Habits and Customs
The Parrusits, notwithstanding their primitive agriculture, moved about a great deal within their territory, as the exigencies of the season, the food supply, sanitary conditions, or their relations with other Indians demanded. They occasionally went into the high mountains in summer to hunt or fish but returned at intervals to the valleys to tend the crops. In the fall they went nut gathering among the pinyon pines of the foothills. The winters were usually spent in the valleys.
Their wickiups were made upon a framework of poles lashed together at the top in such way as to leave an opening for smoke to escape. The poles, tied with sinew in the conventional tepee shape, were plied with brush or woven willows and then covered with long strips of juniper bark or with skins of rabbits. At one side an opening was left for an entry-way. The fire was built in the center, leaving space around the sides for eating and sleeping.
Camps were usually located on a mesa, hill or flat, so that water had to be carried some distance from stream or spring. For this purpose, they wove jugs with narrow necks from the limbs of the squawbush and waterproofed them with pitch from the pinyon pine. Sinews were tied to the necks of the jugs for shoulder or head straps. Basketry was competent, but there is no evidence of pottery among them.
Paiute equipment for life was simple. Clothing consisted of a breechclout for the men, and for women a brief skirt hanging from the waist. These were sometimes supplemented by robes hung from the shoulders for warmth, buckskin moccasins for the feet, and ornaments of various kinds, particularly beads and feathers. They had no regular head dress, but often painted themselves with a special red earth which gave them a weird appearance. Breechclouts, skirts and robes were usually made from rabbit skins. In order to have the fur both inside and out, they would take a strip of fur and roll it in a spiral around a sinew or yucca fiber. Many such strips sewed together with sinew thread made a skin cloth from which clothing could be fashioned.
Hunting equipment consisted principally of the bow and arrow, supplemented by stone skinning knives. Their arrows were shafted with feathers and tipped with hard wood or stone points, small ones for birds and small game and larger ones for war or big game, all held in place by sinews. The shaft of the arrow was made from a straight limb or from reed cane. Sinew was made by shredding the tendons of deer or other large game. If arrows were to be poisoned, a concoction was made by inducing a rattlesnake to bite into a piece of liver, letting it stand a few days and then mixing it with crushed black widow spiders. Arrow tips dipped in this were considered deadly.
The Paiutes used the rock grinder or metate and mano for grinding such foods as corn, mesquite beans, and the coarse grass seed from which they made bread. The meal was mixed with water to make a batter and was cooked on a hot rock in the fire. The rock was first rubbed with clay to keep the meal from sticking. According to one method, the batter was made thin and poured over the rock in a flat cake. The heat from the rock soon set the batter and the rock was then stood upright close to the fire so the cake would bake on both sides. In the other method, the batter was made thicker and put out on the rock in the form of a conical loaf and coals were heaped around it.
Though the Indians raised corn, squash and beans, they lived principally upon fish, birds, wild game, wild fruits, roots and seeds. The principal game was rabbit and deer but occasionally antelope and mountain sheep supplemented their meager fare, and any sort of smaller game was used when obtainable. Hyrum Leany, who settled in Harrisburg in 1862, relates how the Indians used to go hunting lizards and chipmunks (ta-bats pa-shugi). The boys would tuck the heads under their belts and sometimes would come home with a beltful. The chuckwalla lizards were regarded as delicacies and the Indians had learned the art of removing them from the crevices in which they puff themselves up until their sides are pressed tightly against the rock, thus making it difficult to dislodge them. By puncturing the distended lungs with a sharp hooked stick, they were easily extracted.
To cook a small animal, such as rabbit or chipmunk, the Paiutes laid it in the fire without any preliminary preparation other than the removal of the skin, and the hot coals were raked over it. All parts of the body were eaten and nothing edible was missed. Surplus meat was usually dried.
Among the plants, grass seed was a staple article of diet. It could be gathered in those days almost anywhere, though the grass has largely disappeared since the advent of the white man’s horses, cattle and sheep. The fruit of the cactus (tuna or prickly pear) furnished a food mainstay in midsummer. In places where the yant (Agave) was found, the young flower stalks were roasted barbecue fashion. This was a delicacy designated as pe-ya-ga-mint, “a sweet food.”
Sugar was obtained in small quantities from the water willows and from the reed cane (Phragmites) by cutting it when plant lice had been working on it. As it dried, crystals of sugar appeared. This was gathered by shaking off the crystals and using them as a delicacy.
Among the native fruits gathered in season were the wild grapes and the sour squawberries of the stream banks in the valleys, the little red ookie berries of the semi-alkaline flats, the weump berries (Berberis fremonti) of the foothills, the sarvis berries (Amelanchier) of the lower mountain slopes and the choke cherries (Prunus), strawberries, and raspberries (Rubus) of the mountains. Pine nuts obtained from the cones of the pinyon pines were a staple fall crop gathered in large quantities and kept for later use.
It is certain that the Parrusits Indians raised crops by irrigation before the whites appeared among them. Escalante, in 1776, remarked only about corn and squash, but it is believed that they also raised beans and probably melons. Their farms were located on small flats where water could be easily diverted from spring or stream. Farming implements were mainly sticks of various kinds, usually of ash, about three feet long and three or four inches wide toward one end, with the edges sharpened and running to a point. Ditches were hard to make and maintain due to periodic floods. Cultivated areas were usually very small, five acres being the maximum.
An old Kaibabits Indian named George graphically described the farming operations thus: “Kaibab Injuns no raise’m crops. ’nudder Injuns raise’m. No shovel, no hoe. Use’m stick; dig’m ditch; make water come. Dig little hole over here, over there, all around; plant’um corn.”
The squaws performed most of the labor in tending the crops. The bucks were the warriors and hunters. Harvesting the corn, carrying water, gathering grass seed, grinding corn meal, making bread, making clothing, all were squaw’s work. There may, however, have been a more equal division of work than appears to us now, since the food supply and safety of the home depended much upon the prowess of the hunter and the vigilance of the warrior.
The simple personal equipment and belongings gathered up by an individual during his lifetime were usually buried with him for his spirit journey. Nothing of material value was passed on from generation to generation; each had to depend upon his own efforts. Weaklings, cripples, and the aged had a hard time. If they became burdensome, they were usually abandoned and sometimes burned. St. George cattlemen at Mount Trumbull frustrated an attempted burning as late as the nineties. The Uinkarets had just left camp when the cowboys accidentally stumbled upon it. One wickiup was left standing. The doorway had been fastened, wood and trash had been piled around it and set on fire as the Indians left. Inside, an old blind Indian named Waterman was nearly suffocated when the cowboys released him. The Indians having abandoned him refused to care for him further and he became a burden on the whites.
At the time of the white settlement of the Virgin River Valley in the 50’s and 60’s, there were perhaps a thousand Parrusits in various bands along the stream with their principal camping places near Rockville, Virgin City, Toquerville, Washington Fields and Santa Clara. These all appear to have recognized the leadership of Chief Tut-se-gavits, head of the Tonaquint band living on the Santa Clara Creek, and to have been held together under regular tribal control.
G. H. Heap, one of the Argonauts, described the Paiutes in 1853 in the following uncomplimentary paragraphs:
The Pah-Utah Indians are the greatest horse thieves on the continent. Rarely attempting the bold coup-de-main of the Utahs, they dog travelers during their march and follow on their trail like jackals, cutting off any stragglers whom they can surprise and overpower, and pick up such animals as stray from the band or lag behind from fatigue. At night lurking around the camp, and concealing themselves behind rocks and bushes, they communicate with each other by imitating the sounds of birds and animals. They never ride, but use as food the horses and mules that they steal, and, if within arrowshot of one of these animals, a poisoned shaft secures him as their prize. Their arms are bows and arrows tipped with obsidian, and lances sometimes pointed with iron, which they obtain from the wrecks of wagons found along the road. They also use a pronged stick to drag lizards from their holes.
Yearly expeditions are fitted out in New Mexico to trade with the Pah-Utahs for their children and recourse is often had to foul means to force their parents to part with them. So common is it to make a raid for this purpose, that it is considered as no more objectionable than to go on a buffalo or a mustang hunt. One of our men, Jose Galliego [sic], who was an old hand at this species of man-hunting, related to us with evident gusto, numerous anecdotes on this subject; and as we approached the village he rode up to Mr. Beale and eagerly proposed to him that we should “charge on it like h—l, kill the mans, and maybe catch some of the little boys and gals.”[6]
The coming of the Mormon pioneers gradually upset the Paiute government. The whites frequently settled on Indian camp sites and occupied Indian farming lands. Their domestic livestock ate the grass that formerly supplied the Indians with seed, and crowded out deer and other game upon which they largely subsisted. This interference with their movements and the reduction in the food supply tended eventually to bring the Indians into partial dependence upon the whites.
Within a few years, farm crops and livestock brought to the whites more food and clothing than the Indians had ever dreamed of. No wonder they became beggars in the towns and thieves of cattle and horses on the range. As long as the whites were in the minority, they used to feed the Indians. In the words of John Dennett, an old settler of Rockville, this “gave them an idea of some other kind of food beside grass seed and wild game.”
As the whites increased and became strong enough to defy the Indians, the attitude changed from one of fear to that of domination. Although they continued more or less to feed the begging Indians, they soon put a stop to thievery on the range, punishing it in many cases by death. This transition was marked by bitter feeling and even by war between the races. In time, it became increasingly difficult for the Indians to maintain themselves.
Not only was their food supply reduced, but the whites also spread strange maladies among the Indians. Measles and smallpox are known to have been fatal in many cases. When Silver Reef, a mining town of 1500 people, was flourishing in the 70’s and 80’s it is known that venereal diseases were spread among the Indians. Fatalities from disease and the diminution of food supplies were undoubtedly heavy factors in the drastic reduction of the Indian population. Of the estimated thousand Parrusits living along the Virgin River in the 50’s and 60’s, there was only one survivor (until his death in June, 1945), an old fellow called Peter Harrison, who lived among the Shivwits Indians on the Santa Clara reservation.
Among the neighbors of the Parrusits there remained in 1933 only about seventy-five Kaibabits on a reservation at Moccasin, Arizona, some fifty Shivwits on a reservation on the Santa Clara Creek, fifty miles to the west; and about fifty Com-o-its in the vicinity of Cedar City. The Uinkarets and several smaller groups are today entirely extinct.
Asked to account for this tragedy, the old Kaibabits Indian George explained it this way: “When white man come, lotsa Injuns here; alla same white man now. Injuns heap yai-quay [meaning lots of them die]; maybe so six, maybe so five, maybe so two in night. Purty soon all gone. White man, he come: raise’m pompoose. Purty soon lotsa white man.”