Much of pre-Columbian United States history is oral. Traditional tales were passed down from mouth to mouth according to tradition, carrying the ancestral stories and origin myths from generation and generation and binding the peoples to their individual mythology.
To educate through storytelling in this way is a powerful tool for bonding the tribe together, focussing on the collective rather than the individual. However it can also allow error and embellishment to creep in, as the slow process of history turning into legend occurs.
To be sure, such changes occur in almost every civilization, but the case of the Native Americans of the North American continent is particularly marked, due to a coincidence in their development. When Europe made contact with the native tribes of the Americas, many of the stories were about relatively recent history and the process of crystallizing them into fables was on-going.
As a result, some of the stories straddle this divide, and exist somewhere between truth and tradition. So it is with the so-called Lovelock Cannibals, the ginger tribe known as the Si-Te-Cah who fought the Paiute peoples of what is now Nevada.
Four Foot of Guano
The Si-Te-Cah did not survive their war with the Paiute. The two tribes were sworn enemies and the Si-Te-Cah were feared and respected by their opponents. But they were hated, too.
According to the Paiute oral history, they eventually gained an upper hand over their fierce rivals and were able to force them to retreat into Lovelock cave. When the Si-Te-Cah refused to surrender and save their own lives, the Paiute trapped them in the cave.
Piling brush wood and logs in the mouth of the cave, the Paiute set a great blaze which trapped the remaining Si-Te-Cah inside. Every survivor of the Si-Te-Cah tribe was killed.
Thus far there is little to differentiate this story from many other inter-tribal clashes which occurred across the great continent of North America. What about the other stories of this tribe? How do we know they were cannibals, or the color of their hair?
The answer to the first comes from the daughter of a Paiute tribal chief named Sarah Winnemucca and her book Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. Writing in the late 19th century, Sarah described an enemy tribe who used to raid Paiute settlements and carry off prisoners to eat.
Sarah had more tangible evidence for the distinctive red hair the tribe had, as well. In her book she also describes, somewhat ghoulishly, a dress she owned which had been made from the red hair of the defeated Si-Te-Cah. Sarah described it as a “mourning dress”.
Intriguingly, we also have evidence for this lost tribe from Lovelock cave itself. When miners entered the cave in 1911 they discovered an unholy amount of guano from birds and bats which roosted there. Underneath they found a treasure trove of artifacts.
Buried beneath four feet (1.2 m) of guano they found thousands of items, as well as skeletons which pointed to long occupation of the cave. Although they did not notify the authorities of their find for over a year and many artifacts were destroyed as they worked the cave, as many as 10,000 artifacts have been recovered since.
The artifacts are distinctly Paiute and suggest a close relationship between the tribe that died in the cave and the Paiute who remember them through their oral history. But as to what made the Si-Te-Cah distinct, and who they were: that was lost when the last of them died at Lovelock Cave.
Top Image: Trapped in Lovelock cave, the Si-Te-Cah were wiped out by the Paiute. Source: Skylar / Adobe Stock.
By Joseph Green
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