COSUMNE
Cosumne is the name of a village in Sacramento County, about twenty-two miles southeast of Sacramento. The Cosumne river rises in El Dorado County, near the Sierra Nevada, and enters the Mokelumne about twenty-five miles south of the city of Sacramento.
Cosumne is an Indian word, said to mean “salmon,” and was taken from the tribe who lived upon the river. The frequent occurrence of the ending amni, or umne, in the names of rivers in the Sierras has led to the mistaken conclusion that the suffix actually means “river,” but we have the statement of A. L. Kroeber, Professor of Anthropology in the University of California, that, “The supposition may be hazarded that the ending amni, or umne, is originally a Miwok ending, with the meaning ‘people of’.” Thus the meaning of Cosumne may be “people of the village of Coso,” and of Mokelumne, “people of the village of Mukkel,” and so on through all the names having this ending.
Powers, in his Tribes of California, says Kos-sum-mi was the Indian word for “salmon,” and that this is the probable origin of the name Cosumne.
The Bureau of Ethnology has an interesting paragraph on the manners and customs of these Indians: “They went almost naked; their houses were of bark, sometimes thatched with grass, and covered with earth; the bark was loosened from the trees by repeated blows with stone hatchets, the latter having the head fastened to the handle with deer sinews. Their ordinary weapons were bows and stone-tipped arrows. The women made finely-woven conical baskets of grass, the smaller ones of which held water. Their amusements were chiefly dancing and foot-ball; the dances, however, were in some degree ceremonial. Their principal deity was the sun, and the women had a ceremony which resembled the ‘sun dance’ of the tribes of the upper Missouri. Their dead were buried in graves in the earth. The tribe is now practically extinct.”—(quoted from Rice, in American Anthropology, III, 259, 1890.)