Survival Arts Of The Primitive Paiutes

Margaret M. Wheat

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780874174533
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

With over 24, 000 copies in print, this bestselling book tells how the Paiutes survived in the harsh Nevada climate. Chronicling food-gathering methods, basket weaving, hunting, skinning, and working with rabbit skins, this book serves as an invaluable reference on early Paiute culture. Any inquiring person who has worked with the Native Americans of the West will testify to the difficulties of obtaining the information he seeks. They are an old and proud and reserved race, and acceptance of outsiders is not freely given. In her twenty years of painstaking work with the Northern Paiutes, Margaret Wheat earned that full measure of acceptance. She tells the story of the generation of Native Americans whose lives were changed forever by the arrival of pioneers and prospectors in 1849.

I

The Old People and the Land

THE GREAT BASIN

Before gold was discovered in California at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, little was known of that vast area of the West now comprising the states of Nevada and Utah. Only a handful of white men had attempted to cross the forbidding expanse of desert that lies between the Sierra Nevada mountains of western Nevada and the Wasatch Mountains of central Utah—an area nearly as large as France.

In the decade between 1832 and 1843, small groups of trappers and explorers had risked their lives to find the beaver-filled rivers which the cartographers had drawn onto maps of the area. John C. Frémont,¹ with his exploration party of 1843, hoped to discover the Buenaventure,² a legendary river that was said to flow from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. If the river did indeed exist, he knew that it could provide the pathway across this unknown part of the West. Instead, he found only small, thirsty streams that vanished in dusty flatlands.

He named the region the Great Basin, a term leading many to envisage a vast, smooth bowl with a drain at the bottom, like a sink. A more accurate name would have been the Many Basins Province.

Here, over millions of years, huge blocks of land a dozen or more miles across became tilted, their upturned edges forming the crest of one mountain range after another, each having one steep slope and one gentle slope. Between the ranges lay chains of basins, half-a-day’s-walk wide, from which there was no drainage. During the Pleistocene these basins became filled with water, making lakes that rose and fell in rhythm with the periods of glaciation. At times of highest water many of the lakes joined at the passes, forming one huge lake that covered more than nine thousand square miles. On it a boat could have sailed 250 miles north and south, or 180 miles east and west. Geologists have given the name Lake Lahontan to this prehistoric body of water.³ Today only two lakes of the great Lahontan system have not gone dry within the memory of man—Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake. Both are briny, containing the concentrate of the once great mother lake. Salts and minerals, concentrated in the drying lake, built weirdly-shaped castles and caverns of coral-like tufa, while waves sculptured hollows in tufa-cemented gravel and cut caves in rocky headlands. These became the grottoes for fish and later, when dry, shelter for animals.

As the lake receded, man entered the region to walk the shore line. He hunted and fished, leaving broken spears and discarded tools to record his presence. As the water dropped below the mouths of the caves, he took refuge in them, building his campfires to keep himself warm, burying his dead out of the reach of animals, and cacheing his food in the dark corners.⁴ Camels, bison, shrub-oxen, and horses were probably his game.

Following the slow retreat of the shore line down the mountain slopes, generation after generation of Indians developed new skills and abandoned old ones. By the time the valley bottoms were dry and the once magnificent inland sea was reduced to reed-choked marshes and briny, treeless lakes, the Indians had learned to weave watertight baskets and had discarded the atlatl for the bow and arrow. Most importantly, they learned to survive in an inhospitable land where short, green springs were followed by long, brown summers and clear, cold winters.

The country inhabited by these Indians lay in the rain-shadow east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Wet storms rolling in off the Pacific Ocean and across California were lifted up the western slope of the range. Here, tall, icy peaks drained the moisture from the wind as it passed. Pouring down the eastern slope of the mountains, the air, heated by compression, dried the rivers and streams, the ponds and lakes, the plants and animals, and the people. In summer the midday sun beat down on the clay and sand of the old lake floor, driving the rabbits, the lizards, and the coyotes into the uncertain shade of small, dry bushes. The setting sun took away the warmth, and in a moment the desert was chilled. Often the temperature dropped fifty degrees between noon and night. Winters were cold but dry. Snow that lasted more than a few days was rare in the valleys, but southern slopes, protected from the wind, warmed quickly in the midwinter sun. Then Indians and desert creatures alike came out of their shelters to hunt for food, hurrying back as the sun went down.

At the bottom of each valley was a lake or a marsh, depending on the water supply. The dwindling rivers which fed them wandered down the valleys, cutting deep into the old lake-bottom sands and silts. Along the banks the sagebrush grew twice as high and the cottontails twice as fat. Here there were trees—willows and cottonwoods—providing the only protection from the sun which the Indians did not make themselves.

In the Great Basin the marshes and playas were intermittent affairs, always at the mercy of dry cycles and shifting dunes and channels. In a half dozen years a marsh could change into a dust bowl, or conversely, a desert flat would be transformed into a luxuriant nesting ground for migratory water birds. Seeded by the wind the margins of the marshes became tangles of cattails and tules⁵ that furnished roots for muskrats and man, grew leaves for the houses of blackbirds and man, and produced seeds for ducks and man.

Born in a few hours from flash floods were playa lakes. Thin sheets of water, miles across and ankle-deep, they might last a day, a week, or a month, but never long enough to support life. When the water was gone, the desert again became a white, glaring plane of hard-baked clay broken into myriads of hexagonal sections, and the Indians walked across rather than around it.

Two paces from the marsh’s edge the desert began. Small grey-green sage and greasewood bushes covered the valley floors and carpeted the hill slopes. This was the home of the jackrabbit, the antelope, the wolf, and his tricky brother, the coyote. Here grew the tiny seeds that furnished much food for the Indians. Here also were the ground squirrels, rats, and birds which competed with the Indians for the seeds. Here were the cottontails, crickets, and caterpillars that ate the plants before the seeds matured. Here also went the Indians to harvest the rodents, the insects, and the birds.

Higher on the slopes where the weather was cooler and rainfall more frequent, junipers and nut-bearing piñon pines formed a thin mantle over the mountain tops. This was the home of the sagegrouse, the marmot, the deer, and the pika, or little-chief-rabbit, who made hay for his winter use. A few streams, which one could step across, traced their way among the pines and down through the sagebrush to disappear into the gravel at the mouths of the canyons. This was the deer-hunting, nut-gathering land of the Indians. If the nut crop failed, both the deer and the Indians grew lean.

Springs were remarkably common in the Great Basin, furnishing water for those who knew where and how to find it. In nearly every valley hot springs bubbled out along the fault line of the mountains’ up-tilting, while clear, cold springs could be found in most of the ranges. Even so, no Indian ventured far without his water jug.

Bleak and cold, or hot and dry though the Great Basin was, the Indians found a livelihood there because they were wise in its ways and used every resource advantageously. Many adventurers who entered this barren country during the latter part of the nineteenth century died from heat and thirst in the summer, or from cold in the winter, or starved when they had exhausted the supplies they carried with them. Yet the Indians of the Great Basin were considered by the first explorers to be miserable creatures—even though they managed to survive where the white man could not.

They learned to build shelters from whatever material was available, protecting themselves in their seasonal wanderings from the extremes of the climate. They recognized and used small bits of food such as rodents, insects, roots, and tiny seeds which were rejected by the starving pioneers. They raised children and grew to old age. At times they even danced and sang.

TROUT-EATERS, CUI-UI-EATERS, AND CATTAIL-EATERS

When the white man arrived in the Great Basin, he found five tribes of Indians locked off from the rest of the world by the high, snowcapped mountains on the west and the waterless deserts on the east. Four of the tribes belonged to one basic linguistic family, and the fifth spoke an alien tongue. In the southeast lived the Southern Paiutes, to the east were the Goshutes and the Shoshones, and in the northwest were the Northern Paiutes. The small unrelated group, the Washos, centered near Lake Tahoe.

Although the Northern Paiutes did not actually live in the Sierra Nevada, that towering range molded the pattern of their daily lives. It controlled the storms in the winter and captured the rainfall in the summer. It sent them fish-filled rivers to recharge their shrinking lakes and marshes, and it acted as a barrier to commerce with the rest of the world. And although the Indians were unaware of it, the Sierra Nevada possessed a treasure of gold which had been washed out of the rocks and held in pockets in the ancient riverbeds for some ninety million years. This treasure house was later to change the life of every Indian in the Basin when in one short decade thousands upon thousands of prospectors—good and bad, kind and cruel, wise and foolish—began to pour down the Humboldt River trail and across their land to the Mother Lode in California in 1849.

Before the land and its resources became the property of white men by arbitrary right of claim, the Indians freely roamed the Great Basin in a seasonal cycle to glean their subsistence. The quest for food was so pressing that many bands in the Great Basin became known for the food they most commonly used—the Ground-squirrel-eaters (kibídika

a), the Jackrabbit-eaters (kammídika

a), and the Sucker-eaters (pakwídika

a).

This is the story of the Trout-eaters (agáidika

a), the Cui-ui-eaters (kuyúidika

a), and the Cattail-eaters (tóidika

a) who lived in the western part of what is now Nevada. They were only three bands among twenty-three or more comprising the Northern Paiutes of Nevada, California, Idaho, and Oregon.

The Trout-eaters took their name from the huge salmon-trout (agai), now known as the Lahontan cutthroat, that lived in Walker Lake and spawned in the Walker River. This unique trout was a legacy from ancient Lake Lahontan where it evolved many thousands of years ago. The Trout-eaters made their headquarters at the mouth of the river, near their main source of food, but they also searched the desert and hills for seeds, roots, and nuts at ripening times.

The Cui-ui-eaters who lived on the shores of Pyramid Lake—seventy-five miles to the north—were named after a very different fish which white people later called the cui-ui. It was a large black fish of the sucker family, known only in Pyramid and Winnemucca lakes, a vestige of the vanished Lake Lahontan. Early in May, when the days began to grow warm, thousands of the big, ugly fish came from somewhere on the lake bottom to spawn in the Truckee River, after which they returned to the deep waters of the lake and were not seen until the following year. When Frémont and his exploring party visited the Cui-ui-eaters at the mouth of the Truckee River in January, 1844, he noted: “These Indians are very fat and appear to live an easy and happy life.”⁶

The Cattail-eaters lived fifty miles to the east of Pyramid Lake in marshy areas near the sinks of the Carson and Humboldt rivers. Here, thousands of acres of land were covered with cattails and tules, rushes and nutgrass, making an ideal resting place for migratory water birds on the great flyway from Mexico to Canada. The roots and seeds of the marsh plants, the ducks and geese, and the little fish of the sloughs, along with the pinenuts from the mountains, formed the major foodstuffs for the Cattail-eaters. The pattern of life for these three bands was, for the most part, the pattern for all of the Northern Paiute Indians. Differences occurred where natural resources differed.

Agriculture was unknown to these groups in the northern part of the Great Basin where killing frosts came late in the spring and early in the fall. With a rainfall of only four to six inches per year, such crops as corn, beans, squash, and cotton could not be grown without irrigation.

Everywhere in the Basin the constant search went on from valley to lake, to mountain, to river, to marsh for water, food, and firewood, and for the materials out of which shelter and clothing and tools could be made.

Even in winter, when snow and cold hampered the ceaseless wanderings, camps were not permanent. Small family groups, made up of the head man and his wife or wives (who were invariably sisters), the children, a grandparent or two, and possibly an uncle, erected shelters near their caches of food. They chose locations which were protected from storms, where the creeks or springs remained open throughout the winter, and where firewood was available. Without such tools as axe or saw, the supply of fuel which could be carried in bundles on the backs of women, and logs which could be dragged by men, soon became exhausted. Rather than search in ever widening circles around the winter camps, it was often more practical to move the family with its few belongings and build new shelters near a fresh supply of wood.

In fact, acquiring sufficient fuel was such a problem that it was one of the first chores assigned to children, and gathering firewood became part of the ceremony for a young Indian girl when she became a woman. An industrious girl who gathered large piles of wood, the Paiutes believed, would not be a lazy wife. In a culture where obtaining fuel and food was woman’s work, a lazy wife could mean a cold, hungry family.

Early trappers and explorers recorded that the Basin Indians went naked most of the time, wearing only tunics of rabbit skins in winter.⁷ Deer, whose hides could be used for buckskin clothing, were scarce in the Great Basin.⁸ Antelope were much more plentiful on the rolling flanks of the mountain ranges, but to hunt and kill them was a community project. Mountain sheep were numerous but wary. Since all hides were at a premium they were used principally for such things as pouches to carry paints and other treasured possessions. An Indian fully dressed in skins was rare in the Basin, even in winter.

The rabbitskin blanket was the essential item of clothing, and at night it was both blanket and bed. Worn like a cape, it was tied by cordage around the neck and hung below the thighs. When an Indian’s legs became cold while traveling, he merely squatted down and let the folds of the blanket warm them. A fortunate, or industrious, Indian might wear leather moccasins; but without a tanning process to make buckskin waterproof, the Great Basin Indians more often resorted to pacs made of sagebrush bark which could be manufactured on the spot. At times, skirts of grass or shredded sagebrush bark were added to the women’s costumes, topped by a bowl...