Si-Te-Cah

According to Paiute oral history, the Si-Te-Cah,Saiduka or Sai'i are a legendary tribe whose mummi-fied remains were allegedly discovered under four feet ofguano by guanominers in what is now known as LovelockCave in Lovelock, Nevada, United States. Although thecave had been mined since 1911, miners didn't notifyauthorities until 1912. The miners destroyed many ofthe artifacts, but archaeologists were still able to retrieve10,000 Paiute artifacts from the cave. Items included tuleduck decoys, sandals, and baskets, several dating backover 2000 years.

1 Name

“Si-Te-Cah” literally means “tule-eaters” in the languageof the Paiute Indians. Tule is a fibrous water plant. Inorder to escape harassment from the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cahs were said to have lived on rafts made of tule on thelake.

2 Oral history

According to the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cah were a red-haired band of cannibalistic giants.[1] The Si-Te-Cah andthe Paiutes were at war, and after a long struggle a coali-tion of tribes trapped the remaining Si-Te-Cah in Love-lock Cave. When they refused to come out, the Indianspiled brush before the cave mouth and set it aflame. TheSi-Te-Cah were annihilated.Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, daughter of Paiute ChiefWinnemucca, wrote about what she described as “a smalltribe of barbarians” who ate her people in her book LifeAmong the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims - she wrotethat “after my people had killed them all, the peopleround us called us Say-do-carah. It means conqueror; italso means “enemy.” “My people say that the tribe weexterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair,which has been handed down from father to son. I havea dress which has been in our family a great many years,trimmed with the reddish hair. I am going to wear it sometime when I lecture. It is called a mourning dress, and noone has such a dress but my family.”[2] Hopkins does notmention giants.

3 Archaeology

Adrienne Mayor writes about the Si-Te-Cah in her book,Legends of the First Americans.[3] She suggests that the'giant' interpretation of the skeletons from LovelockCave and other dry caves in Nevada was started by en-trepreneurs setting up tourist displays and that the skele-tons themselves were of normal size. However, about ahundred miles north of Lovelock there are plentiful fos-sils of mammoths and cave bears, and their large limbbones could easily be thought to be those of giants by anuntrained observer. She also discusses the reddish hair,pointing out that hair pigment is not stable after death andthat various factors such as temperature, soil, etc. canturn ancient very dark hair rusty red or orange. Anotherexplanation for the 'giant' interpretation of the skeletonsmay also come from the fact that some of the first re-mains unearthed by the guano miners in 1911-12 weredescribed as “giant”.[4]

Awritten report by James H. Hart, the first of two minersto excavate the cave in the fall of 1911, recalls that in thenorth-central part of the cave, about four feet deep, “wasa striking looking body of a man “six feet six inches tall.”His body was mummified and his hair distinctly red.”[5]Unfortunately in the first year of mining, some of the hu-man remains and artifacts were lost and destroyed. “Thebest specimen of the adult mummies was boiled and de-stroyed by a local fraternal lodge, which wanted the skele-ton for initiation purposes.”[6] Also, several of the fibersandals found in the cave were remarkably large, and onereported at over 15 inches (38 cm) in length was said tobe on display at the Nevada Historical Society’s museumin Reno in 1952.[7][8][9]

The Paiute tradition asserts that the Si-Te-Cah peoplepracticed cannibalism, and this may have had some ba-sis in fact. During the 1924 excavation of the cave, aseries of three human bones were found near the surfacetowards the mouth of the cave. “These had been split toextract the marrow, as animal bones were split, and prob-ably indicate cannibalism during a famine.”[10]

4 Notes[1] Johnston, Charlie. “Prehistoric Storage: Nevada’s ancient

caves contain a “hole” lot of Native American history.”Nevada Magazine. July/August 2011. Retrieved 18 Nov2012.

[2] Hopkins 75

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2 6 EXTERNAL LINKS

[3] Mayor, Adrienne (2005). Fossil legends of the first Amer-icans. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN0-691-11345-9.

[4] Loud and Harrington

[5] Loud and Harrington 87

[6] Loud and Harrington 5

[7] Nevada State Journal, Reno, Nevada. Sunday, August 3,1952 Page 6.

[8] Nevada State Journal, Reno, Nevada. Sunday, February22, 1953 p. 9.

[9] Reno Evening Gazette, Reno, Nevada. Thursday, Sep.25, 1913 p. 1.

[10] Loud and Harrington 13

5 References• Carroll C. Calkins, ed. (1982). Mysteries of the un-explained. [chief contributing writer, Richard Mar-shall ; contributing writers, Monte Davis, ValerieMoolman, Georg Zappler] (Repr. with amendmentsed.). Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Associa-tion. pp. 41–42. ISBN 0895771462. |first1= miss-ing |last1= in Authors list (help)

• Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca. Life Among the Pi-utes: Their Wrongs and Claims. Boston StereotypeFoundry, 1882.

• Loud, Llewellyn L.; M. R. Harrington (15 February1929). “Lovelock Cave”. University of CaliforniaPublications in American Archaeology and Ethnol-ogy (University of California at Berkeley) 25 (1):1–183.

6 External links• Adrienne Mayor’s homepage

• Stone Mother, a Paiute Legend

• Paiute Indian Legends

• Paiute Legends and Stories

• Lovelock Culture

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7 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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