Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Handbook of Yokuts Indians - Pahmit's Story Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 11 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 22:09:32 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:18:10 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:18:10

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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246 HANDBOOK OF. YOKUTS INDIANS sniff and smell at the Tachis and sing songs about them. The Tachi would get sick. Finally they would die. _ One of the Tachi got sick because the doctors were following him like coyotes and smelling him. He told Tumnah. Tumnah said, ‘‘ All right, we will get our bows and arrows and go over and kill him.’’ They got some stone pointed arrows that they kept especially to keep away the Indian doctor’s magic. Stone [obsidian] pointed arrows are Tripne. They used these arrows sometimes to shoot bad doctors. Tumnah went with the other Tachi over to Nutunutu. Some of the people there saw them coming. They ran and told the doctor that some people were coming to kill him. He did not believe it at first. He was lying on his bed in his house. But when the Tachi came to his door he saw that they were going to kill him all right. He did not say a word. He jumped up and held his rabbit skin blanket in front of him. He started waving the blanket and singing and dancing to stop the arrows and to use his Tripne power. Most of the arrows went through and hit him, but not hard enough to kill him. The Tachi kept asking the doctor how he liked it. He kept answering, ‘‘ Hen-sis (good).”’ The Tachi kept shooting arrows into the doctor and asked him, ‘‘Is that sweet?’? He answered, ‘‘It is sweet.’? Finally one Tachi shot him with a pistol. He shot the doctor through the middle and he fell down and died. Before I was born my father and mother were staying on Buena Vista Lake at the old village of Tulamni (Too-lahm’-ne). They saw an Indian doctor killed there because he had killed some people. Afterward my people lived at Fort Tejon and went back to Tulamni, but all of the Indians were gone. When I was grown I was at Tejon Ranch and heard some of the Indians there tell about the Indian doctor being killed at Tulamni. I have never been there. I would like to see it, but Tam almost blind. When I was about seventeen years old some Mono Indian Doctors came from across the mountains to the east and talked ~ to our doctors for a long time. They were worried because so many Indians had been dying. Our doctors wanted to stop the dying because they had been blamed for lots of it. So they talked about it for a long time. HANDBOOK OF YOKUTS..INDIANS ‘ The Mono Indian Doctors said that if we held a big new kind of dance at Eshom valley we could stop all of the dyin, and could bring back all of our dead people. So our doctor and our Teah (Te’-ah, chief) agreed to help. They called this new dance Heut Hetwe (He’-ut Het’-we). At the Eshom valley Heut Hetwe we were to see all of owy dead people. Tih-pik’-nits, the bird person who was keepev of the hereafter, was to bring back to us our fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts and our grandparents. Then no one was to dse anymore. That was why all of the Indians went to Eshowm valley. The white people thought they were going to figh+, They did not want to fight. They were not going to hurt anyone. When we went to Eshom valley my people were living, about three miles south of Farmersville at the ‘‘Fish’’ Ric@ Rancheria. My people called that place Sulawlahne (Soo-lawlahn’-ne). The Teah there was Teep-wuit’-trah. He belonge ¢ to the Wowol tribe. He was uncle to my mother. He took us Eshom valley. ; It was a nice place in Eshom valley where the dance we. s held. The Indians used to go there to gather clover to eat . There was always a nice field of sweet clover there in the spring. We called Eshom valley Chetutu (Che-tut’-00), ey clover place. There is a creek in the valley. The dance wes made near a water hole in the creek. The Eshom valley dance was the biggest dance I ever saw Indians came from everywhere, some from Tule river and Deer Creek, some from Lemoore and some from Kings rivey , We went horseback from Sulawlahnne. It took us two days to go there. ’ The chiefs who had charge of the dance told us that we must not get angry or be mean to one another at the dance , We were to keep dancing all the time. Only the little childre y could sleep. If anyone did not dance he would die or turn into a rotten log of wood. The chiefs also told us that we must bathe in the creek every morning. When the Win-at’-wn (messenger) called we were all to run to the creek and bathe. They told us that w2 were going to dance the same dance that the dead people dance in Tihpikntis Pahn [Land of the Dead]. We danced in a big circle at Eshom valley. Sometimes everybody danced at once. We held each others’ hands. We