A Search for a Vanished People

During the summer of 1937, Luther Cressman and some of his students began exploring caves along the cliffs of Catlow Valley in southeastern Oregon. Dr. Cressman was the head of the newly formed anthropology department at the University of Oregon. In later years, he recalled one of their early discoveries in Roaring Springs Cave, a direct link to the ancient people who lived in the caves. [Dr. Cressman] "They found one day, a pair of sandals that had been worn by some small child. [Flute music] They were tied together by a tie string, and close by these were two very small baskets. They were in very good shape, they were not thrown away. Something must have happened to that youngster, and her family went out one morning and never came back. [Higher flute music continues] And we found those things an unknown number of years later." The work that Dr. Cressman and his students started that summer became the first

scientific search for the vanished people of the northern Great Basin. [Dr. Cressman] "As I stand here in this dry, flat expanse, which is a bed-- very very dry, now-- of an ancient lake, my mind goes back over more than 40 years, during which I have worked here, in the northern Great Basin, to describe and understand the way of life of the people who lived here. We know they've lived here for at least 13,000 years. And from indirect evidence, a great deal longer than that." There's considerable controversy about the date when human prehistory began on the American continents. But anthropologists do agree that even the first people were immigrants-- early human and pre-human skeletal remains on other continents date

back several million years. But the only human remains found in the Americas have been those of fully developed people. The question is, then: if people didn't evolve here, how did they get here? [Growing wind] A growing body of evidence shows us that the first Americans began a long journey out of Asia during the last Ice Age [birds chirping]-- a time of great glaciers, huge animals and the emergence of modern people. During the Ice Ages, the climate of the world [chirping stops, wind continues] fluctuated widely between periods of warmth and periods of cold. These fluctuations each span thousands of years. Vast areas in the northern hemisphere were uninhabited and cold, that touched the lives of people all over the world. Much of the global water supply was trapped in the glaciers, and the water no longer ran back into the oceans. As the glaciers grew, the water level of the oceans

dropped 300 to 400 feet. Gradually, the continental shorelines widened, and new landmasses appeared. One of the new land areas that surfaced was at the Bering Straits, between North America and Asia. Today, the sea is shallow there, and depth recordings show the outline of an elevated plateau on the ocean floor. But during the Ice Ages, whenever the water level dropped, the plateau was a flat open tundra at least a thousand miles wide. Constant winds kept it free of ice and snow. People and animals from both continents foraged back and forth over the land connection. There were periods of time when the glaciers melted back far enough to raise the water level of the oceans. Then the land connections disappeared again under the water. Each time that happened, an ice-free corridor opened between the eastern and western ice masses of North America. Through that passage way, many generations of first

Americans gradually moved southward, eventually populating the northern and southern continents. Some of those first Americans found their way into the Great Basin of the North American West, and thousands of years after that, Luther Cressman and his students went into the northern Great Basin. Young Dr. Cressman joined the University of Oregon faculty in 1929, to teach sociology. Classes at Columbia University with famous anthropologist Franz Boas had also sparked his interest in prehistoric cultures, so when he arrived in Oregon, Dr. Cressman's attention was attracted to the ancient rock art in the state. As soon as possible, [low reed music] he organized a trip to make a first photographic record of all the examples he could find. [Dr. Cressman] "A graduate student, Harris Stafford, and I, go between 2100 and 2500 miles in my Model A, and made a

very large collection of photographs of petroglyphs." [Reed music] During the survey of rock art, Dr. Cressman began to observe signs [Reed music stops] of ancient lakes that once filled the valleys. [Dr. Cressman] "All these lakes had beach lines or terraces, where the water had stood long periods of time, cutting the beaches into the rock surfaces of the shoreline." Cressman believed that if he could associate the lake terraces with glacial periods, perhaps then he could fit his archaeological finds into that timeframe. With that idea in mind, he developed a research program to study the beach terraces and search for evidence of early man in the Great Basin. The Great Basin is a unique area.

It's a high plateau stretching approximately five hundred miles from the Great Salt Lake Basin in Utah, to the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the California-Nevada border. The northern Great Basin reaches northward along the Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades, into southeastern Oregon. It's an area of sparse vegetation, a picture book where the processes of land building can be read on every hand. Cliffs of the basin are striped with lava flows. In places, the lava is 3000 feet deep-- one of the thickest lava crust areas in the world-- which built the region into a high plateau, averaging 4000 feet above sea level. Later, huge cracks, called faults, broke through the lava crust. In time, under great earth pressures, rimrocks and mountain ridges tilted upward along the faults. Poker Jim Ridge in South Central Oregon overlooks Warner Valley.

It provides the typical profile of a fault formation. Steens Mountain, further to the east, is a classic fault-formation on an even grander scale. It's huge eastern escarpment rises a mile above the Alvord Desert and the ranches below. The 30-mile ridge along the summit is almost 10,000 feet above sea level. A view of other fault-formed ridges stretches off in every direction throughout the Great Basin. [Thunder] These ridges form natural valleys with largely internal drainage, convenient places for water to collect. In ancient times, lakes filled most of these valleys. Whenever the Ice Age glaciers advanced over North America, they rose like mountains of ice at their southern limits. When the warmer air from the south collided with that icy barrier, the clouds dropped their

load of moisture. The result was heavy rainfall south of the ice, and the valleys filled with water. The Great Basin was well within that Ice Age ring belt. The deluge of rain, and the water from springs and rivers, collected in the basins, forming extensive lake systems. When the climate warmed, the glaciers melted back to the north, the rain decreased, evaporation increased, and the lakes shrank. Researchers all through the Great Basin have found the lake fluctuations recorded in miles of water-worn gravel along old beach lines. In the eastern Great Basin, prehistoric Lake Bonneville filled to a height of 1100 feet, and spilled over into basin after basin, until it covered 20,000 square miles. [Water flowing] Today, Salt Lake in Utah is the largest surviving remnant of the ancient lake. In the Western basin,

there was another labyrinth of connecting lakes: prehistoric Lake Lahontan, which covered 8600 square miles. In some places it reached a depth of seven hundred feet. Modern Pyramid Lake in Nevada is a still-shrinking remnant of prehistoric Lake Lahontan. In southern Oregon, there were seven or eight prehistoric lakes, each of them larger than any lake in the state today. Beach terraces in Catlow Valley, to the west of Steens Mountain, outline the shores of one of those ice age lakes. The first archaeological sites in southeastern Oregon were caves hollowed out by the lake at its highest level. [Dr. Cressman] "Dry caves in the Great Basin and other areas of the country provide, on the whole, an excellent storage place for the artifacts left there by people who at one time or another occupied them. Some, however, are very, very dry, and consequently, also, very disagreeable [engine noise?] and dirty to work in. But

this dry dust preserved, very well indeed, the artifacts that people left. And one will find basketry, string, pieces of leather, wood, bone, in addition to all the other stonework [scraping noise], etcetera, that were ever left in the cave. [Digging] If we look at the cultures of the American Indians, we'll find that in different areas, they concentrated on different kinds of materials for their tools, instruments, and so on; and these not only served that purpose but they also served as a medium for artistic expression. In the southwest, the major thing was pottery. In the-- on the Columbia River, it was stoneware. In the Great Basin, the Indians concentrated on basketry, almost entirely." Twined basketry found in Catlow and Roaring Springs

Cave represents almost every basketry form known in the Aboriginal West. Dr. Cressman and his students found this much-worn parching tray, and some excellent examples of beautiful decorative designs. There were woven sandals of sagebrush bark, also matting, and basketry fragments made for various household uses. [Scraping noises] They also found a number of mysterious, unidentifiable hooks scattered through the debris in Roaring Springs Cave. Dr. Cressman recalled one morning, when one of the students working in the cave called out in surprise. [Dr. Cressman] "...And he had uncovered this [inaudible]. The first one ever found in Oregon, and the only one of its kind that I know of in the United States. We cleaned it up, measured it, so on. We noticed, then, that it had this burr or hook, on the end, and we knew now what the unidentified hooks meant-- it meant that they had broken off from

atlatls, which therefore was a weapon in use. It's likely that this type of weapon came to the New World from the Old World, from Asia, and then was later replaced by the bow and arrow." But as unique and exciting as the Catlow Valley finds were, Cressman had no way to date them. Stratigraphy was the only method they had to put the finds in order. The students carefully recorded the artifacts as they found them-- from bottom to top, the order in which they'd been dropped in the caves. In the 1930s, Dr. Cressman depended almost entirely on his students to do the hard, dirty work in the field, as well as the systematic recording of information. [Dr. Cressman] "None of this early work of mine, in the Great Basin, [water flowing, scraping noises, voices in background] would have been possible without the aid of many students. In the early days, these students worked without wages. As a matter of fact, they paid to go along,

'cause they had to pay for food. I had no money to support it, except a tiny bit of a grant from the university." But in spite of limited financial assistance, Dr. Cressman found plenty of student help, and he pushed ahead with the search. [Slow pipe music] Now he was beginning to develop a vision of how the early people might have lived. Watching the age-old migrations of waterfowl in the remnant lakes and marshes, he wondered if the earliest people had lived here-- when the valleys were filled with lakes, when mammoths and camels and bison had roamed the hills. But that was only

speculation. He must find hard evidence, something to give him a dating horizon. Then a friend in the U.S. Forest Service brought word of a cluster of caves and rock shelters overlooking Summer Lake Valley, just five miles north of the small town of Paisley. At Five Mile Point Caves, the field party found an undisturbed layer of volcanic ash that had drifted into the caves, and they found human artifacts above and below the ash layer. [Unknown] "It's excellent, isn't it?" Howard Williams, a volcanologist from the University of California, was invited to visit the site and examine the ash layer. Dr. Williams took an ash sample for testing, and reported that it had come from the eruption of Mount Mazama, the prehistoric blast that left the crater now filled with the blue waters of Crater Lake. Dr. Williams could identify the source of the ash fall, but, like the

archaeologist, he had no precise method for dating it. He could only estimate the age of the ash layer. [Dr. Cressman] "He estimated that it was between 4 and 10,000 thousand years old. That's a big gap. But nevertheless, we began to have a dating system for this area. But it was still too large." Five Mile Point Caves had other surprises. The field party found pieces of a charred sagebrush campfire below the ash layer. Mixed with the charcoal were fragments of spear points and bone tools, along with the bones of extinct birds and animals. [Dr. Cressman] "They brought the bones in to me, I wasn't with them at the time, they brought them into the camp, and I recognized one of them as camel bone. Well that was a terrific discovery, that we had camel bone here. And that the camel bone had been broken; obviously, they'd eaten the meat off of it, and it was in this ash fireplace, is what it was." In these caves, they also found the bones of other large animals-- extinct horse

and bison. But there were also the bones of many small mammals and birds, showing that the early people hunted whatever was available, large or small. [Dr. Cressman] "At any rate, that cave is important, therefore, for the reason that it's the one place in the Great Basin where we have a completely valid association of man with those extinct animals." A second ash layer site was found in Fort Rock Valley to the north of Summer Lake. The valley is named for the remains of a collapsed volcanic cone that looks like an old decaying fortress. Nearby, in another volcanic butte, is Fort Rock Cave, which was later to be dedicated as a national historic site. [Dr. Cressman] "A picture that one has approaching the cave now, is not a true representation of what was here in 1938 when we first came into this cave. Then, it was

full of debris, about two feet of cattle manure on top of that. The cave was occupied itself by people who lived mostly out in front, you know, not back in the cave. Where they could get the sun, they could look down here and see the volcano, and they had really a magnificent view out of this place. And it was warm, and protected from the western winds." Dr. Cressman and his party found the expected stone and bone artifacts in Fort Rock Cave. But the most famous pieces were a large number of woven sandals found below an undisturbed Mazama ash layer. [Dr. Cressman] "Now the interesting thing here, is that we have a toe flap. Th- The toe fit in here, and these shreds that came up as, well, see them here, were spread out here to a soft mass, and then bundles of them were

twined with a smaller [inaudible] band, and this comprised the toe flap. And careful examination of this sole shows mud encased in it. But, a significant thing about this is, that there had to be mud, had to be rain, had to be water around here to get the mud encased in this, wherever this chap wore this sandal is not now." In the 1930s, most archeologists believe that people had not been in the Great Basin until the last 2000 years. But Luther Cressman thought otherwise. His research told him they had come much earlier than that, possibly as early as 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. [Dr. Cressman] "This evidence was filled tough intellectual food for hard liners to just." His speculations were questioned by many of

his colleagues until finally, in the summer of 1948, he was able to put his ideas to a test. That summer, he drove to Crater Lake National Park, looking for material to send to the new radiocarbon dating laboratory at the University of Chicago. At last, a scientific dating method had been developed. He found the charred remains of an ancient forest scattered through the volcanic ash in a road bank. Charcoal samples were tested: first by radiocarbon dating, and later by newer methods. The tests agree that the forest was burned close to 7000 years ago, during the last big eruption of Mount Mazama. Now, artifacts found above and below Mazama ash can be located in time, before or after 7000 years ago. Next, a sandal from below the Mazama ash layer in Fort Rock Cave was radiocarbon dated. It was shown to be over 9000 years old,

but Cressman was still not satisfied that they had the earliest possible dates. In 1966, he and his students returned to Fort Rock, looking for other items to be radiocarbon dated. This time, they found the remains of a charcoal hearth with an assemblage of tools. [Dr. Cressman] "That material, that you see here, was part of a hearth, or material around a hearth, and they are all artifacts. And the charcoal in that hearth was dated at 13,200-some odd radiocarbon years ago, and is a valid date." These tools, made by early residents of Fort Rock Valley, included a broken mano for grinding seeds. There were small projectile points for use on an atlatl shaft. This is a scraper, probably a blade detached from a core. This is another kind of scraping tool,

perhaps some Burin. [Dr. Cressman] "If we think back to the time when the glaciers lay across the northern part of the continent, at 13,000 years ago, all that area was under ice. And to find these things down here at Fort Rock Cave at 13,200 years ago, means that the people were down in the Great Basin before the last glaciation. That's why these things are so important." Another important breakthrough came with the dating of shell fragments found along the lowest beach terraces in Fort Rock Valley. They were found to be 13,300 years old. At last, the beach terraces could be tied to the lives of the early cave dwellers. People in Fort Rock Cave had dropped their tools around the hearth fire, when there was still a shallow marshy lake in the valley during the last glaciation. Now, Cressman could verify the long continuity of life in the northern Great Basin. The

culture of the people developed and adapted to drastic environmental changes, but it survived the millennia from 13,000 years ago into the early 20th century. [Dr. Cressman] "I think the culture of the Great Basin Indians is very fascinating, in that it shows how these people, throughout a long period of time, with very simple means at their disposal, made excellent accommodation to the environment, and adapted to it as it changed through long periods of time." Today, the search for vanished people continues in new places all through the Great Basin. In 1980, Mel Aikens and a new generation of students were excavating this site, in the sand dunes of southeastern Oregon. [Dr. Aikens] "We're excavating at two different levels here: up above, at the top of the dune, is a relatively

recent site. Below, is the Mount Mazama ash stratum, where we're finding evidence of human occupation that dates to about 7000 years ago. The area where the people are working is the actual occupational stratum. We're finding obsidian flakes, projectile points, milling stones, artifacts of that nature. We're also finding some evidence of charcoal, suggesting that fire hearths were nearby." The Great Basin [scraping noises] has been identified as the last major area in the country where surface archaeology is still possible. That makes it an invaluable resource for preserving the history of American Indians. Even in the open sand dunes, there are fragments of information to be gathered and carefully recorded. [Dr. Aikens] "Localities such as this one, where archaeological remains are exposed on the surface of the ground, are very important to our study, for giving us the broad scope of human occupation within a major region. We have studied this

locality in some detail through controlled surface collection; we have major selections of artifacts, which we will be able to interpret in much the way that we interpret remains from excavated sites." When people come into the Great Basin today, they find it difficult to believe that this was once a land of lakes. But Luther Cressman's research tells us that the early people lived in a cool, rainy climate on the shores of the last of the Ice Age lakes. [Bird chirping] Great migrations of waterfowl nested in the marshes, and animals, now extinct, flourished on the hillsides. It was a good habitat for people and animals, and it lasted for at least 3000 years, until the great glaciers melted for the last time, and rain ceased to fall in abundance in the Great Basin. [Reed music] [Wind] Dr. Cressman gratefully acknowledges the assistance of his wife Cecilia, his

students, and residents of the areas where he worked. Reporters, ranchers, Forest Service rangers, and others who took an interest in the early field projects. A student friend wrote to Mrs. Cressman, "You spent many lonely weeks so that Luther could do research. You share with him as a partner in his academic breakthroughs resulting from his field work." [Wind] [Wind continues], [Tapping and singing], [Gulls]

Thousands of years ago Native Americans came to live in the Great Basin of the North

American West. Scientific, archaeological evidence can verify the presence of people in the Basin for at least 13,000 years-- one of the longest documented periods of human habitation in North America. Early residents of the Great Basin left behind them basketry fragments, arrowheads, and other possessions, which have been found in dry caves and rock shelters, and around their campsites and chipping locations. With these artifacts, archaeologists have been able to piece together the patterns of a Great Basin desert culture. The material culture of the Basin-people varied only in detail, according to local environmental differences. [Birds chirping] The inheritors of that ancient culture are the contemporary Washoes, Shoshones, and the southern and northern Paiutes. One group of

Northern Paiutes lives on a small reservation near Burns, Oregon, in Harney Valley. Their ancestors were probably living in the valley long before Europeans had discovered the New World. This film is a response to the interest of the Burns Paiute tribe, in preserving a record of their heritage. Today, only the elder members of the Paiute families recall living in the traditional ways. And, with each passing generation, the link with the past becomes more and more fragile. The Great Basin is a vast 4000 foot plateau in the interior of the western United States. A tri-state region, including parts of Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho, is today identified as the northern Great Basin. Traditionally, this has been the home of the Northern Paiutes. This interior plateau is made up of a series of basins from which there is little

or no outward drainage. Each basin valley has its own geological arrangement of low lands, often an old lake bed surrounded by hillsides and cliffs composed of layer upon layer of volcanic basalt, with flat mesas or mountain slopes above. [scratch noise] Accumulating their knowledge over centuries, the Paiutes learned to live with the resources of this land, where the desert is often only a few feet from a lake or a marsh. The Indians moved with the ripening of the wild plants, and the seasonal habits of the animals, with whom they shared the land. [Native American-style singing and drumming] [Singing and drumming continues] Their harvesting season began each spring, when they moved up into the hills to visit

well-known root camps. Some of the Paiute women still return. [Paiute woman] "They all getting up- up there together to have a- a lot of fun. And the women-folks are digging, digging at these roots and will get enough of their food for winter. And the men, go out in a thicket, in the summertime, kill a deer, and then dry them to put away for the winter, to leave on. That's how we live. I was the age of her, maybe a little older, so I remember. [Inaudible] I learned from my grandfolks, grandmas, and I used to have my own [inaudible] a little

and things like that. And I also, I learned, whatever they do, I watch them. [woman] "When I was a little girl, I used to come with my folks over here, ever since I can remember, when I was little, and what I know, just what I hear about, is that they said that the different Indians come over here and they gather here-- trade, you know, and they have games, and- and the men, they have races, right over the hill, over on the other side. And through there is where they do all their racing-- horses, and all that kind, you know. And over here on this side, they do all their digging-- the women dig their roots and- and then they have their own kind of games going

too, you know. They have a little stick game, and other kind of games that they- they did years ago." [Native American style singing] [continued song] [woman] "This is bitterroots. We Indians call it ?kangyetch?, and this is the time that it's ready; when there's little buds on it. And we dig it up like this, we peel the skin, and we break the top off, and then we wash them, and then we lay them out in the sun to dry."

On the hillsides, the Indians found a good variety of plants with edible roots and greens. There was (ya-pah), also known as the wild carrot, and (su-gah) which they ground into flour. (Nat-gutah-vah) is the tasty wild onion, and many others. Some of these roots were eaten fresh, others were carefully dried and stored for winter cooking. [Paiute woman] "This is camas, as Paiutes we call it (baseh-guah). And these, they grow down mostly down in the meadowlands, now privately owned lands, which the Indians don't dig down there, they don't dig them anymore like they, many years ago used to dig them." The camas roots were cooked in an earth oven-- a pit lined with hot rocks and filled with alternating layers of camas roots and grass. All this was covered with

soil, over which a fire was kept burning for several days, until the roots were ready for eating. After the sociability of the spring root gathering, families traveled alone throughout the summer. They moved from one campsite to another, hunting, fishing, and gathering plant-foods wherever they traveled. As the summer turned into fall, the women began looking for the bright red choke cherries on the bushes along the river banks. They had discovered that the stems could be brewed to make a tasty drink. But the bushes were most highly prized for their crop of berries. [Stones pounding] [woman] "Well, this the way they do it in the olden days, y'know. They had to crush all

these berries, like that, and keep working at it, and I guess 'til you get enough to make your round patties, y'know. And when they get enough of that, why they, why they dry it in the sun. Then when one side dries, then they turn it over, and keep checking it that way." Small insects, ants, larvae, grasshoppers, also provided food products in some valleys. In the years of drought, nothing was small enough to be overlooked. The Indians were also aware of the aphids swarming among the cane plants in the summer. They discovered that when the insects punctured the underside of the cane leaves, they deposited a

drop of sweet liquid which provided practically the only sweet the Paiutes had. When the liquid dried, it was beaten loose and collected, then tossed in a winnowing tray to get rid of the unwanted cane fragments, leaving only the sweet sticky particles. Before the settlers and ranchers came, large numbers of Paiutes gathered around Malheur Lake for the tedious job of collecting the minute, black wattle seeds. They roasted, winnowed, and ground them into meal. [woman] "That's what they, [inaudible], my people. All people, their name is wada- (wadatika). I can say it grows around in Malheur Lake. That's why they get the seed in the fall time. Around September, it's ready. A little tiny black seed." Harney

Valley Paiutes thus came to be known as the "wada eaters"-- the Wadatika-- following the custom of identifying bands of Paiutes according to a major food they eat. The cui-ui eaters were the Indians who lived around Pyramid Lake in Nevada. They were the ones who harvested the cui-ui suckers as they migrated out of the lake into the Truckee River to spawn. Other groups were the trout eaters in the Walker River country, the cattail eaters, ground squirrel eaters, also in Nevada. These weren't tribal names because the Paiutes didn't have formal tribal organizations. They lived in small family bands. The number in each group was determined by the food resources in the valley where they lived. When a group grew too large for the food supply, some of the people moved away to join another group or begin a new one. Thus, family ties took the place of tribal associations. [Native American style singing] Fall was the time when the women gathered and prepared the natural fibers, which, during the

winter, they made into an ingenious variety of things. Important to their seasonal travels were the conical shaped baskets they twined for gathering food and carrying burdens. [woman] "...to tell you about this basket here, was my mother used to make. She used to make a lot of baskets. And I used to watch her how she make it, and I know she makes this kind to go out and to use them to pick berries. And she carried on her back, like this." In addition to their gathering baskets, there were two other primary harvesting tools the Paiute women twined: the ladle shaped beaters used to loosen seeds from plants and bushes, and trays for winnowing and roasting. First, the seeds and nuts were carefully roasted in a tray of hot coals. The trick was to keep the contents moving to protect the burnable fiber tray. Next,

they were tossed in the trays, allowing the wind to blow away the husks and shells. Baskets were also used for cooking: they were tightly coiled or twined, and smeared with resin. Unable to put a fiber basket over an open fire, the Paiutes devised an alternative method: they heated rocks in the fire and dropped them into a cooking basket full of water, exchanging hot rocks for cooled ones until the food was cooked. The red stemmed willows gathered from September through February were the strongest, and were preferred by the women for their baskets. In Great Basin caves, archaeologists have found remnants of prehistoric twined and coiled basketry. Some of the fragments have been scientifically tested, and dated

as being over 9000 years old. These basket-making techniques have been passed down from mother to daughter ever since those distant times. Twining is the easier and quicker method of basket making, and was used most frequently by the Paiute women. Since they were the burden-bearers for their families, the women usually disposed of the quickly-made baskets, rather than carry them on to the next campsite. Coiled baskets, however, were more difficult and time-consuming to make, so they weren't discarded as casually. When coiling was done, it was usually for food bowls and cooking containers made for daily use. Long ago, women learned that for the art of basket making they needed no complicated tools. They needed only their fingers, with the help from a scraping edge and a bit of bone or a small stick. In fact because of that,

basketry may be the oldest of the human arts. Water jugs were a necessity in the desert, and they too were made of natural fibers-- tightly woven, heavily-resined with hot pitch and red clay. The large jugs were filled when the entire family or band traveled to a new campsite, but a small jug of water was enough for a hunter on a one-day trip after game, and in their constant search for food, the Paiute men were always hunting and fishing wherever the families traveled. [Water flowing] For the Paiute men of Harney Valley, fishing began in the spring, when migrating salmon came up the Columbia and into the Malheur River. They fished with spears, hooks, nets, and traps. [woman] "There used to be salmon along the [inaudible] river.

We used to go there, for a bunch of these man-hooks, and catch a salmon. They make a long stick and some kind of point of the stick. And just to go around and catch a big salmon and the women cut them up and dry them, and they just put over the horse and lead the horse home. That's the way we used to do it a long time ago." Snowmelts from the mountains and upland ridges drains into the valleys and collects in the lowland marshes of the Great Basin. [Birds chirping] In very early times, waterfowl began coming here on their migratory flights north and south along the Pacific flyway. At times in the spring and fall, they came in such large numbers that they literally darkened the sky. [Birds continue chirping]

Here in the marshes was a rich food supply for the Indians, and out of the plant resources, they fashioned their bird hunting devices: tule rafts to help them collect eggs, nets to snare coots, and duck decoys. Cleverly manipulating tules and tying them with cattail strips, the Indians produced the likeness of a canvasback. The craft of making these decoys appears to be an ancient one: a cache of them was excavated from Lovelock Cave in North-Central Nevada, suggesting that they appeared in the Basin culture at least 4000 years ago.

For a final realistic touch, a duck skin would be stretched over the tule form, and pinned in place with greasewood twigs. Wherever the bands travelled, the men were busy trapping small animals. But the large, swift animals of the Basin-- the antelope, deer, and mountain sheep-- provided an enormous challenge to the hunters before they acquired horses. So periodically, bands from neighboring valleys came together to pool their efforts for communal animal drives. Every successful hunt was an occasion for rejoicing. After the meat was cared for, every other part of the animal was put to good use. The men made tools from antlers and bone, a bone needle could help a woman with her weaving, decorative pieces might be fashioned from bone, or from the

horn of a mountain sheep. [Maraca shaking] Rattles for dancing, and shawman magic were made from the dew claws on the feet of a deer, or from the tough internal membranes of the animal. Even the brain was carefully saved to make a solution used in dressing at the hide. [woman] "I stretched "this hide and make a lot out of. And I make a cradle board, and I make glove out of, and moccasins, and most they use for cradle board to cover. And when I tan it and- and smoke it for everything I use. It's hard to work when you first get started--

scrape the hide, and soaking the brain for over- overnight. Then you wash it and stretch it. When we learned from our mother, our grandmother could teach us how to tan the hides. And I never forget, I just-- and I'm doing it." [Birds chirping] People of the Great Basin became highly skilled at making cordage, which they used to make nets for rabbit drives, and for dozens of other uses. They could make lightweight cordage from cattail leaves whenever they wanted to set a trap, or fasten items together.

But the finest display of their skill was seen in the nets the hunters made from native hemp and milkweed fibers-- the netting was so uniform that it's difficult to believe it was actually handmade. Some of the nets for their rabbit drives were hundreds of feet long, and strung out across the desert, they assured the people food for many meals and rabbit fur blankets for the entire family. The rabbit hides were cut into strips and twisted into a furry robe with no skin showing. These strips were strung on a loom and twined together with fiber cordage or bark. Without this warmth, it would have been difficult or impossible for the Paiutes to survive through the cold winter months. [Draft blowing] [Birds chirping] By late October, the Indians thought often of the need for warmth, as they began to note the

signs of approaching winter. [Animals cooing and calling] At last, when the migratory birds began leaving the marshes, the people knew it was time to move into the sheltered valleys to make their cattail-and-willow houses for the winter. To build a house, a circle of long, strong willows were secured in the ground for the framework. Traditionally, long ropes of sagebrush

bark were used to tie the frame together. As cloth became available, strips of old clothing were also used as ties. Mats to cover the structure were made of cattail leaves tied to willow strips. Cattails were preferred, because their flat, moisture-resistant surfaces shed rain and snow like shingles. [Wind] The only openings were a small smoke hole in the top, and a doorway facing toward the rising sun, and away from the prevailing Basin winds.

With the coming of winter, travel was over for the Paiute families. Gathered around a small fire in their houses, wrapped in their rabbit fur blankets, they were thankful for the food gathered and stored throughout the growing seasons. Winter leisure provided time for basket-making, carving new tools, listening to the storytellers and the wisdom of the elders. For thousands of years, Native Americans in the Great Basin followed this seasonal cycle of life. Then in the 1800s, the expanding American frontier nearly erased the old way of life: an ancient culture, developed

by people who recognized the earth as their home, and the source of their survival. [Geese honking] [Native American style singing] [Singing fades out]