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Who Were The Si-Te-Cah
Runestone.org ^ | Steve McNallen

Posted on 11/23/2003 6:48:27 PM PST by blam

WHO WERE THE SI-TE-CAH?

Note the cranial similarities between this Lovelock Cave skull discovered in the 1920's and the Kennewick Man sketch by Jamie Chatters (Click on the site) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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This 1995 article by Steve McNallen was written months before the discovery of the Kennewick Man or the current controversy over ancient Caucasians in North America. In retrospect, it seems hauntingly prophetic.

The history of the European peoples in the are we call California is generally assumed to have begun with the Spanish in the 1500's, followed later by the English (represented by Sir Francis Drake) and by the Russians. Our history books tell us all about these explorations, and we European-Californians should be knowledgeable about this part of our heritage. However, the books WON'T tell you about some of the more apocryphal reports of our kind of people in the American West, long ago...

Lovelock, Nevada, is about eighty miles northeast of Reno. It was in a cave near here, in 1911, that guano miners found mummies, bones, and artifacts buried under four feet of bat excrement. The desiccated bodies belonged to a very tall people - with red hair.

This is not the physical profile of your typical American Indian, to put it mildly. And in fact, the local Paiutes had legends about these towering troublemakers, whom they called the "Si-Te-Cah." According to them the redheads were a warlike people, and a number of the Indian tribes joined together in a long war against them. Eventually, the Paiutes and their allies forced the Si-Te-Cah back to their home acres, near Mount Shasta in our own California.

Mining engineer and amateur archeologist John T. Reid took an interest in the remains of the Si-Te-Cah and did his best to document the finds as they were unearthed. He also interviewed many locals who had knowledge of the affair. His memoirs can be found in the Nevada Historical Society Archives, located in Reno.

Official archeology refused to take an interest. According to reports, two investigators were sent to the scene. One was from the University of California, and the other from New York. Rather than unearthing facts, they seemed more interested in burying them - literally; we are told the New Yorker ordered a mummy reburied on at least once occasion. Nor was anything published about the anomalies until 1929, seventeen years after their visit.

So how did the mummies get in the cave, anyway? The way the Paiutes tell it, the Si-Te-Cah lived on a lake in the basin overlooked by the cave. When I say on the lake, that's just what I mean - they dwelled on rafts to escape harassment from the Paiutes. The rafts, like many other things in Si-Te-Cah society, were made of a fibrous water plant called tule; in fact, the name Si-Te-Cah means "tule eaters."

The Paiutes and the long-legged redheads did not get along well. The Indians accused the Si-Te-Cah of being cannibals, and waged war against them. The Si-Te-Cah fought back. After a long struggle, a coalition of tribes trapped the remaining Si-Te-Cah in what is now called Lovelock Cave. When they refused to come out, the Indians piled brush before the cave mouth and set it aflame. The Si-Te-Cah were annihilated.

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, daughter of Paiute Chief Winnemucca, related many stories about the Si-Te-Cah in her book Life Among the Paiutes. On page 75, she relates, "My people say that the tribe we exterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair, which has been handed down from father to son. I have a dress which has been in our family a great many years, trimmed with the reddish hair. I am going to wear it some time when I lecture. It is called a mourning dress, and no one has such a dress but my family."

All of this could be dismissed as another tall tale, but the case for the Si-Te-Cah does not rest on one man's research, or on remains found in one guano-filled cave. In 1931, mummies wee discovered in the Humboldt Lake bed. Eight years later, a mystery skeleton was unearthed on a ranch in the region. In each case, the skeletons or mummies were exceptionally tall and appeared to be connected with the strange lost race of redheads.

According to the Indians, the Si-Te-Cah built a pyramidal stone structure in New York Canyon, some miles away in Churchill County. Unfortunately, the area is riven with earthquakes and the rocky ruins have largely tumbled over the years.

Not much has survived from the Si-Te-Cah. When the archeological establishment refused to take their existence seriously, a number of small, private museums arose to fill the gap. A fire in one of these destroyed an irreplaceable collection of bones, mummified remains, feathered artifacts, and shells carved with mysterious symbols. Today there is a museum in Lovelock with a display describing the cave finds, but it ignores allegations that the Si-Te-Cah were anything other than Indians. The Nevada State Historical Society has some artifacts from the cave, but again, there is not even a hint of controversy.

Today, the basin that held the lake is a dry and dusty desert, its water usually limited to a few alkali pool, and the tule is as gone as the mysterious people who once ate it and floated on rafts made from its stalks. But the cave is still there, looming darkly above the desert floor, accessible by a short climb up a winding trail. It is a natural defensive position; it the Paiutes tried attacking the Si-Te-Cah from this direction, they must have taken considerable losses.

On the day we were there, there were no Paiutes in sight - nor tourists, nor prospectors, nor anyone else. Our eyes soon grew accustomed to the cave's gloom, and within minutes we had explored the extent of the sheltering rock. I scrambled out a secondary entrance/exit, a hole that opened a few yards to one side. Pausing to admire the endless desert view, I walked back to the main entrance. There, far from water of any kind, was a knot made of two strands of fibrous water plant - tule. It hadn't been buried; no mud or clods clung to it. It looked as though someone had placed it there moments before. Had it been there when we entered the cave? Well, I hadn't seen it, though admittedly I was focused on the cave itself.

So who were the Si-Te-Cah? We may never know. From John Reid's journals, it is clear he was researching the occurrence of other "White tribes" throughout what is now the United States. We have tales of Celtic settlements that preceded Columbus, but they were presumably on the other side of the continent and it's hard to see how they would have gotten to Nevada. Could bands of our people have migrated across the Bering Strait at the same time as the ancestors of the Indians? Our kind do have a propensity to wander...

The existence of early, previously unknown Eurofolk in the Nevada-California region indicates that our roots here may be even deeper than we suspected. We need to recover what we can of our lost heritage, and transmit it to our children as part of their birthright. Maybe the Si-Te-Cah were a transitory phenomenon - but this time, we're here to stay!


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events; US: Arizona; US: California; US: Nevada; US: Utah
KEYWORDS: archaeology; arizona; california; economic; ggg; godsgravesglyphs; history; lovelock; nevada; paiute; paiutes; sitecah; tuleeaters; utah; were; who
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To: mamelukesabre
The first "known" Russians in the Aleutians discovered that the folks there were pretty much like the same folks in Siberia ~ a mixed bag.

Bering had folks along with him who could talk to them.

Later on during the development of the Russian colony in California, a good number of Aleuts and Indians were taken down to California by the Russians. They worked at tanning furs, and also raised vegetables to ship up to the Russian fur hunters in Alaska.

The Russians, in turn, handed the furs over to John Finley(Findley), his brother, and a couple of other fellows from Seymour, Indiana. They would take them down the coast to Spanish fur traders at the San Luis Rey Mission in what is now Vista, CA.

The Spanish traders would ship them across the Pacific as tradegoods for the China trade, or down the coast to settlements in South America.

When the Russian colony was sold off to Sutter most of the Indians and Aleuts moved to Russia with the Russian officers, some of the Russian workforce stayed with Sutter, and some of the Russian fur trapper/traders went East, presumably to Seymour, Indiana, with Finley and the others. You can find Russian Orthodox cast iron crosses over graves of unknown persons in early graveyards around Seymour.

Yup, white folk settling America from the West Coast to Mid-America ~ BEFORE the Civil War.

101 posted on 03/13/2008 8:10:54 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: blam; mamelukesabre
All I've run into concerning battles with the natives in the Aleutians concerned Sakha (who have a lot of folks with blondism traits) and Ainu.

They're the same as the folks up there today.

102 posted on 03/13/2008 8:12:39 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: blam
Yup, them's the ladies!

Although the Sakha crowd who were driven out of India looked terribly East Asian, they'd ruled large chunks of India for such a long time the ruling class had picked up some of those remarkable mammaries so celebrated in the stone work.

103 posted on 03/13/2008 8:15:05 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah; mamelukesabre
Siberian Graveyard's Secret (More Redheads)
104 posted on 03/13/2008 8:22:40 PM PDT by blam (Secure the border and enforce the law)
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To: Mike Darancette
"The newrby town of "Weed" is aptly named."

It sure is beautiful to look at though.

105 posted on 12/22/2010 3:51:49 PM PST by Mariner (USS Tarawa, VQ3, USS Benjamin Stoddert, NAVCAMS WestPac, 7th Fleet, Navcommsta Puget Sound)
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To: Notforprophet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca,_South_Carolina

Just one of many Senecas, there are towns, rivers etc. in many states named Seneca.


106 posted on 07/04/2012 8:13:34 AM PDT by RipSawyer
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To: blam

They couldn’t of been Europeans ...they had elongated skulls .. two rows of teeth and six fingers.no European has that and they wet 9 ft tall . Chinese are white and they didn’t originate in Europe these race of whitemen are found even in south Americas thousands of years before Europe was even inhabited.... these people were called paracas and they flourished in lake titikaka in Peru and Bolivia the first Caucasian man was said to originate in central Asia maybe one group went far east long ago and evolve to something else ....native Americans worshiped them as gods in south America and they were way more advance then we are today just looked at the pyrimids they constructed looked like they used machines


107 posted on 05/30/2014 6:53:55 PM PDT by theweasel9000
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To: theweasel9000; blam

You joined FR today so you could post a reply to a two year old thread?
Wow...


108 posted on 05/30/2014 6:59:51 PM PDT by Repeal The 17th (We have met the enemy and he is us.)
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To: Repeal The 17th

Mysterious are the ways of Google. That’s my take.


109 posted on 05/30/2014 7:04:57 PM PDT by Tijeras_Slim
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To: blam
Okay, so what is "Seteca."

Those annoying bugs that come out every 13 years.

110 posted on 05/30/2014 7:14:04 PM PDT by kevao (Biblical Jesus: Give your money to the poor. Socialist Jesus: Give your neighbor's money to the poor)
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To: theweasel9000
Another old one.

Kuelap - The Machu Picchu Of Northern Peru (Chachapoyas - White, blonde haired people)

111 posted on 05/30/2014 7:32:29 PM PDT by blam
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To: Repeal The 17th
"You joined FR today so you could post a reply to a two year old thread?"

The thread is 11 years old.

112 posted on 05/30/2014 7:34:06 PM PDT by blam
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To: bam

yea just to post it up fyi. these people were here before vikings came(true first Europeans) and before them Chinese year 1424 when china was ruled by emperor Zheng . ther evidence that Africans came here before the Chinese look it up Egyptian mummies test positive for Peruvian cocain. si te cahs/paracas were cave duelers maybe thats why they were white didnt tan under the sun to much. blue eyes is just a gene mutation maybe being in the dark to much made ther eyes blue. this was more than 10,000 years ago. dont mean to doom your day but no way in hell they were from Europe. i do believe in the hollow earth . in the US national parks people goes missing never to be seen again since the 1800 children men women gone without a trace. native americans say its the giant wild men that takes these people to caves were they are said to live. and the people that are found says the same thing. look it up. they still might be around but who knows if they are the si te cahs


113 posted on 05/31/2014 2:17:07 PM PDT by theweasel9000
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To: blam

11 year old tread or not the topic is still older than that 100’s of years old topic ans it will go on forever until its exposed


114 posted on 05/31/2014 2:17:07 PM PDT by theweasel9000
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To: theweasel9000

bump


115 posted on 06/01/2014 3:10:08 PM PDT by Cvengr (Adversity in life and death is inevitable. Thru faith in Christ, stress is optional.)
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To: blam

Ancient writings tells us that a portion of Mu existed off the coast of California. Pre-flood, the coasts line probably would have extended further out than today. It is known that from Mu came the Mayas to settle South and Central America. Great megalithic structures were also built in Mexico pre-flood. Folks from Mu also moved into North America. Giants were there too. There are the diaries of Sir Francis Drake and his encounters with Giants in either the current SF Bay Area, or Monterey Bay Area. In fact, the clan of Giants wanted him to be their leader!

North America has a rich human history pre-modern Indian. They ere the last people to settle. Upon encountering the great earthen mounds and scattered megalithic structure, they could only say that they did not build them, but that the other ones before did....Makes one wonder, eh?


116 posted on 11/04/2015 5:46:49 PM PST by abigkahuna (Here now and whatever....)
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To: abigkahuna

Where are the skeletons of these giants?


117 posted on 11/05/2015 5:19:38 AM PST by blam (Jeff Sessions For President)
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To: blam

——Official archeology refused to take an interest——

since there were no pots or shards, there was nothing on wich archaeologists could fixate /s


118 posted on 11/05/2015 5:31:36 AM PST by bert ((K.E.; N.P.; GOPc.;+12, 73, ....carson is the kinder gentler trumping.)
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To: bert

(9,400 Year Old Mummy)

Spirit Cave Man

119 posted on 11/05/2015 9:00:50 AM PST by blam (Jeff Sessions For President)
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To: blam

2017 bump.


120 posted on 03/06/2017 3:16:03 PM PST by blam
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