’s phases takes just about a month,
so the names for Indians’ moons corresponded nearly to our month names.

All local tribes recognized four seasons. These were identified by the
positions of certain stars among mountain Maidu, but more generally by
the positions of the rising sun with respect to a certain peak, tree, or
similar fixed object. Some Indians kept track of the seasons by watching
the daily progression of a beam of sunlight coming through the smoke
hole of a house and falling upon its floor or wall. The shortest day of
the year naturally was marked by the most southerly progression of the
sun. This was noted by the Indians, no doubt with joy in the realization
that longer days and, somewhat later, warmer weather were to be
expected. The year started with the beginning of November when Indians
of the Lassen area had left the high elevation hunting grounds on the
flanks of Lassen Peak, had collected their stores of acorn and salmon,
and were warmly settled in their winter quarters. Mountain Maidu seem to
have used names for only the nine moons most important to them.

There was no calendar as such, but the number of days until a certain
“big time” or other event was kept track of by either cutting off or
untying one knot in a knotted cord or thong each day. Years were not
recorded either, but were measured within the memory span as so many
winters ago, or by relating time to some important event, such as a war
which most persons might remember.

Directions were pointed out, or in speech were referred to as sunrise
and sunset for east and west respectively. Directions were commonly
given with respect to features of the local geography: in the direction
of such and such a village or toward a named river, spring, or mountain
which was conspicuous or generally known. We must remember that the
territories of our local tribes were small and that the terrain was
intimately known. Specific names were not only given to the conspicuous
features of the topography, but among Atsugewi, at least, virtually
every flat, every draw, and every hill was specifically named, and these
names were known to all members of the tribe. Names of places in the
territories of other tribes were not known by the local names of those
tribes. They were either translated or given its own entirely different
set of names by the first tribe. In other words, each tribe had
different names for all places—a very confusing situation. Dixon reports
that Maidu recognized directions as we know them, but that the northeast
or mountain Maidu had five: west, northwest (the direction of Lassen
Peak), north, east, and south.

Chapter XXX
CONCEPTS OF SUN, MOON, AND STARS

Mountain Maidu and Atsugewi believed the sun to be a female human—the
wife—and the moon to be a male human—the husband. This is a reversal of
the sex ascribed to these bodies by some other tribes. They believed
that the figure of a frog was visible in the moon.

Atsugewi stated that Frog fought Moon and swallowed him and the next
time that Moon swallowed Frog who is now in the center of the moon. When
Moon and Frog fought, the former was not round, but crescent shaped.
Yana stated that in the moon they could see Moon’s wife, Frog. Pine
Marten snapped his evil father-in-law Moon into the sky by means of
bending a springy tree ’way down and suddenly letting it go. He used the
same system to snap Frog and her two daughters into the sky also.

To Atsugewi, as to most tribes, the phases of the moon: new, full, and
waning, represented birth, life, and death—repeated every four weeks,
although, of course, none of the Indians had the concept of a “week”
such as we have. All through the year Atsugewi greeted the new moon. Old
persons shook themselves, and their clothes and bedding in its presence.
Younger folks ran and jumped toward the moon. If the points or horns of
the new moon crescent were vertical it was a bad omen indicating
sickness or death. Babies were shown the new moon, and in the case of
both Atsugewi and mountain Maidu, babies’ faces and arms were rubbed in
the new moonlight to make them grow fast. All local tribes addressed the
moon aloud in friendly terms as if it were a personal relative. The Yana
prayed to it. In contrast to Atsugewi reaction to vertical position of
the two moon points, the Yana and mountain Maidu accepted this as
meaning good fortune and good weather ahead. To these tribes horizontal
position of the moon crescent in the winter sky denoted that it was full
of water and indicated pending rains or storms. At other seasons both
horns up foretold of death. Yana thought that both sun and moon were
feminine.

After its daily trip across the sky, Atsugewi thought that the sun
returned to the east in a blue cloud via the side of the earth. As the
sun and the moon passed each other at the side of the earth, they
decided on the weather for the following day. The moon supplied the cold
and the sun the heat.

Eclipses of sun and moon were believed by Yana to be due to their dogs
devouring them. Atsugewi and mountain Maidu felt that the heavenly
bodies were dying. The former were of the opinion that Lizard was eating
Sun or Moon as the case might be. They shouted loudly, shot arrows into
the air toward the eclipse and beat all available female dogs. Mountain
Maidu thought that Frog was eating Moon or Sun.

A reddish moon foretold of disaster and was a sign of war for Atsugewi,
but to Yana it meant hot weather ahead.

Only a few star groups of the night sky were named.

Yana thought the constellation we call the Belt of Orion was Coyote’s
arrow. All local tribes believed the Milky Way to be a road, or river in
some cases, which was traveled by departing spirits or souls of the
dead. Shooting or Falling stars, (more properly meteorites) presaged
good weather to the Atsugewi who thought these were torches carried by
spirits from one house to another in the sky. For this tribe too, a
single conspicuous star—no doubt a planet—seen near the moon was an evil
sign. If the star were on the left someone nearby would die soon; if it
lay to the right of the moon someone farther away was doomed.

Atsugewi called the Seven Sisters wir-etisu. These girls were seduced by
a little rabbit boy at a puberty dance. They became ashamed and went up
in the sky to become stars. The Big Dipper was called Coyote’s Cane.
Maidu thought that stars were made of something soft like buckskin.

Chapter XXXI
WEATHER PHENOMENA

As mentioned in the preceding chapter, weather was determined by
agreement between sun and moon, but it appears that many things could
influence their decisions.

Atsugewi assumed it to be the natural thing that it would sprinkle a
little after a funeral. They also felt that rolling rocks down mountain
sides or loud shouting in the mountains would cause rain. Furthermore
they believed that the occurrence of precipitation could be influenced
by shamans, if they felt like it, by smoking tobacco while looking at
the sun. The nature of the spirit of a girl, whose ears were pierced at
this time, was also thought to either cause it to rain or to stop doing
so according to her spirit power.

Rainbows brought good wild crops as far as the Atsugewi were concerned.
However, both they and mountain Maidu were of the opinion that pointing
with a finger at a rainbow, particularly among children would cause the
finger to become crooked or to fall off.

Thunder and lightning were feared by all tribes of the Lassen region. To
Atsugewi thunder was the shouting of an old man who wears a rabbit skin
and who goes about looking for women whom he kills. Mountain Maidu
thought it to be due to an old man who lives up above and who was once a
boy on earth, but who had been sent away because he was too fast and ate
everything in sight. How he made the noise we do not know.

Also, according to Dixon, “Thunder is thought to be a man or boy of
miraculous abilities. He eats trees chiefly. Had it not been for
Mosquito, however, Thunder would have preyed on people. Mosquito
deceived him, and refused to let Thunder know whence the blood and
meat he brought came. Had Thunder found out that Mosquito obtained
these from people, they, and not the trees, would have been his prey.”
To Yana, thunder was a mythical dog originally: “... a child dug from
the ground who accompanied Flint Boy to the west in the guise of a
dog. He remained behind in the black storm clouds capping Bally
Mountain, a high peak west of Redding, whence his terrific bark could
be heard as thunder.”

Atsugewi and mountain Maidu, fearing thunder and lightning, talked to
them and told them to go away. Old men in the latter tribe carried
burning sticks in a circle to help drive them away. Atsugewi placed
skins, preferably raccoon, on sticks held up in the air. They would wave
these around and call aloud words to the effect that there are: “Too
many rattlesnakes here, go some other place!”. Not only that, but
frequently during a thunder storm, especially if violent, they would run
into open areas, and sometimes even jump into water. Lightning was
thought to be the weapon of the old man, Thunder Person, mentioned
above. It came out of his mouth. Apparently Thunder Person was thought
to assume the form of a raccoon on occasion. Maidu also believed that it
would thunder whenever a person was bitten by a rattlesnake or when a
great man died or when a woman had a miscarriage.

Whirlwinds were generally regarded as evil omens which sickened people
with bad dreams and captured peoples’ shadows or spirits. Indians tried
to dodge or hide from them. They spoke informally to whirlwinds.
Mountain Maidu said that they put pains into people. Whenever possible,
Maidu smoked tobacco when talking to whirlwinds. Atsugewi threw dirt and
water at the dust devils in an effort to destroy them. Yana did
likewise, but they did not believe that spirits were inside of
whirlwinds.

Chapter XXXII
EARTHQUAKE BELIEFS

Lassen Peak and its vicinity are subject to many local earthquakes
today. The geologic nature of the area indicates that this has been so
for thousands of years. Lassen Peak was known to the Atsugewi as
Wicuhirdiki, which has no meaning. The area was thought to be inhabited
by a powerful spirit, but Garth notes that there seemed to be no fear
about hunting and fishing there, and the Indians apparently utilized the
hot springs medicinally. Garth recorded one pertinent bit of Atsugewi
(Apwaruge) myth as follows:

“There once was an earthquake that shook this country up and made
those boulders out on the flat shake. It shook so much that it made
people sick. There was a very old woman whose hair was almost green.
She picked up a rock and pounded it on another rock while she sang.
She was praying for the world to stop shaking. Soon she got an answer,
and the shaking ceased. Many people were killed. Those who lived in
canyons were covered by rocks that were shaken down.”

Yana interpretation of the perplexing and frightening phenomenon of
earthquakes is tied in, as we might expect, with mythology as follows,
to quote from Sapir and Spier:

“A series of fabulous malignant beings were conceived as dwelling in
certain localities. In the Sacramento River were water grizzlies
(hat-en-na) which pulled fishermen down to devour (them).... They were
spotted black and white, like dogs. Somewhere (not specified) was a
serpent (e-k-u) which killed people. Near Terry’s mill were believed
to dwell malignant little beings (yo-yautsgi), like little children.
They often enticed people and ate them up. At a marshy spot and spring
on Round Mountain, called Ha-mupdi (?), dwelled a being called
Mo-s-ugi-yauna who caused the ground to shake when he was displeased.

“Once Mo-s-ugi-yauna made a little baby of himself and put himself in
the road of two women. One of them took it up and in sport gave it one
of her nipples to suck, though she was really without milk. The baby
kept sucking until the girl tried to take her breast away, but without
success. The baby kept sucking at her, sucked up her flesh, and at
last sucked up her whole body.

“This being was displeased if strangers came near and talked anything
but Yana. Once some Yreka Indians came and talked Chinook jargon at
that place, whereupon the earth began to shake violently. At last the
owner of the place cried out to Mo-s-ugi-yauna that it was not he who
had thus spoken and begged him ‘in the doctor way’ to stop, whereupon
he did.”

Chapter XXXIII
CREATION BELIEFS AND OTHER LEGENDS

All local Indians believed in a mythical age when animals were persons
and talked to each other. Both Atsugewi and mountain Maidu thought that
floods played a part in the past scheme of things before people were
created by gifted animal ancestors.

Garth relates that “Atsugewi mythology tells of the successive
creation of two former worlds, the first of which was destroyed by a
great flood and the second by a fire which Coyote instigated in an
attempt to kill his rival, Grey Fox. After this both Coyote and Grey
Fox descended from the heavens on a long rope to the primeval sea
below. Here Grey Fox took combings from his fur (in some accounts a
piece of sod) and proceeded to make land of it, stretching it to all
sides until the present earth was made, in concept a large island
floating in the sea. Grey Fox then created trees, animals, and finally
people. The sun and moon were two brothers whom Grey Fox told to mount
into the sky to light the world, the one during the day and the other
at night.... Grey Fox first wanted to create two moons and two suns,
but Coyote objected saying that it would be too hot. Grey Fox then
made only the sun and one moon.”

In a somewhat different version, Dixon has recorded that the Atsugewi
“... recount how, in the beginning, there was only the illimitable sea
and the cloudless sky. Slowly in the sky a tiny cloud began to form,
and grew till it reached considerable proportions. Then gradually it
condensed, and, becoming solid, became the Silver-Gray Fox, the
Creator. Then arose immediately a fog; and from this, as it condensed,
and coagulated as it were, arose Coyote. By a process of
long-continued and intense thought, the Creator created a canoe into
which both he and Coyote descended, and for long years floated and
drifted aimlessly therein, till, the canoe having become moss-grown
and decayed, they had, perforce, to consider the necessity of creating
a world whereon they might take refuge.”

The Yana legends quoted below from Gifford and Klimek (first) and from
Sapir and Spier are from the northern and central tribes, of that
people. These legends are given in lieu of those of southern Yana and
Yahi, with which this book should be concerned, because of the
similarity of the culture of these four tribes. It is extremely unlikely
that there would be very great differences in their legends and beliefs
of creation. Obviously each tribe had its own unique details.

North Yana: “Coyote, assistant creator, was marplot (the evil schemer)
who brought death into the world as follows: Coyote, his two sons, and
other people went down-stream to get clamshells. The people played.
Coyote’s sons seized the clamshells and ran off with them. One escaped
with the stolen shells, but the other was killed. The Coyote boy who
escaped shouted to Old Man Coyote, who sat in his assembly house and
observed daily what transpired. Coyote boy told the old man his
brother was dead. Old Coyote then mourned for his son. Silver Fox told
him not to cry, but to clean the assembly house and bring in the dead
boy. They strewed the floor with straw and built fire. Silver Fox told
old Coyote to lie down and pretend to sleep. ‘Do not move,’ said
Silver Fox. This was to cause dead boy to revive. They started to cut
old Coyote’s belly to get back the spirit of his dead son. Old Coyote
shouted with pain and said: ‘Let him stay dead. The dead shall remain
dead.’ Thus he spoiled Silver Fox’s plan for resurrection.”

Central Yana: “... the creation of people took place at Wama-riwi, a
village at the cove north of Battle Creek and several miles west of
the present Shingletown, that is, roughly at the center of Yana
territory. Here in the beginning were Lizard and Cottontail (in
Dixon’s version, Lizard, Gray Squirrel, and Coyote; in Curtin’s,
Silkworm) who had no predecessors. Discussing how people shall be
made, Lizard lays down sticks which they carry to the four directions
to become neighboring Indian tribes. Realizing that they have omitted
those at the center, they put down bad (short) sticks there. Hence the
Yana are shorter than any of their neighbors: a view held by the Yana
and repeated by Powers as fact. In Dixon’s version (from the same
informant) Lizard carefully prepares three sticks for Atsugewi,
Wintun, and Achomawi, and as an afterthought, short sticks for the
Yana. The first three are placed to the east, west, and north; the
others are boiled to transform them into humans. Coyote refuses to
recognize them until they speak properly, that is, the Yana tongue.
Curtin’s version is quite different, although still the Yana are
created from sticks: his presumably Northern Yana informant, himself a
chief, placed the locale in his own country, at Round Mountain. Here
Silkworm puts down three sticks, for the Yana chief, a woman, and an
orphan, and a large number around the first for common people; he
instructs them how to procure food and admonishes that they obey the
chief.

“The origin of sex, or rather its proper attribution rests in the
circumstance that in the beginning, women were men; men were women.
The women were such poor hunters that people starved. To remedy this,
Cottontail placed stones in a fire; when the women were seated, the
stones burst, cutting their proper organs, and the women became men.
Hands were then webbed like Lizard’s. In order that they might handle
bows and pestles, Lizard, experimenting, cut his fingers apart. With
this as a model, he separated those of humans. (In Curtin’s version,
Water Lizard remedies the defect for himself alone.) In the beginning
when people died, they rose from their graves again. Coyote, who
objected to these improvements of human affairs, not only proposes
that they shall stay dead but stamps down a dead man who would rise.
When his own son dies, he changes his mind, but Lizard, Cottontail,
and Gray Squirrel will have none of it, so that death and mourning
were established forever.”

Again Garth is here quoted on Atsugewi beliefs: “As in most of
northern California there are numerous natural phenomena in Atsugewi
territory which marked some mythological event. A low cone-like rock
in Dixie Valley was said to be a basket belonging to Coyote. About
four miles south of Pittville on the old village site of Mawakasui was
an oblong rock ten feet or so in length which was said to be the
petrified remains of a lizard whom Butterfly had killed. The extremely
rough tongue of lava-covered land extending down the center of Hat
Creek Valley was created by Porcupine to impede Coyote with whom
Porcupine was running a race. Eagle Lake was said to have been
formerly in Atsuge territory, but Coyote tired of the manzanita
berries and camass roots which the people fed to him here, so he moved
the lake to the Apwaruge country. Here the people fed him epos roots
and treated him better.”

The Maidu concept of the world according to Dixon is that of “...
floating on the surface of a great sea, but anchored by five ropes
stretched by the Creator, which hold the island steady, and prevent it
from drifting about. Occasionally some being seizes these ropes and
shakes them, and this causes earthquakes. The world was flat when
first made from the bit of mud brought up from the depths of the
primeval sea by the turtle (turtle does not appear in the northeast or
mountain Maidu version) or from the robin’s nest floating in the sea.
Later the Creator and the Coyote went about over the world, making the
rivers and mountains. Coyote was in general responsible for the
latter, and for the extreme roughness of the country....” The
Creator’s stone canoe is said to be visible today on top of Keddie
Peak just north of Indian Valley (Greenville); also his and Coyote’s
dance houses may be seen as huge circular depressions at what is now
Durham (near Chico).

In his extensive collection of Maidu myths, Dixon observes that
“Throughout the myths there is nowhere any suggestion that the Maidu
had any knowledge of any other region, that they were immigrants in
the land where they live. This complete absence of any migration
tradition is a feature which is very characteristic, and serves to
differentiate the mythology not only of the Maidu, but of most
Californian tribes, from that of the Southwest, and much of the
eastern portion of the continent.”

He further states: “here the creation is a real beginning: beyond it,
there is nothing. In the beginning was only the great sea, calm and
unlimited, to which, down from the clear sky, the Creator came, or on
which he and Coyote were floating in a canoe. Of the origin of
previous place of abode of either Creator or Coyote, the Maidu know
nothing....”

“... the whole series of tales told by the stock ... appeared to
follow one another in a more or less regular and recognized order.
Beginning with the creation, a rather systematic chain of events leads
up to the appearance of the ancestors of the present Indians, with
whose coming the mythic cycle came to a close. This mythic era, the
be-be-ito, seems to fall into a number of periods, with each of which
a group or set of myths has to deal. First, we have the coming of
Ko-do-yan-pe (Earth-Namer or Creator) and Coyote, their discovery of
this world, and the preparation of it for the ‘first people’; next the
creation of these first people, and the making and planting of the
germs of the human race, the Indians, who were to come after; third,
the long period during which the first people were in conflict, and
were in the end changed to the various animals in the present world.
In this period Earth-Maker tries to put an end to Coyote, whose evil
ways and wishes are in direct contrast to his own.” Creator was always
dignified and striving to make life easy, happy, and deathless for
mankind, while Coyote, a trickster and amorous knave, worked with
continued success to render life difficult for man with the result
that man’s lot is to suffer and finally to die. This belief was
generally uniform among the tribes of the Lassen area. “... During
this period Earth-Maker strives for a last time in vain with Coyote,
his defeat, and disappearance toward the East coincident with the
appearance of the human race, which bursts forth from the spots where
the original pairs had been buried long before.” These potential human
beings had been made “... as tiny wooden figures by the Creator, and
planted here and there in pairs, that they might grow in secret and
safety during the time of monsters and great conflicts....”

In other myths also there is great similarity among the Maidu,
Atsugewi, Yana, and Yahi. Dixon says concerning “... The theft of
fire, for instance.... In all, the fire is held by a man and his
daughters, and is discovered largely through the agency of the Lizard;
the fire is watched and guarded by a sentinel bird, is stolen in
consequence of his sleeping while on guard, and pursuit by the women
is hindered by the strings of their skirts being cut as they sleep.
The fire is brought back by a group of animals, among whom the fire is
divided for safety; and the pursuers, who are usually Thunder, and his
two daughters Rain and Hail, are put to flight.”

Chapter XXXIV
MEDICAL TREATMENT

The bulk of the important doctoring was done by shamans or medicine men.
This was all based on supernatural faith and fear. As we know from
advances of our modern civilization in the field of psychosomatic
medicine, such “in the mind” cures were highly effective in practice.
With all due respect to the modern medical profession, it is a foregone
conclusion that from 50% to 75% of the patients of today’s general
medical doctor are going to get well eventually without any bonafide
medical treatment anyway. This percentage favored the shamans too.

Besides shamans there were secondary Indian doctors called herbalists.
Among Atsugewi, these persons did not have the power of shamans, and
could not cure disease, but only check or weaken it. However, this class
of doctor did administer various medicines internally and externally,
and gave treatments which may actually have been—in some cases—of
benefit beyond mere faith healing. These remedies were handed down, as
was all Indian knowledge, by word of mouth from generation to
generation. Old men taught the young.

Herbalists were able to make snake bite victims recover; treatment
included sucking the wound. Cauterization or burning of affected parts
was practiced. Atsugewi treated rheumatism in patients with vapor baths
in a trench of hot coals on which pine needles and yerba santa or
mountain balm branches were placed, with a robe over all.

Mountain Maidu smoked wild parsnip for headaches, colds, and wounds.
Mountain Maidu and Atsugewi believed that toothaches were caused by the
presence of worms in the teeth. Corrective poultices were placed on the
cheek. Yana did this too, but placed a hot stone on the poultice, and
also bit on a mole’s front foot, dried, to relieve the pain. Atsugewi
often set the poultice on fire which might leave permanent scars.

The seeds of rosinweed, a member of the sunflower family, were
collected, then shelled, cooked, dried, and finally pounded. This
medicine was taken for chills. Wild iris roots were chewed raw for
coughing.

Decoctions, that is, water in which plants had been boiled to extract
their medicinal juices, were drunk. California angelica, a member of the
parsley family, was used in this way for colds, diarrhea, headache, et
cetera. This medication was popular with all local tribes for treating
many ills.

Yana used poultices of roots of bracken fern, pounded and warmed for
application to burns. The bulbs of false solomon seal were pounded fine
and also hot soap-root poultices were applied to swellings, pains, or
boils. Peeled California angelica roots were crushed and laid on aching
heads.

Ground squirrel grease was used to soften rough hands and to relieve
cracking of the skin from chapping.

Atsugewi employed green leaves of chokecherry, pounded as poultices, for
cuts, sores, and bruises. The boiled liquor of pounded chokecherry bark
was used for bathing wounds to promote healing.

They employed decoctions of wormwood to prevent blood poisoning and to
treat cuts. Decoctions of greenleaf manzanita leaves were good for cuts
and burns. Both oak bark and oak gall decoctions were drunk to prevent
infection and catching colds and were given to women in childbirth.
Atsugewi also chewed raw juniper berries as a treatment for colds.

Obviously there was a host of other treatments as we know of a large
variety of other plants, roots, and fruits which were used medicinally.

Broken bones were set as best they could be set, and were bound up in
simple but effective splints.

For general good health Garth states that an Atsugewi “... man chewed
the top shoot off a young pine tree. Especially was this done by a
father after his wife bore a child.”

In Yana sweat houses and probably in those of other tribes too, veins
were cut with obsidian chips to “let the bad blood out” if a person felt
ill.

Chapter XXXV
SPIRITS AND GHOSTS

Ghosts and spirits were one and the same, and were to local Indians as
souls are conceived by white man, yet the Indian conception was more
variable. Some spirits were good and others were evil, but all were
feared and avoided whenever possible. They were frequently associated
with omens and had somewhat the appearance of human beings. Among
Atsugewi they were visible only to shamans, but were heard by nearly all
persons. Yana commoners both saw and heard spirits, but only very
rarely.

The spirit left the body right after death. Mountain Maidu thought that
it turned back once before going on. Yana believed that the spirit
tarried in the vicinity of the body for a while, going to the south
first briefly for a sort of trial or evaluation which included
determination as to whether or not the nose septum had been pierced.
Then, as all local Indians apparently agreed, the ghost or spirit went
to a distant place in the west via the Milky Way. Yana thought that
there was some distinction in destination of good and bad persons’
ghosts, but our other tribes conceived only of one place for all spirits
finally. We do not today have a very clear understanding of the
aboriginal Indian concept of heaven except that people lived in this
land of the dead in sweat houses, hunting, eating, loving, and sleeping,
but with complete absence of sickness. Concepts of the life of spirits
changed with the coming of the whites preceding even the advent of
pioneer settler days. All information in that regard which students have
been able to gain from informants in this region is decidedly flavored
with Christian dogma.

Spirits or ghosts returned to old haunts of the body on occasion or,
more often, to the vicinity of the grave. For this reason burial grounds
were usually well removed from villages. Bad smells would drive spirits
away, while whistling and flowers attracted them. Fiber-wound crossed
sticks were hung in sweat houses of Yana tribes to keep spirits out. All
tribes of the Lassen area thought that ghosts visited the living in
dreams and also considered it feasible that the spirits of people might
go to visit those of the dead when the persons were asleep, or more
commonly when the living were unconscious.

Mountain Maidu didn’t speak much about ghosts, but if one had been
making a nuisance of itself by visiting much in dreams, they fed it by
having all members of the family throw small portions of food into the
fire before commencing to eat their meals. Besides, a shaman was hired
under these circumstances to sing for the dreamer. The same ceremony was
observed by the Atsugewi. It was also the practice of the dreamer in
this tribe to eat with a dog, spitting out some of the food, saying to
the dog, “You better eat for me. Take that spirit away.” Atsugewi were
evidently very conscious of ghosts for they spoke to them, spit out
chewed epos roots for the spirits, smoked tobacco for them, burned hair
and skin to repel them, and tobacco and feather bundles were hung near
the house doorways for their benefit. New Atsugewi parents had a unique
ritual at the time of their first meat eating after the taboos of
childbirth—they chewed small amounts of meat and put this on their toes
for the dogs to eat.

Garth says of Atsugewi spirit beliefs: “A man who was about to die,
whether he felt sick or not, had a peculiar odor about him. If he went
hunting, deer ran from him saying, ‘Phew, that man smells bad.’
Coyotes and dogs would come close to him and bark at him. He would die
unless a shaman could remove this aura of death from him.”

There were many omens of a spirit nature which foretold calamity. To
Atsugewi upon hearing the cries of certain animals at night, especially
if an owl hooted at one, or if one saw a kingsnake, death was supposed
to descend upon a relative.

If evil spirits frightened a person and tried to steal his soul, the
spirits could be foiled by standing with one’s feet widely spread apart.
If followed by a ghost, a person might turn around, retracing his
footsteps while the spirit continued in the direction one had been
traveling initially.

When a person was asleep his spirit could wander around. If, during
these wanderings, a bad spirit caught the person’s spirit before he
could awaken, the person was deprived of it.

Also the spirit on occasion left a person voluntarily if it didn’t like
the body, as for instance, if it smelled badly. When a person’s spirit
or soul were gone, only the heart was left to keep him alive, and he
would succumb easily to the first sickness. For this reason, Atsugewi
shamans periodically examined all the people to see if any spirits were
missing. When anyone was found lacking his spirit, the shaman had to
work to bring it back, sucking it into the person’s head. If several
spirits were missing at once, it was not easy to get the right spirit
back into its own body. They didn’t know what would happen if a person
got the wrong soul back into his body—but it wasn’t good.

Chapter XXXVI
SHAMANISM AND DOCTORING

Shamans or doctors, more commonly known to modern Americans by the name
medicine men, were important in the lives of all Indians but, among
ours, probably to the highest degree among the Maidu. Whether we, with
our scientific enlightenment today, are after all happier and of greater
peace of mind, than the aborigines were or not, is a philosophical
consideration beyond the scope of this book. The fact of the matter is
that mankind in the past invariably has resorted to the supernatural to
explain things not understood. Indians are a case in point—being totally
without scientific explanations, mysticism and the supernatural pervaded
their whole culture—their every day activities—to a point which to us
today seems fantastic, yet understandable in a way. If you and I had
been in the Indian’s place, might not we also have subscribed whole
heartedly to these same beliefs with which we would have grown up, and
which our loved and trusted elders had taught us in good faith?
Shamanism gave to the Indians a feeling of comfort and, shall we say,
security?—a sort of foundation of faith which all men must have for the
living of reasonably satisfying lives.

Shamans were men of influence in the village, with prestige second only
to that of the chief. Women shamans were uncommon and usually possessed
less potent power. The life of a shaman was precarious because if he
failed to effect a high percentage of cures or if he were “proven”
responsible for sending pains which caused death to persons, he might be
killed—sometimes even with the advance approval of the chief, and
without retaliation by the offending shaman’s relatives. When this was
done, he was cut into pieces, not for the morbid reasons, the reader
might suspect, but for the practical reason that the parts of his body
could in this way be disposed of in widely scattered places. Otherwise
there was the danger that he might, with the help of his power, be
reassembled and again be able to continue his malpractice and to include
his murderers among future victims.

There were several kinds of shamans among the local Indians. Each tribe
in the Lassen area had the all important Sucking Shaman. Atsugewi and
mountain Maidu also had special Bear, Rattlesnake, and Weather Shamans
while only Yana had Singing Shamans in addition.

The power of shamans was much more potent than mere “luck” which came
easily to the majority of ordinary mortals in dreams, during puberty
ceremonies, and the like. This “luck” was a weak supernatural blessing
which was not sought, but came voluntarily and gave the person skill and
success in crafts and daily pursuits such as fishing, hunting certain
animals or birds, canoe making, et cetera.

It would be impractical in this book to give the complicated and
voluminous details of all phases of shamanism as conceived and practiced
by each of the four local tribes. The following information has been
somewhat generalized in the hope that the reader will get the “feel” of
the shaman concept which was essentially the same for all the tribes of
the Lassen area.

Power was usually sought by men desiring to be shamans, but all were not
successful in such quests. On the other hand shamanistic power came to
some voluntarily, and it was dangerous not to accept this power if it
came to one. To refuse might cause death. One could tell when one was
successful in getting power because one would bleed from the nose or
mouth. He would also learn to sing and dance, and would receive
instructions and paraphernalia from his guardian spirit.

Shamanistic power could be acquired in a number of ways, not all of
which applied to each tribe being considered. A rare means was by
inheritance. If an old shaman had power and if this power or guardian
spirit liked his son or nephew, it would say “Sometimes I’m going to
play with that boy” and so it goes to the boy. At sundown the latter
listens to it sing to him and he gets the power. The boy learns about it
in the vision and from the old shaman’s instructions.

[Illustration: Small portions of yellow hammer or red-shafted quill
headbands.]

Another infrequent way to gain power was involuntarily when seriously
ill, while in a trance, or when dreaming.

The third and usual method of acquiring the shamanistic power was by
vision quest. It was a difficult ordeal. This might be undertaken at
various times of life, but most commonly at or near puberty. In questing
power there was no assurance of success, no matter how sincere a person
might be, or how hard he might try. Successful shamans could quest
repeatedly for additional powers.

Youths were prepared for questing by being lectured to by fathers or
uncles who also pierced their nose septa. Each youth went alone and
unclothed into certain portions of the mountains for several days and
nights. He slept little and fasted, eating little or nothing at all; all
flesh was taboo. The questing usually included swimming in lakes or
special pools and placing the nose piercing stick in an underwater
niche, and (Yana) securing certain bird feathers. He built a fire,
smoking his body over it, and cut himself deliberately. If successful,
the power came to him in a trance or faint producing bleeding from the
nose or mouth.

The guardian spirit communicated with the novice, appearing in a vision
usually. It gave instructions and taught its special ceremonial song. To
shamans of some tribes the guardian spirit looked something like a
human; to others it looked like a bug or like a small hair. This was the
“pain” or poison object and yet was considered to be a guardian spirit
at the same time. This is what the novice acquired in becoming a shaman.
This pain or guardian spirit could come from any of many sources. It was
alive and could talk, and gave the novice certain resultant powers. Most
commonly powers were from animals such as coyote, bear, and the like,
but also might come from sun, moon, wind, thunder and lightning, eagle,
hawk, small birds, reptiles, frog, or oldman spirit.

The novice then acquired what we might call magic feathers. There were
several types including the popular salmon colored flicker feathers.
Most important, however, was the feather tuft known as kaku among the
Atsugewi. This allegedly was found in finished form and not made. So
full of power was the kaku that it could not be kept in a house. It was
placed outside securely tied to a willow branch beside a stream or
hidden inside a hollow tree trunk. The kaku was able to move by itself
so had to be tied down or placed under a rock. When the novice shaman
discovered his kaku, the feathers were singing; when he died, blood
dripped from its feathers!

Upon his return to the village, the successful seeker stayed out of
dwelling houses for a day or two. Among some tribes he was sick for this
period. Universally he sweated and swam. Eating habits of the novice
shaman varied in different cases, but were always as dictated by the
specific instructions given to him by his guardian spirit. Invariably
all forms of flesh were shunned. He smoked tobacco and gave his first
hunting kill to an old man. During the novice period the new shaman was
helped by old shamans at the fireside in the sweat house. He did much
dancing, singing, handled hot coals and fire, bled from the mouth, and
might fall into a trance.

In contrast to herbalist doctors who gave private treatment, that of
shamans was public and usually conducted indoors, preferably in sweat
lodges. The shaman needed singing help and the more help and the more
persons who attended his doctoring the better. Sucking Shamans were the
most important and required official assistants. These included one or
more interpreters to communicate with the lay helpers or supporters,
while the shaman was doctoring, and an outside speaker to help call the
shaman’s spirits. Doctoring could take from one to three days and
nights.

To diagnose the patient’s ills the shaman danced about, blowing smoke on
him, and singing with the help of the audience. The shamans also drank
water, sometimes with a tube, from portable stone mortars with spirit
power. They often squirted water from their mouths. A whistle was used
in some cases and often the supernatural powerful cocoon rattle. Among
mountain Maidu herb medicines might be administered to the patient also.

At length the shaman’s guardian spirit or pain told him the location of
the disease object, and then he could see or feel it. Often the shaman
learned further from the spirit just who it was who had sent the disease
object to plague his patient.

Curing the afflicted was accomplished next by the shaman’s sucking this
pain or disease object out of some portion of the person’s body. The
evil pain could be any curious small object and this the shaman
exhibited to all present. The malignant pain was disposed of in a number
of ways. It might be sent back to the owner who sent it, that is, the
offending shaman. Or, it might be sent to his children who would be
doomed because a shaman could not doctor his own pain. Other times the
curing shaman would destroy the disease object by biting it and burning
it or dispose of it by taking the pain into his own charmed body.

When a whole community had been affected by a pain sent by an evil
shaman, the pain usually hid in the bushes nearby. In such a case, the
shaman had to be very powerful to get the best of the situation. First
he conducted the ceremony of detection of one victim in the usual sweat
house manner. Once the shaman found out where the trouble was, he went
outdoors with the villagers to help in corraling the offending pain.
Frequently only after a lengthy search was he successful in finding the
pain and then capturing it. Upon taking it into his body it might be so
powerful as to cause him to go into a trance. In this event his
assistants had to support him bodily, and had to sing for him, otherwise
the shaman might die. Without wishing to appear facetious or
disparaging, it can be said that a good shaman had to be an excellent
showman as well.

Sucking Shamans were obligated to accept all cases which they were asked
to treat. If they refused any and the afflicted died, then the shamans
might be killed themselves by relatives of the persons who succumbed.
The thinking was that if a shaman refused a case, he must have had
something to do with making the person sick in the first place.

Payment was always made to the shaman. The amount was determined by the
patient’s relatives. They would take the offering to the shaman when
engaging him, but payment was not made at that time. The shaman looked
over the proffered payment and might ask for more or for a different
kind of payment. To give himself a foolproof alibi in case of failure to
cure, and to increase his prestige if he did cure, he might reply to the
effect that “The beads already have the smell of death on them, but I’ll
see what I can do about it.” The payment was placed near the patient
during healing treatment and was not actually collected by the shaman if
the patient died within a few weeks or months. The shaman’s assistants
were also paid, but in lesser amounts.

[Illustration: Maidu shaman ceremonial neck pendant knife of
obsidian, nine and one half inches long (after Dixon)]

Besides the main function of curing, other good powers of the shamans
were the ability to foretell future events, to see what was going on at
distant places, and to locate lost or stolen articles. Among certain
tribes control of weather was also possible by Sucking Shamans—among
others there were special shamans with weather power.

Evil powers of Sucking Shamans could cause illness or death. This was
done by talking to the pain and sending it to the victim. The shaman
might put it on the end of a willow stick and point it at the person
while singing and smoking tobacco. This could go on all night.
Transmission of the pain to the intended victim was facilitated by
contact, such as sneaking up behind him and touching him, or by putting
the disease pain in his food or under his doorstep. The bad pain might
also be dispatched by blowing it through a pipe or putting it in the
victim’s pipe, or by talking to the shaman’s own animal spirit,
injecting the pain into it and then sending the animal to the victim.
This power animal might just take it to the intended person, or it might
actually attack and bite him. If the evil pain had been successfully
sent, and the intended dire results occurred, the relatives of the
victim had a moral right to kill the offending shaman, without fear of
retaliation. It seems that the culprit was usually recognized—obviously
often mistakenly. It follows that shamans’ lives were somewhat
precarious, not knowing who was going to find damning evidence against
them.

By somewhat the same means as described above shamans could steal a
person’s spirit or soul, rendering that person liable to quick and sure
death from the slightest accident or illness. Shamans could be hired to
perform these evil powers.

Singing Shamans were dreamers foretelling the future and telling the
living what their dead relatives wanted them to do. The Singing Shaman
was always male among mountain Maidu. Our other tribes did not have this
specialist, instead such powers were in the repertoire of the Sucking
Shaman.

Among Yana and Yahi tribes, apparently, weather doctoring could be done
by any shaman, and this was usually the case among Atsugewi. However,
mountain Maidu had specialized Weather Shamans. These were men who were
capable not only of producing rain, snow, or hail, but also fog and high
winds, or ending any of these.

Rattlesnake Shamans were generally women among Atsugewi and men among
mountain Maidu. They could protect people from rattlesnakes or cure
bites. The latter was accomplished by sucking which removed snakes and
snakes’ teeth from the wound.

Bear Shamans did not exist among Yana tribes. Among Atsugewi and
mountain Maidu these were not specialists, instead bear power was an
additional skill of Sucking Shamans. They were almost always men and
pertained not to Black Bear, but only to the California Grizzly. They
wore bear skin, hair, teeth, and claws and simulated the bear’s actions
in treating patients. Bear Shamans were called primarily to minister to
bear wounded persons from whom they sucked out bear blood and teeth.

Chapter XXXVII
MISCELLANEOUS MAGIC

All tribes of the Lassen region exercised miscellaneous more or less
supernatural powers which one might term magic.

Examples were: carrying a turtleshell on one’s belt which rendered a
person immune to rattlesnake strikes, or, among Maidu the rubbing of the
root of _Angelica breweri_ on the legs to keep rattlesnakes away.
Poisoning of persons could be done by some skilled people (not shamans)
by rubbing an unspecified substance on their hands and then touching the
victim’s body; this could drive him crazy or kill him.

To mountain Maidu the number five was sacred and lucky according to
Dixon.

[Illustration: Yana charmstones and a fir twig basket container for
such charms.]

Charm stones, usually in pairs were found by many fortunate Indians.
They were smooth and rounded and were especially effective if possessing
rings or other special markings on them which were actually surface
traces of mineral veins. Quartz crystals, rare in this volcanic region,
were also highly prized as charm stones. An ideal storage place for
charm stones in their special basketry containers was in a rattlesnake
“den” where such snakes tended to hibernate in the winter. At any rate
charm stones were kept hidden and the owner would secretly rub them on
himself to gain good luck in gambling or in other pursuits which
involved much in the way of chance.

[Illustration: Atsugewi charmstones]

Prayers for a variety of reasons were offered simply by the individual.
It was common practice every few days or so to make token food offerings
at mealtime for no specific reason. The bits of food might be thrown to
the east or into the fire.

* * * * * * * *

Thus ends this resume of the customs and beliefs of the tribes of the
Lassen region—tribes virtually extinct as such today—tribes which once
lived here among the scenic beauties of Lassen Volcanic National Park.
We, the descendants of the relentless conquerors of these local Indians,
come here now to enjoy ourselves and to refresh our bodies and spirits.
As we do this on the lands of the vanquished, we owe them not only a
moment of thoughtful reverence, but also whatever kindness and aid we
are able to give their descendants.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dixon, Roland B.: BASKETRY DESIGNS OF THE INDIANS OF NORTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Feb. 12, 1902, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History,
Vol. 17, Part 1
Dixon, Roland B.: MAIDU MYTHS
June 30, 1902, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History,
Vol. 17, Part 2
Dixon, Roland B.: THE NORTHERN MAIDU
May 1905, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol.
17, Part 3
Garth, Thomas R.: KINSHIP TERMINOLOGY, MARRIAGE PRACTICES, AND
BEHAVIOR TOWARD KIN AMONG THE ATSUGEWI
July 1944, American Anthropologist, Vol. 46, No. 3
Garth, Thomas R.: EMPHASIS ON INDUSTRIOUSNESS AMONG THE ATSUGEWI
Oct. 1945, American Anthropologist, Vol. 47, No. 4
Garth, Thomas R.: ATSUGEWI ETHNOGRAPHY
Feb. 1953, Anthropological Records, University of California, Vol.
14, No. 2
Gifford, E. W. and Klimek, Stanislaw: CULTURE ELEMENT DISTRIBUTIONS:
II, YANA
1936, University of California Publications in American Archeology
and Ethnology, Vol. 37, No. 2
Heizer, R. F. and Whipple, M. A.: THE CALIFORNIA INDIANS
1951, University of California Press
Klimek, Stanislaw: CULTURE ELEMENT DISTRIBUTIONS: I, THE STRUCTURE OF
THE CALIFORNIA INDIAN CULTURE
1935, University of California Publications in American Archeology
and Ethnology
Kniffen, Fred B.: ACHOMAWI GEOGRAPHY
1928, University of California Publications in American Archeology
and Ethnology
Kroeber, A. L.: HANDBOOK OF THE INDIANS OF CALIFORNIA
1925, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology,
Bulletin. No. 78
Kroeber, A. L.: CULTURE ELEMENT DISTRIBUTIONS: XV, SALT, DOGS, AND
TOBACCO
Feb. 1941, Anthropological Records, University of California, Vol.
6, No. 1
Mason, Otis T.: REPORT OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM
1902
Merriam, C. Hart: CLASSIFICATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE PIT RIVER
INDIAN TRIBES
Smithsonian Institute, Vol. 78, No. 3
Pope, Saxton T.: THE MEDICAL HISTORY OF ISHI
May 15, 1920, University of California Publications in American
Archeology and Ethnology, Vol. 13, No. 5
Sapir, Edward: THE POSITION OF YANA IN THE HOKAN STOCK
June 1917, University of California Publications in American
Archeology and Ethnology, Vol. 13, No. 1
Sapir, Edward and Spier, Leslie: NOTES ON THE CULTURE OF THE YANA
Sept. 1943, Anthropological Records, University of California, Vol.
3, No. 3
Sauer, Carl O.: EARLY RELATIONS OF MAN TO PLANTS
Jan. 1947, Geographical Review
Vogelin, Ermine W.: CULTURE ELEMENT DISTRIBUTIONS: XX, NORTHEAST
CALIFORNIA
June 1942, Anthropological Records, University of California, Vol.
7, No. 2
Waterman, T. T.: THE YANA INDIANS
Feb. 1918, University of California Publications in American
Archeology and Ethnology, Vol. 13, No. 2

ASK
THE MAN IN THE
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE UNIFORM

_He’ll be glad to help you!_

BE PROUD OF
LASSEN VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARK!

As a citizen of the United States it belongs to you. Keep it unspoiled
for your next visit and for future generations by helping to:

1. Prevent forest fires.
2. Protect the flowers, the animal life, and the rock and mineral
formations.
3. Keep it clean.

This booklet is one of a series prepared by the Loomis Museum
Association, a non-profit distributing organization sponsored by the
Naturalist Department of Lassen Volcanic National Park. The Association
is dedicated to the accumulation and dissemination of information
concerning the history and natural history of this park. Toward this end
it has published the following books available by mail. The post office
address is Mineral, California. During the summer, these publications
are also available at the Loomis Museum sales desk at Manzanita Lake,
Lassen Volcanic National Park.

GEOLOGY OF LASSEN’S LANDSCAPE, Schulz 55¢
PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE LASSEN VOLCANO, Loomis 85¢
GUIDE TO LASSEN PEAK HIGHWAY, Schulz 25¢
STORIES OF LASSEN’S PLACE NAMES, Schulz 40¢
BIRDS OF LASSEN VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARK AND VICINITY, Stebbins 85¢
FISH AND FISHING IN LASSEN VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARK, Potts 40¢
INDIANS OF THE LASSEN AREA Schulz 85¢

For mail orders please add 12% for postage and packing. If the addressee
is in California also add 3% sales tax. Prices are subject to change
without notice.

[Illustration: Association logo]

Transcriber’s Notes

—Silently corrected a few typos.

—Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook
is public-domain in the country of publication.

—In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by
_underscores_.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Indians of Lassen Volcanic National Park and Vicinity" ***

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