New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations

16. Cannibals in the Mountains: Washoe Teratology and the Donner Party

KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 395 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [395], (1) Lines: 0 to 63 ——— 0.772pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: Eject [395], (1) 16. Cannibals in the Mountains Washoe Teratology and the Donner Party barrik van winkle The Washo watched. . . . The Washo watched through the trees as they ate themselves. . . . The body sprawled on the snow, split open, one of them standing over it with a hatchet hanging limp in his hand, the thickness of blood dripping slowly from the blade to the snow, each drop silently splashing red into the coldness. Thomas Sanchez, Rabbit Boss The scream came at midnight, just as I had turned off my lantern. I was in the Sierra Nevada foothills south of Lake Tahoe, at least five miles from any other human being. In a flash I was out of my tent and into my car, with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. The scream was real, not some dream. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. I had not woken myself up from a nightmare in which my advisor, Ray Fogelson, was handing me yet another stack of books, another endless reading list, another set of xeroxed articles. I heard the scream three more times that night, once more from the west—uphill but closer—and then twice more to the east of my camp, going away and downhill. The next morning I was up early and quickly drove down to the Washoe Senior Citizens Center in the Dresslerville Colony (see map).1 It was a crisp fall day in 1983. There I asked a group of Washoe and white elders what could have made the noise. I described it as a combination of a woman’s high-pitched screaming, dogs howling, cats screeching, and panicked chickens. After animated discussion, one man, an Indian cowboy with 40 years’ experience in the Sierras said: “Oh, that was a mountain lion.” Then, leaning across the table and widening his eyes, he added, “You’re lucky it didn’t eat you.” I scoffed at this notion and was told, in a confusion of voices, a well- KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 396 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [396], (2) Lines: 63 to 82 ——— 4.66801pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [396], (2) Washoe Territory KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 397 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [397], (3) Lines: 82 to 108 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [397], (3) known story of two Paiute boys eaten by mountain lions in the 1920s or 1930s. I reproduce the gist of the narrative here, since my notes of this unrecorded conversation do not always make plain exactly who said what: It was when we were all at Stewart [Indian School]. There were these two Paiute boys from Walker River, brothers, or maybe cousin-brothers, who didn’t like school. They escaped and were going over the mountains, the Pine Nut Mountains, our mountains, heading back to Walker River. The school people tracked them with those dogs, the ones they used for prisoners. After a couple of days the dogs were nervous and worried and when they found the boys, they were half-eaten, dead from a mountain lion.2 Over time, as more people heard my mountain lion story, I was rewarded with a deluge of stories about man-eating mountain lions, other anthropophagous animals, and cannibal monsters. Again and again, on that and subsequent occasions, I heard tales from Washoes of all ages about the consumption of human...