Si-Te-Cah

According to Paiute oral history, the Si-Te-Cah, Saiduka or Sai’i are a legendary tribe whose mummified remains were allegedly discovered under four feet of guano by guano miners in what is now known as Lovelock Cave in Lovelock, Nevada, United States. Although the cave had been mined since 1911, miners did not notify authorities until 1912. The miners destroyed many of the artifacts, but archaeologists were still able to retrieve 10,000 Paiute artifacts from the cave. Items included tule duck decoys, sandals, and baskets, several dating back over 2000 years.

Name

“Si-Te-Cah” literally means “tule-eaters” in the language of the Paiute Indians.^[1] Tule is a fibrous water plant. In order to escape harassment from the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cahs were said to have lived on rafts made of tule on the lake.^[2]

Oral history[edit]

According to the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cah were a red-haired band of cannibalistic giants.^[3] The Si-Te-Cah and the Paiutes were at war, and after a long struggle a coalition of tribes trapped the remaining Si-Te-Cah in 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, wrote about what she described as “a small tribe of barbarians” who ate her people in her book Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims – she wrote that “after my people had killed them all, the people round us called us Say-do-carah. It means conqueror; it also means “enemy.” “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.”^[4] Hopkins does not mention giants.

Archaeology[edit]

Adrienne Mayor writes about the Si-Te-Cah in her book Legends of the First Americans.^[5] She suggests that the ‘giant’ interpretation of the skeletons from Lovelock Cave and other dry caves in Nevada was started by entrepreneurs setting up tourist displays and that the skeletons themselves were of normal size. However, about a hundred miles north of Lovelock there are plentiful fossils of mammoths and cave bears, and their large limb bones could easily be thought to be those of giants by an untrained observer. She also discusses the reddish hair, pointing out that hair pigment is not stable after death and that various factors such as temperature, soil, etc. can turn ancient very dark hair rusty red or orange. Another explanation for the ‘giant’ interpretation of the skeletons may also come from the fact that some of the first remains unearthed by the guano miners in 1911-12 were described as “giant”.^[6]

A written report by James H. Hart, the first of two miners to excavate the cave in the fall of 1911, recalls that in the north-central part of the cave, about four feet deep, “was a striking looking body of a man “six feet six inches tall.” His body was mummified and his hair distinctly red.”^[7] Unfortunately in the first year of mining, some of the human remains and artifacts were lost and destroyed. “The best specimen of the adult mummies was boiled and destroyed by a local fraternal lodge, which wanted the skeleton for initiation purposes.”^[8]Also, several of the fiber sandals found in the cave were remarkably large, and one reported at over 15 inches (38 cm) in length was said to be on display at the Nevada Historical Society’s museum in Reno in 1952.^[9]^[10]^[11]

The Paiute tradition asserts that the Si-Te-Cah people practiced cannibalism, and this may have had some basis in fact. During the 1924 excavation of the cave, a series of three human bones were found near the surface towards the mouth of the cave. “These had been split to extract the marrow, as animal bones were split, and probably indicate cannibalism during a famine”.^[12]

Notes[edit]

^ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 152.
^ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 165.
^ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 162.
^ Hopkins 75
^ Mayor, Adrienne (2005). Fossil legends of the first Americans. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11345-9.
^ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 169.
^ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 87.
^ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 5.
^ Nevada State Journal, Reno, Nevada. Sunday, August 3, 1952 Page 6.
^ Nevada State Journal, Reno, Nevada. Sunday, February 22, 1953 p. 9.
^ Reno Evening Gazette, Reno, Nevada. Thursday, Sep. 25, 1913 p. 1.
^ Loud & Harrington 1929, p. 13.

References[edit]

Reader’s digest (1982). Carroll C. Calkins (ed.). Mysteries of the unexplained. [chief contributing writer, Richard Marshall ; contributing writers, Monte Davis, Valerie Moolman, Georg Zappler] (Repr. with amendments ed.). Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Association. pp. 41–42. ISBN 0895771462.
Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca. ‘Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims’ . Boston Stereotype Foundry, 1882.
Loud, Llewellyn L.; Harrington, M. R. (1929). Lovelock Cave. University of California at Berkeley.

DID GIANTS ONCE LIVE IN NORTH AMERICA?

There is strong evidence that Native American folklore about giants is true. Seven-feet tall skeletons have been found in burial mounds of Southeast towns that were home to the ancestors of the Creek Indians.

As European settlers pushed across North America, newspapers printed stories about the discovery of giant skeletons. Some were described as being normal human beings, but very tall. Others had skulls with primitive features.

The most credible stories of giant skeletons were concentrated in the Appalachians, Cumberland Plateau and Ohio Basin. They were typically found in graves lined with stone slabs or field stones, known as the Stone Box Grave Culture. In 1821, 7-feet tall skeletons in stone lined sarcophaguses were found in a White County, TN, burial area.

Legends from Midwest tribes tell of lightly pigmented, yellow-or-red haired giants living around the Great Lakes or southern Canada. Occasionally, these giants traveled south into their territories. While some encounters were benign, others resulted in warfare.

The Cherokees claimed to have killed the last “white Indians” while still living in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Western pioneers sometimes found what they assumed were giant fossilized human skeletons along exposed banks and in caves. They describe these skulls as much thicker than modern humans. Some claimed the skulls had double-rows of teeth.

Several western tribes tell of past confrontations with lightly pigmented giants with either blond or red hair. The Paiutes claimed that the giants were cannibals who hunted Paiutes for food. They repeatedly attacked the giants until their numbers dwindled. The surviving giants were cornered in a cave, then either shot with arrows or asphyxiated by setting a fire at the entrance.

In 1754, George Washington was colonel of the Virginia Colonial militia. When hostilities broke out with France, he supervised construction of Fort Loudon in Winchester, VA. Laborers digging the fort’s foundation uncovered a cemetery of 7-foot skeletons and what appeared to be Native American artifacts. The skeletons were viewed and reported by Washington. It is not known what happened to them. This discovery gives credibility to reports of 7-foot tall skeletons discovered in West Virginia, Kentucky, southern Ohio and southern Indiana.

In 1541, de Soto’s army traveled from the Florida Panhandle to Middle Georgia. Officers noted that the area’s people were more culturally advanced and averaged a foot taller than the Spanish. These were the Okonee and Tamatli branches of the Muskogean Culture – ancestors of the Creek Indians. The Spanish called them Los Indios Gigantes… the Giant Indians. De Soto’s chroniclers claimed that some Great Suns (Chief Priests) of the ancestral Creek provinces were seven feet tall.

To a 5 ft.– 4 in. Spanish soldier, such a man would indeed appear to be a giant.

In the mid-20th century, archaeologists found 7-feet tall skeletons in royal burials at Ocmulgee National Monument and Etowah Mounds National Historic Landmark. Both sites were ancestral to the Creek Indians, adding credibility to the Spanish stories. Creek men today, especially in northern Alabama and Georgia, tend to be exceptionally tall.

During 1918, archaeologists discovered over 10,000 Neolithic artifacts in a Nevada cave. Many seemed too large to have been made by standard sized humans. A male and a female skeleton were also found. The male was said to be 8-feet tall. The skulls are on display at the Humboldt County Museum.

In 1521, Francisco Gordillo and Pedro de Quejo sailed to the Carolina coast to capture Native American slaves. While they captured 70 natives in Chicora, their relations with another province, Duhare, were amiable.

The people of Duhare were described as Europeans who owned a few metal tools. They had red to brown hair, tan skin and gray eyes. The men wore full beards and were much taller than the Spanish. Duhare’s houses and pottery were similar to those of American Indians.

The Duhare lived much like other American Indians except for one thing: they had horses and they raised livestock, including chickens, ducks, geese and deer. All Spanish sources say the Duhare had large herds of domesticated deer, and they made cheese from deer milk! While dairy deer seems impossible, several Gaelic tribes in Ireland and Scotland had domesticated dairy deer before dairy cows.

The people of Duhare were also skilled farmers They grew large quantities of corn, grain, potatoes and other vegetables developed in the New World.

The king of Duhare was named Datha. The Spanish described Dutha as a giant… the largest man they had ever seen. His wife was equally tall. Datha had brightly colored pigments or tattoos that distinguished him from the commoners.Duhare can be translated two ways:
1. as “di-hAicher – place of the Clan Hare” or
2. “du’hEir – place of the Irish.”

Datha is a Medieval Irish Gaelic word that means “painted.” Since Datha’s skin’s was covered with pigments or tattoos, as was traditional among the Celts, this name makes perfect sense.

The description of Duhare’s people matches descriptions by Midwestern tribes of the red-haired giants in Canada. It is quite plausible Duhare’s people were not the only Irish Gaelic Caucasians in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus.