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!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/hokkaido/ainu.html

Origins of the Ainu
by Gary Crawford

The ringing telephone broke the evening silence. It was the fall of 1983, and my research partner, Professor Masakazu Yoshizaki, was calling from Japan.

"Gary, I have some news," Yoshi said. "We have a few grains of barley from a site on the Hokkaido University campus. I think you should come and look at them."

The Japanese language is notorious for its ambiguity, so I wasn't quite sure of the full meaning of what I had just heard. But I didn't need to know much more. Though it may sound like a trivial piece of news to you, I knew something was up, and it deserved closer scrutiny. My teaching schedule at the University of Toronto kept me from hopping on a plane for several months, but when I finally got to the lab on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, I realized the full import of Yoshi's news - namely, that the history of Hokkaido's indigenous people, the Ainu, was about to be rewritten.

Since the mid-1970s I had been investigating the relationship between plants and people in prehistoric northeastern Japan, particularly Hokkaido, using an archeological tool called flotation. The widespread use of this technique beginning in the 1960s sparked a quiet revolution in archeology. Flotation facilitates the collection of plant remains, mainly seeds and charcoal, preserved by burning in oxygen-poor environments such as the depths of a fireplace. Under these circumstances, seeds don't oxidize to ashy dust. One can recover the resulting carbonized seeds by sampling soil from ancient hearths, floors, pits, garbage dumps, and the like. One places the soil gently in water, stirs it so the carbonized material floats to the surface, and then decants the water and its floating contents through a fine mesh, which traps the floating plant material while allowing the water to pass through.

A flotation screen with a recovered sample.

Until the advent of flotation, we couldn't systematically explore early plant use, plant domestication, the local environmental impact of people, and so on. Archeologists had only a limited appreciation of this crucial aspect of prehistoric human life. Wherever we introduced flotation, our perspective on early human life changed, often dramatically. Little did I know just how dramatically it would change our interpretation of the archeology of northeastern Japan.

The archeological grain from Sakushukotoni-gawa ("gawa" means river), as the campus site is known, dated to A.D. 700 to 900. The site is contemporaneous with the medieval Japanese to the south, who had been forging a nation-state for several centuries. The immediate predecessors of the Ainu, who are the native people of northeastern Japan, occupied the site. Many archeologists consider the Ainu to be the last living descendants of the Jomon people, who lived throughout Japan from as early as 13,000 years ago. The Jomon are known for their elaborate earthenware, which they often decorated with cord (rope) impressions, and for their stone tools, pit-house villages, and, by 1500 B.C., elaborate cemeteries marked by stone circles or high earth embankments. To a large degree, the Jomon relied on hunting, fishing, and collecting plants and shellfish for their subsistence.

An early Jomon pit house.

Archeologists find it useful to interpret archeological cultures by relating what they find to existing or historically recorded direct descendants of those cultures. This is quite common in the New World, where many traditional Amerindian cultures known archeologically were also observed and recorded by Europeans. Even today many Amerindians continue to live much as they did in the past, so the continuity with the archeological record is usually indisputable and extremely informative.

To a large extent, this also seemed to be the case in northeastern Japan. Archeologists and historians have long described the Ainu, like the Jomon, as hunter-fisher-collectors and, because the two peoples lived in the same region, they had few qualms about assuming the Ainu were living representatives of Jomon culture. However, the Ainu, at least in the last few centuries according to historic records, lived in above-ground, rectangular dwellings and used metal tools as well as wooden and ceramic bowls, pots, and dishes. These characteristics contrast with those of the Jomon, but in the minds of historians and archeologists it was the lack of agriculture in both cultures that forged the link between the Ainu and Jomon cultures. Further bolstering this opinion, the skeletal biology of Jomon populations demonstrates a strong resemblance and therefore a close affinity to the Ainu. Justifiably, the Ainu seemed a relic of a primitive hunting-and-gathering people who had inhabited northeastern Japan for thousands of years.

Continue: The Relationship between the Jomon and the Ainu

THE SAMURAI AND THE AINU

Findings by American anthropologist C. Loring Brace, University of Michigan, will surely be controversial in race conscious Japan. The eye of the predicted storm will be the Ainu, a "racially different" group of some 18,000 people now living on the northern island of Hokkaido. Pure-blooded Ainu are easy to spot: they have lighter skin, more body hair, and higher-bridged noses than most Japanese. Most Japanese tend to look down on the Ainu.

Brace has studied the skeletons of about 1,100 Japanese, Ainu, and other Asian ethnic groups and has concluded that the revered samurai of Japan are actually descendants of the Ainu, not of the Yayoi from whom most modern Japanese are descended. In fact, Brace threw more fuel on the fire with:

"Dr. Brace said this interpretation also explains why the facial features of the Japanese ruling class are so often unlike those of typical modern Japanese. The Ainu-related samurai achieved such power and prestige in medieval Japan that they intermarried with royality and nobility, passing on Jomon-Ainu blood in the upper classes, while other Japanese were primarily descended from the Yoyoi." The reactions of Japanese scientists have been muted so. One Japanese anthropologist did say to Brace," I hope you are wrong."

The Ainu and their origin have always been rather mysterious, with some people claiming that the Ainu are really Caucasian or proto-Caucasian - in other words, "white." At present, Brace's study denies this interpretation.

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