Si-Te-Cah

Last updated

According to reports of Northern Paiute oral history, the Si-Te-Cah, Saiduka or Sai'i [1] (sometimes erroneously referred to as Say-do-carah or Saiekare [2] after a term said to be used by the Si-Te-Cah to refer to another group) were a legendary tribe who the Northern Paiutes fought a war with and eventually wiped out or drove away from the area, with the final battle having taken place at what is now known as Lovelock Cave near Lovelock, Nevada, United States. They had red hair, and are often (though not always) described as having been cannibals. In some versions of the legend they were giants. In 1911, a large amount of artifacts and mummified human remains were discovered under three to six feet of guano by guano miners in Lovelock Cave. [3]

Contents

Although the cave had been mined since 1911, miners did not notify authorities until 1912. The miners destroyed many of the artifacts, but archaeologists were still able to retrieve 10,000 Northern Paiute artifacts from the cave. Items included tule duck decoys, nets, a pair of sandals, and baskets, several dating back over 2,000 years. [4]

Name

"Si-Te-Cah" means "tule-eaters" in the Northern Paiute language. [5] Tule or Schoenoplectus acutus is a fibrous water plant. In order to escape harassment from the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cahs were said to have lived on rafts made of tule on Lake Humboldt. [6]

Oral history

According to archaeologists Llewellyn L. Loud and Mark Raymond Harrington, writing in 1929, the Northern Paiutes "have accounts of an extinct people living in various localities in Nevada". They expressed doubts over whether these were real historical traditions or whether "They should be regarded as an attempt by the Northern Paiute to explain the archaeological remains of a cultural period preceding their own".

They summarise the descriptions of the Si-Te-Cah given to them by local informants thus: "Characteristics of this ancient people are that they made some of their implements differently from the Northern Paiute and of different stone materials. They had spears and no arrows, while the Northern Paiute had arrows but no spears. They were mean, contemptible, foolish, degraded cannibals, had red hair which they were excessively fond of decorating with bone ornaments, and yet were so poor that they dressed in robes made of the skin and feathers of the mud hen. In a collection of specimens from Nevada every object which is unfamiliar to a Northern Paiute is attributed to them". [7]

Sarah Winnemucca, daughter of Paiute Chief Winnemucca, wrote in 1883 about what she described as "a small tribe of barbarians" who ate her people in her book Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims . She wrote that "after my people had killed them all, the people round us called us Say-do-carah. It means conqueror; it also means 'enemy.' My people say that the tribe we exterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair, which has been handed down from father to son. I have a dress which has been in our family a great many years, trimmed with the reddish hair. I am going to wear it some time when I lecture. It is called a mourning dress, and no one has such a dress but my family." [8]

The accounts of when all this is supposed to have happened are confused, from "many hundred years ago" (Winnemucca) to "four or five generations ago" (Winnemucca's brother, known as Natchez) to "an old Northern Paiute man recently died at Stillwater who is said to have taken part in it, and to have had one eye shot out by an arrow in one of the charges on the cave mouth" (reported by Loud and Harrington). [3]

Some accounts describe the Si-Te-Cah as very tall, [9] or as giants, [10] a thing not mentioned either by Winnemucca or by Loud and Harrington, who say that all their informants describe "ordinary human beings living an entirely rational human life. It is barely possible that further inquiry might bring out supernatural traits, but of all the numerous references made to them, there are no characteristics mentioned but what might well be possessed by some tribe hostile to the Northern Paiute".

Excavations

A written report by James H. Hart, the first of two miners to excavate the cave in the fall of 1911, recalls that in the north-central part of the cave, about four feet deep, "was a striking looking body of a man 'six feet six inches tall.' His body was mummified and his hair distinctly red." [11] Unfortunately in the first year of mining, some of the human remains and artifacts were lost and destroyed. "The best specimen of the adult mummies was boiled and destroyed by a local fraternal lodge, which wanted the skeleton for initiation purposes." [12]

Adrienne Mayor writes about the Si-Te-Cah in her book Fossil Legends of the First Americans. [13] She suggests that the "giant" interpretation of the skeletons from Lovelock Cave and other dry caves in Nevada was started by entrepreneurs setting up tourist displays and that the skeletons themselves were of normal size. However, about a 100 miles north of Lovelock there are plentiful fossils of mammoths and cave bears, and their large limbed bones could easily be thought to be those of giants by an untrained observer. She also discusses the reddish hair, pointing out that hair pigment is not stable after death and that various factors such as temperature, soil, etc. can turn ancient very dark hair rusty red or orange. Another explanation for the "giant" interpretation of the skeletons may also come from the fact that the body of the 6ft 6in man was described by Hart as "a giant" in comparison to the much smaller apparently female skeletons. [7]

Notes

  1. ↑ https://archive.org/details/LovelockCaveLoudAndHarrington1929/page/n8/mode/1up
  2. ↑ THE PAST 100 YEARS - PressReader
  3. 1 2 Loud & Harrington 1929.
  4. ↑ Heizer, Robert F., and Lewis K. Napton (1970). Archaeology and the Prehistoric Great Basin Lacustrine Subsistence Regime as seen from Lovelock Cave, Nevada. Contributions of the University of California Archaeological Research Facility 10. OCLC   253129815
  5. ↑ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 152.
  6. ↑ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 165.
  7. 1 2 Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 169.
  8. ↑ Winnemucca Hopkins, Sarah (1883). Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. Boston: Boston Stereotype Foundry. p. 75. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  9. ↑ "Lovelock Paiute Tribe - Our History" . Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  10. ↑ Hattori, Eugene. "Lovelock Culture". Online Nevada Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  11. ↑ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 168.
  12. ↑ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 2.
  13. ↑ Mayor, Adrienne (2005). Fossil legends of the first Americans. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN   0-691-11345-9.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giant</span> Being of human appearance, usually of prodigious size and strength, common in folklore

In folklore, giants are beings of humanoid appearance, but are at times prodigious in size and strength or bear an otherwise notable appearance. The word giant is first attested in 1297 from Robert of Gloucester's chronicle. It is derived from the Gigantes of Greek mythology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lovelock, Nevada</span> Incorporated city in Nevada, United States

Lovelock is the county seat of Pershing County, Nevada, United States, in which it is the only incorporated city. It is the namesake of a nearby medium-security men's prison and a Cold War-era gunnery range. Formerly a stop for settlers on their way to California and later a train depot, the town's economy remains based on farming, mining and increasingly on tourism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Winnemucca</span> Northern Paiute author, activist, and educator (c. 1844 –1891)

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins was a Northern Paiute writer, activist (lecturer) and educator. Her maiden name was Winnemucca.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pyramid Lake (Nevada)</span> Lake in Nevada, United States

Pyramid Lake is the geographic sink of the basin of the Truckee River, 40 mi (64 km) northeast of Reno, Nevada, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Northern Paiute people</span> Native American tribe in eastern California

The Northern Paiute people are a Numic tribe that has traditionally lived in the Great Basin region of the United States in what is now eastern California, western Nevada, and southeast Oregon. The Northern Paiutes' pre-contact lifestyle was well adapted to the harsh desert environment in which they lived. Each tribe or band occupied a specific territory, generally centered on a lake or wetland that supplied fish and waterfowl. Communal hunt drives, which often involved neighboring bands, would take rabbits and pronghorn from surrounding areas. Individuals and families appear to have moved freely among the bands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Winnemucca Lake</span> Dry lake bed in Nevada with petroglyphs

Winnemucca Lake is a dry lake bed in northwest Nevada that features the oldest known petroglyphs in North America. Located astride the border between Washoe and Pershing counties, it was a shallow lake until the 1930s, but was dried when a dam and a road were built that combined to restrict and block water flow. It was formerly designated as a National Wildlife Refuge, but its status as a refuge was removed due to the lack of water.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin</span> Cultural classification of Native Americans

The Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin are Native Americans of the northern Great Basin, Snake River Plain, and upper Colorado River basin. The "Great Basin" is a cultural classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas and a cultural region located between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, in what is now Nevada, and parts of Oregon, California, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. The Great Basin region at the time of European contact was ~400,000 sq mi (1,000,000 km2). There is very little precipitation in the Great Basin area which affects the lifestyles and cultures of the inhabitants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southern Paiute people</span> Indigenous people native to the U.S. states of Nevada, Arizona, and Utah

The Southern Paiute people are a tribe of Native Americans who have lived in the Colorado River basin of southern Nevada, northern Arizona, and southern Utah. Bands of Southern Paiute live in scattered locations throughout this territory and have been granted federal recognition on several reservations. Southern Paiute's traditionally spoke Colorado River Numic, which is now a critically endangered language of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, and is mutually intelligible with Ute. The term Paiute comes from paa Ute meaning water Ute, and refers to their preference for living near water sources. Before European colonization they practiced springtime, floodplain farming with reservoirs and irrigation ditches for corn, squash, melons, gourds, sunflowers, beans and wheat.

<i>Schoenoplectus acutus</i> Species of plant

Schoenoplectus acutus, called tule, common tule, hardstem tule, tule rush, hardstem bulrush, or viscid bulrush, is a giant species of sedge in the plant family Cyperaceae, native to freshwater marshes all over North America. The common name derives from the Nāhuatl word tōllin, and it was first applied by the early settlers from New Spain who recognized the marsh plants in the Central Valley of California as similar to those in the marshes around Mexico City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spirit Cave mummy</span> Human mummy found in Nevada

The Spirit Cave mummy is the oldest human mummy found in North America. It was discovered in 1940 in Spirit Cave, 13 miles (21 km) east of Fallon, Nevada, United States, by the husband-and-wife archaeological team of Sydney and Georgia Wheeler. Analysis of the remains showed similarities to North and South American indigenous peoples and in 2016, the remains were repatriated to the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of Nevada. The Spirit Cave mummy was one of the first to be dated using accelerated mass spectrometer radiocarbon dating. In turn, its discovery and analysis gave much insight and motivation of further research into the chronology of the western great basin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Winnemucca (Paiute leader)</span> Native American Northern Paiute war chief (c. 1820–1882)

Winnemucca was a Northern Paiute war chief. He was born a Shoshone around 1820 in what would later become the Oregon Territory.

Mark Raymond Harrington was curator of archaeology at the Southwest Museum from 1928 to 1964 and discoverer of ancient Pueblo structures near Overton, Nevada, and Little Lake, California.

The Lovelock Paiute Tribe of the Lovelock Indian Colony is a federally recognized tribe of Northern Paiute Indians in Pershing County, Nevada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lovelock Cave</span> Cave in United States of America

Lovelock Cave (NV-Ch-18) is a North American archaeological site previously known as Sunset Guano Cave, Horseshoe Cave, and Loud Site 18. The cave is about 150 feet (46 m) long and 35 feet (11 m) wide. Lovelock Cave is one of the most important classic sites of the Great Basin region because the conditions of the cave are conducive to the preservation of organic and inorganic material. The cave was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 24, 1984. It was the first major cave in the Great Basin to be excavated, and the Lovelock Cave people are part of the University of California Archaeological Community's Lovelock Cave Station.

The Cedarville Rancheria is a federally recognized tribe of Northern Paiute people in Modoc County, California, about 30 miles (48 km) south of the Oregon border. Cedarville Rancheria is 26 acres in Cedarville. The tribal headquarters is located 20 miles away from the Rancheria in Alturas. The tribe has an environmental protection agency that is dedicated to keeping the Rancheria clean and teaching children how to protect and care for the planet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Numaga</span> Paiute leader

Numaga was a Paiute leader during the Paiute War of 1860 that centered on Pyramid Lake in what is now Nevada in the United States. The war was caused by an influx of miners and ranchers after silver was discovered in the Comstock Lode near to Carson City. The newcomers assaulted the Paiutes and destroyed their foods supplies. When the Paiutes responded, the U.S. Army used force to suppress them. Both before and after the war, Numaga was a strong advocate of peace and did much to reduce the violence on both sides. He died of tuberculosis, a "white man's disease", in 1871.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paleontology in Nevada</span>

Paleontology in Nevada refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of Nevada. Nevada has a rich fossil record of plants and animal life spanning the past 650 million years of time. The earliest fossils from the state are from Esmeralda County, and are Late Proterozoic in age and represent stromatolite reefs of cyanobacteria, amongst these reefs were some of the oldest known shells in the fossil record, the Cloudina-fauna. Much of the Proterozoic and Paleozoic fossil story of Nevada is that of a warm, shallow, tropical sea, with a few exceptions towards the Late Paleozoic. As such many fossils across the state are those of marine animals, such as trilobites, brachiopods, bryozoans, honeycomb corals, archaeocyaths, and horn corals.

Margaret Marean Wheat was an American anthropologist, archeologist and paleontologist who worked and made significant contributions in the Great Basin, in North America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William V. Rinehart</span> American soldier who served as a Union Army officer

William Vance Rinehart was an American soldier who served as a Union Army officer in both the 1st Oregon Volunteer Cavalry Regiment and 1st Oregon Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War. He was later appointed as Indian agent at the Malheur Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon. Rinehart then moved to Seattle, Washington where he engaged in business and was active in state and local politics. He was elected to Washington state's first legislature, serving as a state senator from 1889 through 1890.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.