INDIANS
OF
LASSEN VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARK AND VICINITY

by
Paul E. Schulz

Published by the

Loomis Museum Association
Lassen Volcanic National Park
Mineral, California

Copyright
1954

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

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:

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maidu stone axe head, 5 inches long (after Dixon)

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.

Soap-root fiber acorn meal brush about 6 inches long (after Dixon)

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.

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.

Yahi making fire by twirling buckeye rod on Incense-cedar block

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....

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