Among The Sierra Nevada Mountains by German Artist Albert Bierstadt. This landscape was and still is Sacred to the local Maidu people.

These pages are Dedicated to the Maidu Peoples Past and Present

The Maidu made good use of native flora and fauna. They made food gathering the principal springtime activity, often leaving their villages for days or weeks in order to take advantage of ripened volunteer crops somewhere else.           The Maidu knew nothing about farming, but they never needed it. There was more than enough food growing wild around them. All they had to do was gather it.           While each village was self-governed and dependant of its neighbors, in practice some three to five villages shared a common hunting territory and fishing streams.           Throughout most of California the lowly acorn was the staff of life. Produced in vast quantities by oak trees, acorns were harvested in the fall and carried in baskets to the village and dried. When they were ready to be used, they were cracked open and the nut meats ground to flour. There was only one thing wrong with acorns. They contained tannic acid, which made them bitter and, in large amounts, even poisonous. The ingenious Indians solved the problem by leaching out the tannic acid. They did this by putting the acorn meal in a scooped-out hollow in clean sand and pouring water on it until the tannic acid was removed by the water. The meal was then placed in a tightly woven basket and mixed with water to make a thick soup. To cook it the Indians added a few hot stones to the mixture. Sometimes acorn meal was pressed into cakes and baked. Purifying acorn flour, a Maidu woman kneels before a sand-banked leaching pit and pours hot water on refined meal to leach it of its tannin, a bitter tasting substance that causes indigestion. The hot water washes the tannin through the meal and then is absorbed in the sand base of the pit. The woman pours the water over a bundle of bullrush twigs to lessen the force of the water and distribute it evenly over the flour. The fire at the woman's right is used to heat stones that she will grasp with the wooden tool (in front of the pit) and place in the water basket to her left. To grind acorns into meal, the Maidu's used a flat stone as a mortar and surmounted it with an open-ended, woven cone (far right). A second stone served as a pestle. The cone permitted a woman to grind many acorns in a singe operation, and the high sides of the basket-like cone acted as a shield to keep the flour from blowing away. Grinding was often the work of the elderly. To grind acorns and other nuts and seeds, the Indians used morters and pestles and also metates and manos. The latter grinding tools were probably relatively late importations from the southwest.           These California Indians didn't live on acorns alone. Acorns gave them starches and fats but they also needed protein. They got them from a variety of foods. The mountains abounded in deer, elk, bears and rabbits. Lakes and marshes teemed with all kinds of water birds. The rivers were full of fish. And, if the Indians needed more varity in the vegetable line, the hills and valleys were rich in everything from grass seeds to manzanita berries.           Many Indians could gather enough food during the summer and fall months to last them during the winter and spring. This was the time for ceremonies and dancing, helping to keep the people occupied.           Although some kind of food was usually available nearly every month of the year, the California Indians believed in storing food away for a rainy day. Nearly every household had its granary for the storage of acorns.           The Maidu commonly built their granaries near each lodge, sometimes on the ground but more often elevated on stilts, occasionally head high. The granaries were caped, thus not only to keep out birds and squirrels but also shed rain.           An estimate has been made that a typical family of two parents and four children picking acorns for two weeks would proably have gathered 33,500 pounds of the nuts.           The Nishinan, the Maidu's southern neighbors, stored as much as a three year supply of acorns in years of plentiful harvest.           There are no accounts of thievery of the granaries' contents and we conclude the natives respected each others' ownership of them.           In the technical side of life, the making of implements and utensils, the Indians would have to be rated well down the scale. Yet they were good in one art, that of making baskets. In this they were so good that they excelled the tribes of any other region in North America, if not in the whole world. They made baskets in every size from that of a pinhead to huge ones ten or more feet in diameter. The stitches on some of theses baskets are so fine that you need a magnifying glass to see them.           In addition to closely woven, watertight baskets for cooking, they made large storage baskets, bowls, shallow trays, traps, cradles, hats and seed beaters.           To make these baskets they used dozens of different kinds of wild plant stems, barks, roots and leaves. Some of the more common were fern roots, red bark of the redbud, white willow twigs and tule roots, hazel twigs, yucca leaves, brown marsh grass roots and sedge roots.           By combining these different kinds of plants, the Indians were able to make geometric designs on their baskets in red, black, white, brown or tan.

As to clothing, the Maidu wore moccasins, and in the winter they wore leggings which reached from the knee down to around the moccasins. The men went naked except for a breechcloth of buckskin worn in winter. The woman wore an apron of skin both in front and in back.           For decorations, women pierced their ears and wore bone or wood in them. They attached woodpecker scalps from the bone or wood in them. They attached woodpecker scalps from the bone or wood and often alternated them with the tips of quail scalps.           The Maidu wore elaborate feather decorations for their ceremonial dances. In a dance called lo'li, only the women took part. They sometimes wore feather branches, but always an elaborate feather crown called and uni'ni. Men alone participated in the dancethat followed, and they also wore the uni'ni crown.           The Maidu, nicknamed "Digger Indians" by the Europeans because they searched for edible roots to supplement their acorn diet.

This page was last updated on: April 9, 2006

Please click Page 2 for the rest of the story.

Music, Wind In The Woods, by elan Michaels

The drawing above left depicts the interior of a lodge. Long poles support the earthen walls and ceiling, and poles also form the frame of a bed. On the floor one woman (rear) pounds acorns into flour and another boils mush. Behind the cook are several duck decoys made from stuffed duck skins. The drawing above right depicts Maidu men playing a hand game. a favorite gambling entertainment among many Indians, is under way in this Maidu lodge. One player holds a marked and an unmarked bone and rapidly switches them from fist to fist. He then challenges his opponents to guess which hand holds the marked bone. Bets were high in this contest.

Maidu tribesmen (above) gossip on the roofs of their semi-underground lodges in their village. Each village consists of a scattering of dwellings, each 20 to 40 feet in diameter. The opening in the center of each roof does double duty as a smoke hole and an entryway. Near the lodges are barrellike structures for storing acorns, a major part of the Maidu diet.

Basket Cone

Credit; The drawings on this page were scanned from a book Titled, "America's Facinating Indian Heritage" Published by Readers Digest Association, Inc., Pleasantville, New York.

The volcano Mount Lassen erupted often enough in prehistoric times              to form the mountain, so it is little wonder the Indians in the northeast                  corner of California believed the world began there at the desire of a                       Great Man back when the earth resembled a molton mass. When it                          cooled, they believed that the deity made a woman to live with him,                          and from those two                              came all human.                                      Eventually Maidu Indians lived in 74 villages which                                             stretched roughly from the Nevada state line, over the                                        mountains, and down into the low Sacramento Valley foothills, in one place far enough west to include the Marysville Buttes. The County's where the Maidu lived are, Lassen, Butte, Plumas, Yuba, Sutter, Sierra, Nevada, Placer and El Dorado.           The northern Maidu villages were generally south of a line drawn from Susanville west to Mount Lassen. A southern branch of the Maidu, the Nishinam, mainly inhabited the Bear River Valley.           A second belief existed among some Maidu as to their origin. This legend starts with the belief that the tribe once inhabited the Sacramento Valley. One day an immence body of water overcame everyone, and everything in the valley was swept away. This ocean covered the entire valley and allowed only two pesons to escape. The Great Man blessed this pair and they produced offspring from which the present people came.           After nine days the Great Man caused a split in a mountain which allowed the valley water to rush out into the ocean. Could this actually be the way the Golden Gate was formed?           The mystery of steaming Mount Lassen faced their every generation. Sometimes dormant, appearing to sleep, it sometimes awakened to hide its peak in a plume of vapor, and occasionally its angry gods spewed out death-dealing ash and rock.           While six dozen villages stretched across well-watered mountains and fertile meadows, the Maidu established themselves in four principal areas: Susanville, Big Meadows (Plumas County), Indian Valley (southeast of Mount Lassen), and American Valley (Feather River).           For the most part the Maidu placed their villages on elevations where approaching strangers could be seen well in advance of their arrival. When, as occasionally happened, villages needed to be built without a view of its approaches, natives manned hilltop posts for their protection.           The Maidu Indians of the Sacramento Valley built large, circular, partially underground houses. These were from twenty to forty feet in diameter and from two to three feet deep. The Indians covered a pole and log framework with a heavy layer of earth, making a warm house. Several families lived in the larger houses. In the bigger villages there was generally a much larger house set aside as the village dance hall and sweat house. The summer house was made of cut branches tied together and fastened to sapling posts, then covered with brush and often dirt. The Maidu built these summer shelters facing east, thus escaping the heat from the hotter afternoon sun rays.           Since the Maidu inhabited territory all the way from the Sacramento Valley floor to above 7,000 feet in the Sierra, their need for warmer dwellings at the higher elevations made them design their houses for warmth.