Corbett Mack
The Life of a Northern Paiute
as told by Michael Hittman
University of Nevada Press
Reno / / Las Vegas
University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA
Copyright © 1996 by University of Nebraska Press
New preface copyright © 2013 by University of Nevada Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hittman, Michael.
Corbett Mack : the life of a Northern Paiute / as told by Michael Hittman. — First edition. pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87417-915-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-87417-916-3 (e-book)
1. Mack, Corbett, 1892–1974. 2. Northern Paiute Indians—Biography. 3. Northern Paiute Indians—History. 4. Northern Paiute Indians--Social life and customs. 5. Smith Creek Valley (Nev.)—Social life and customs. 6. Mason Valley (Nev.)—Social life and customs. I. Title.
E99.P2.M335 2013 305.897'4577—dc23
[B] 2013016218
The paper used in this book meets the requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISo z39.48-1992 (R2002). Binding materials were selected for strength and durability.
University of Nevada Press Paperback Edition, 2013
First Printing
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
5 4 3 2 1
ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-915-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-916-3 (e-book)
For my wife, Meryl whose courage through life-threatening illness inspires this book, and my daughters Julie, who learned to walk on Campbell Ranch to Grandma Ida’s “Hey-na Hey-na” song, and Eliza, whose love of animals was nurtured there.
3. Boarding School (1905–10)
4. Work and Girls (1912–23)
56.
57.
58.
61.
5. Italians, Potatoes, Homemade Wine (1923–58)
67.
68.
69.
6. Chinese
(1896–1931)
104. Shootin’ Moohoo’oo:
106. Toha Moohoo’oo (‘Morphine’)
7. Some Real old-Timers (1896–1940)
118.
129. Tom Mitchell!
130. Nuumuu Puharrˆ (“Witchcraft’)
131. Tom Mitchell’s Witchin’
133. The Death of
134. Pneumonia!
135. Exposure! Pneumonia!
136. The Death of Tom Mitchell
137. Ben Lancaster (Chief Gray Horse), Peyotist
138.
8. Retirement Years (1954–74)
140.
145.
146.
Acknowledgments
A book as long in the making as this requires many acknowledgments. Fieldwork in Yerington was originally funded by National Science Foundation grants: the Field Training Program in Anthropology, (Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, 1965) and a Grant Supporting Doctoral Dissertation Work (GS-2007) in 1969. IN 1992 I received a grant from the Nevada Humanities Committee of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NHC 87-33), and I thank its executive director, Judy Winzeler, for support and friendship. Long Island University, where I have been employed since 1968, has supported me in countless ways, most recently with funding from a Title III Grant, and I take pleasure expressing my appreciation to its administrator, my good friend Darlene Kindermann.
Kathleen o’Connor brought cartons of raw data to my desk in the Leo J. Ryan Memorial Federal Archives Building, San Bruno, California, and also answered many questions. Phillip I. Earle, curator of history at the Nevada Historical Society in Reno, often hosted me. He (and staff members) directed me to state newspapers for data on opiates and to other invaluable sources. Susan Searcy, manuscript curator, and Linda Perry, library assistant—in fact, the entire staff at Special Collections at the University of Nevada Libraries, Reno—were also enormously helpful and always courteous. So, too, were the staffs at the Lyon County Courthouse and at the Municipal Library in Yerington, where I spent numerous research hours.
I also wish to thank the staff of the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada and particularly an old friend, Shayne Del Cohen, for allowing me to copy material they retrieved from the National Archives, Washington, D.C., for use in the Notes section of this book. This material as yet has not been cataloged in San Bruno and is cited here as ITC Archives.
Most recently, Jeff Kintop at the Nevada State Archives building helped by guiding me through State Prison Records. There in Carson City I had the eerie experience of finally seeing the faces—albeit mug shots—of Smith and Mason Valley opiate addicts whom Corbett Mack so frequently had told me about. over the years, too, my late uncle Bernard Bader of Walnut Creek, California, not only generously put me up in his home, but also lent me a second car to conduct this research. I will always miss him.
Most of my informants, regrettably, are also dead: Andy Dick, Nellie Emm, Brady Emm, Hazel Quinn, Rosie Brown, Richard “Switch” Brown, Henry Fredericks, Irene Thompson, Howard Rogers, Chester Smith, and, of course, the subject of this work, Corbett Mack. They fed me well and taught me everything I learned about Northern Paiutes apart from the books; I note in this regard the supplemental assistance received from Russell Dick and Corbett’s three surviving nieces: Lena Rogers, Bernice Crutcher, and Elsie Sam Ausmus. They not only were most cooperative in remembering their beloved uncle for me, but Mrs. Crutcher also went through a family album and lent me several photographs. Kay Fowler was kind enough to allow me to quote from the handout on Northern Paiute prayer delivered at a convention; her friendship over the years and her knowledge have enriched me.
Lastly, Ida Mae Valdez, whom I call beeya, or mother, because since 1965 this remarkable human being opened her home and Paiute family and embracing heart to me, recently chided me for writing this book. “He’s a nobody,” she said. “Corbett Mack’s just a plain ordinary Indian drunk.” Dear Ida, that is precisely the point. And just as the English Puritans opposed bear baiting, not so much because it gave paint to the bear, but because it brought pleasure to the participants, so too have I delayed writing about this destructive and painful subject for similar reasons.
Note on orthography
Trained though I was to transcribe Northern Paiute according to the IPA, I have adopted transcription changes that have resulted over the years primarily from the work of Arie Poldervaart, Wycliffe Bible translator. In writing the Yerington Paiute Language Grammar and Paiute-English/English-Paiute Dictionary for the Yerington Paiute Tribe, Poldervaart taught us how to simplify the writing of the language. For even greater simplication, I have modified his system as follows:
aa long a as in bait
oo long o as in boot
ee long e as in we
ˆ u as in but
uu barred i as in “jist”
rr trill as in the spanish burro
’ glottal stop
dz as in rouge
gh Germanic guttural
Stress is frequently on the second syllable. Final vowels are frequently silent.
Introduction
Corbett Mack: The Life of a Northern Paiute is an as-told-by (rather than -to) life history or "Indian autobiography" of Corbett Mack (1892-1974), my primary Northern Paiute informant. A "contradiction in terms," as Arnold Krupat has recently defined this genre,
Indian autobiographies are collaborative efforts jointly produced by some white who translates, transcribes, compiles, edits, interprets, polishes, and ultimately determines the "form" of the text in writing, and by an Indian who is its "subject" and whose "life" becomes the "content" of the "autobiography" whose title may bear his name. [in Swann 1983:272]
Another literary critic who has made important contributions to this longstanding field of interest to anthropologists (cf. Kluckhohn 1945; Langness 1965; Mandelbaum 1973) is H. David Brumble III. According to Brumble (1988: 10), the Indian autobiographer "will try to elicit stories about his subject's childhood, because his literate, western audience expects autobiography to answer [these questions]." This results, Brumble writes, in texts in which it is "the Anglo editor, who decides, finally, what is to get the shape of his subject's 'autobiography'" (1988:11). Emphasizing what Krupat has termed their "bicultural composite authorship" (in Swann 1983:272), Brumble significantly also adds: "The editors of life-history materials almost always arrange things in chronological order (whatever may have been the sense of time implicit in the autobiographical tales themselves)" (1988: 16).
By his count, more than 600 such narratives have thus far been published (Brumble 1988:76): 43 percent of them collected and edited by anthropologists, another 40 percent edited by (other) non-Native Americans. The life
Corbett Mack
histories or Indian autobiographies of Sam Blowsnake, Winnebago (Radin [1920] 1963), Chona, the Papago woman (Underhill [1936] 1979), Don Talayesva, arabi Hopi (Simmons [1942] 1971), and, of course, Nicholas Black Elk (Neihardt 1932; DeMallie 1984) immediately come to mind. Yet for the Great Basin, and Northern Paiutes particularly, only a handful of these exist: the Humboldt River Paiute "Princess" Sarah Winnemucca's "heavily edited" (by Mrs. Horace Mann, cf. Brumble 1988:37,61) influential plaint (Hopkins [1882] 1969; Canfield 1983), factually, among the earliest of this genre; two (brief) life histories of the Owens Valley Paiutes Jake Stewart and Sam Newland, as collected and presented by Julian Steward in 1934; and that of Lovelock Paiute Annie Lowry (b. 1856), as told to Lalla Scott in 1936 (1966). More recently, autobiographical sketches of well-known Great Basin Indians have been admirably drawn by the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada and published as Life Stories of Our Native People. This life history or Indian autobiography of Corbett Mack, then, fills an obvious void. Because I neither systematically collected this information nor ever even remotely thought of publishing the life story of Corbett Mack as such, the questions how and why this work came to be "transcribed, edited, polished, interpreted, [and] thoroughly mediated" (cf. Krupat in Swann 1983:272) by me can serve as a useful starting point.
To begin with, I first went-actually I was assigned by lots-among Corbett Mack's people, the Tabooseedokado or 'Grass Nut Eaters' of Smith and Mason valleys, Nevada (Stewart 1939: 143), a federally recognized modem tribe of Northern Paiutes known today as the Yerington Paiute Tribe (Hittman 1984), in 1965, after being selected to participate in the Tri-Institute Field Training Project in Anthropology. This was a National Science Foundation summer program designed to train beginning graduate students in techniques of ethnographic field research. Located at the University of Nevada, Reno, a dozen of us were trained by Warren L. d' Azevedo, Don Fowler, Wick Miller, Wayne Suttles, and William Jacobson and were sent to different reservations and Indian colonies, mostly throughout Nevada, with Franz Boas's historic anthropological mission: to collect ethnographic data from elderly informants as a way of preserving what remained of traditional Great Basin people's cultures, that is, "salvage ethnography." On the 9.45acre Yerington Indian Colony in Mason Valley, and on Campbell Ranch, its 1,400-acre companion reservation eight miles to the northeast, I, by the luck of the draw, or fate, was privileged to interview elderly Northern Paiute men and women about beliefs and practices appertaining to the collection and
preparation of plant and animal foods, what I called foodlore (Hittman 1965). Having been preceded in the field by another student, I duly took note of the praise heaped upon Corbett Mack by Eileen Kane, University of Pittsburgh student. She called him "the most excellent and co-operative of my informants: his retention of detail, of ethnohistorical fact, and of dates, was impressive" (1964:58).
According to my diary, it was on 21 June 1965, when I stopped a borrowed car at Corbett Mack's nephew's house on Campbell Ranch to seek directions to Tribal Chairman Frank Quinn's house, that I met Corbett. He seemed friendly, I happily noted. Indeed, apart from age, Corbett was very much like me: short (five feet, six inches), slight (120 pounds), light-skinned, and blue-eyed, though otherwise a stiff-kneed, retired Paiute, who was dressed in a faded blue denim work shirt, jeans, and dress shoes, and whose neatly parted head full of brackish white hair also reminded me of my paternal grandfather. Because Corbett Mack, seated alone on a rickety bench underneath a grove of cottonwood trees rolling cigarettes, pragmatically and romantically struck me as the ideal informant (cf. Casagrande 1960), I returned five days later on a purchased bicycle, eager to interview him. He was then weeding an impressive garden. Corbett invited me to wait, and I played with his friendly Australian sheepdog Pinto, whose own cloudy blue eyes were so much like his owner's-an interaction more pleasant than the encounter I had just experienced with Corbett's neighbor's vicious dog! Upon completion of his task, Corbett Mack joined me in that shady place; he accepted my (nervous) half-sandwich offer without a "Thank you," followed by a cigarette, again with no thanks. Thus we sat in silence for quite some time, I a fledgling anthropologist, grappling with how to broach ponderously worded ethnographic questions, Corbett Mack an experienced informant, hunched over, elbows resting on his knees, staring down at the ground. I did begin my ethnographic work that day-two productive hours collecting what seemed like a wealth of data (a basic word list, kinship terms, and so forth), which I could hardly wait to get home to type. But because of my proximity to the Yerington Indian Colony, I did not return to interview Corbett Mack at Campbell Ranch until 30 June 1965, when I recorded the following in my diary: "Corbett looked up at me as if I were stupid for repeating the same question." "Nice man," I also wrote. "And all he wants-he won't take payment!-is Prince Albert pipe tobacco and brown Wheat Straw paper!" I also learned that day that because his eyes went bad as a young man, Corbett had not really hunted very much; still, he said he knew of taboos surrounding
Corbett Mack
the procurement and preparation of both animal and plant foods, which he would be willing to share. More importantly for the genesis of this book, after relating the belief that hunters who "played with" animals (that is, tortured them or threw porcupine guts in the air) could cause winter storms, Corbett Mack illustrated with family fact that his stepfather had skinned a jackrabbit one day and let it loose, "then [Big Mack] got sick and he nearly died!"
I saw Corbett eight more times that summer, interviewing him on only four of those occasions:
7 July 1965: After having been generously given the use of a motor scooter by Ken Stevens, a Yerington neighbor, I found Corbett drunk and immediately left.
13 July 1965: Corbett was again drunk. He screamed at his dog when I arrived, then, pausing with mild irritation to inquire what it was I wanted, regained his composure and abruptly left to irrigate the garden.
26 July 1965: Corbett Mack, sobering up, told me about Owl and an unidentified hawk, tabudzeeba, whose cry similarly foretold personal misfortune; the predicted trouble could be averted if only a person would "talk to 'em," that is, say, "Go away! I don't wanna hear you no more!"
27 July 1965: Revealing an ironic sensibility, Corbett told me how whites used laugh at "them Indians" for painting their faces, whereas "now their own women paint theirs worse than us! Same as smokin'!" he also wryly observed.
4 August 1965: Corbett Mack was not home.
9 August 1965: Drunk again, and surly. Even so, he regained enough composure to allow me to begin an interview, which was abruptly ended when Corbett left to irrigate his garden.
10 August 1965: I entered his house to this friendly greeting: "Hello, Mike!" In fact, I had brought Corbett some requested groceries-a loaf of Wonderbread, a can of Spam, macaroni salad from the deli, and cigarette makings-in lieu of informant pay. After insisting on paying, he related the folktales I retell in sections 151-54, including several "dirty stories" about Trickster Coyote (e.g., the Northern Paiute creation story with its vagina dentata motif), which Corbett laughed while narrating.
13 August 1965: Having forgotten to bring promised groceries, I recorded a short session on foodlore.
21 August 1965: Not at home. I intended to say goodbye.
22 August 1965: Returned again to say goodbye. Since Corbett declined my offer of groceries, I gave him my favorite sweater as a memento.
Three years then passed, and upon completion of Ph.D. coursework at the University of New Mexico, I decided to return to Yerington. Armed with my dissertation proposal to test a model of caste on Northern Paiute-taivo (white) relations in Smith and Mason valleys, while glancing through back issues of the weekly newspaper-work on the proposal admittedly was going poorly-I chanced upon a shocking item: "We regret to say this city has a 'hop head' population that would put many larger localities to shame." This was reported in the Yerington TImes on 4 January 1908. Glancing ahead, I saw that on 27 November 1909 the same newspaper wrote: "The degrading influence of opium is rapidly reducing the Indian squaws to prostitution and the buck to the vile employment of procurers." Opiate addiction, moreover, not only seemed widespread but proved to be long-lasting, as revealed by a comment in the rival newspaper, the Mason Valley News, on 29 March 1924:
With the death of these 2 Indians the people are beginning to awaken to the fact that conditions are getting pretty rotten at the Indian camp (Yerington). At present 90% of the Indians in the valley are hop heads and the time is coming when some dope-crazed Indian is going to run amuck and kill a few citizens Now is a good time to call the attention of the government to the fact that the so-called reservation within the city limits of Yerington is nothing more or less than a clearing house for yen shee peddlers. The place is so damn rotten that it smells to heaven.
And, again, four years later, in this same source: "One by one Yerington's Indians are succumbing to the ravages of booze and dope. Before long the ranchers will be hard put for hay hands" (6 October 1928).
Native American opiate addiction? Unprepared for this finding by graduate school studies, and particularly by ethnographic readings on Northern Paiutes of the Great Basin during the aforementioned Field Training Project in Anthropology, I was doubly surprised to learn that some of my informants had been arrested and imprisoned on narcotics-related charges. Feeling, therefore, that this information demanded immediate scrutiny, I changed dissertation topics-in the field. And how well I recall that fateful letter written to Philip K. Bock, my advisor-from the field!
The historical context was the late 1960s. Knowing that Smith and Mason Valley Paiutes originated the 1890 Ghost Dance (Mooney 1896); surmising that they had participated in an earlier manifestation of the same,
Corbett Mack
the 1870 Ghost Dance (Du Bois 1939), which erupted on the Walker River Reservation in adjacent Walker Valley; and belonging to a generation for whom drugs were very much part of the counterculture in which I participated, whose own illusory dreams regarding a charismatic leader had been dashed by the assassination of a president in Dallas (dreams and idealistic yearnings that would reignite and be extinguished twice more by bullets in King and in Bobby Kennedy)-a Woodstock to Altamount decade also contradictorily symbolized by the "two Camelots" (cf. Horowitz 1967)-the following hypothesis, then, seemed to literally construct itself: Like drug use in the 60s, Smith and Mason Valley Northern Paiute opiate addiction was symptomatic of disillusionment with prophecies that had failed, specifically Wovoka's 1 January 1889 Great Revelation. Enter, or reenter, Corbett Mack.
Between 1968 and 1972 I interviewed Corbett no less than fifty-five times; the interviews took about 165 hours, and I recorded some 30 additional hours on audio tape. Of course, Leo Simmons wrote his 460-page life story of Don Talayesva on the basis of 350 interview hours and 8,000 diary page entries (cf. Brumble 1988:185). Be that as it may, I asked Corbett one day about opiates, and with characteristic honesty he related habitually smoking yen-shee, the remains of "wet" opium-called moohoo '00 'Owl' in Northern Paiute, for reasons explained in section 87. Moreover, he told of subsequent addiction to toha moohoo '00 'white black stuff', or morphine, injected intravenously. Hoping to quantify the incidence of opiate addiction, I became drawn to Corbett Mack for another reason: Northern Paiutes' unwillingness to discuss the dead. "Oh, he's dead a long time!" was too frequently the response to genealogical questions. Corbett Mack, on the other hand, was willing not only to name names, but also to name names of the deceased.
"Did so-and-so use moohoo '00, Corbett?" "Was he a heavy user?" "Did he also use that white stuff [morphine]?" "Arrested?" Systematically, thus, I worked him, eliciting the hard data on addiction and addicts for this relatively stable population of approximately 500 Northern Paiutes during their fortyyear travail with opiates. These data I, of course, cross-checked with other informants and historical sources, including newspapers and arrest and prison records. Despite the tediousness of this line of inquiry, Corbett Mack-gratefully-never tired of answering me. Indeed, he seemed to look forward to my visits, if only because I owned a car, and he was not loath to ask me to drive him to a nearby liquor store for his favorite wine, Tavola Red, which I never did; he would then beg me instead to "Bring me a jug next time, partner!" something I confess to foolishly having done on occasion, that is, until Lena
Rogers, Corbett's niece, admonished me. (Mrs. Rogers subsequently revealed how she would watch for my black Volkswagen from her kitchen window, then would drive to her uncle's house after I had left, to determine whether or not I had broken that promise!) In any event, this work, as I say, progressed slowly, torturously, as Corbett Mack patiently, courteously, monosyllabically, answered my every (monotonous) query, opening up, expressing himself more freely on the subject, especially on his life, only after the notebook (or tape recorder) blessedly was closed.
Now, it probably is true that I would have learned what I learned from him without doing what I did. All the same, during my fourth season in the field, 1970, while I was (still) grilling Corbett Mack about opiates, we were seated outdoors on an orange vinyl luncheonette booth his nephew had retrieved from the dump. A hot August day's stifling dry heat was penetrated only by the sound of cicadas and a tractor's engine in the background (much as indoors, on cold days, it would be the ticking of an alarm clock beside Corbett Mack's bed), and those Khoisianlike clicks from this old man's neartoothless mouth that framed our common enterprise. Having acquired my informant's habit of rolling cigarettes, I added a twist that day, marijuana, a sign of those times. Corbett at some point asked, "What are you smokin', partner?" I answered, playfully offering a toke. "No, thanks!" he most emphatically demurred. "How come, Corbett?" "'Cause I drink now," he answered, "so, I don't wanna mix!" "Why's that, Corbett?" "'Cause you see why?" he explained. "They say you can lose your mind that way!"
By my risking self-disclosure (cf. Jourard 1964) our roles then temporarily reversed, inasmuch as Corbett Mack began interrogating me about drugs: How had I obtained marijuana? Where? Cost? Had I encountered difficulties with "them government bulls"? But perhaps even more important than the revelation that he and other Paiutes had sold opiates as well as using them, subsequent interviews with Corbett were imbued with new intimacy, as if I had gained passage into the "underworld of the hophead," the "dope fiend," the "junky" (cf. Becker 1964; Burroughs 1969)-a breakthrough in fieldwork discussed at the Great Basin Anthropological Society Meetings in a paper entitled '''Never Mix-Never Worry': The Heuristic Value of Offering a 'Joint' to an Informant," whose misleading newspaper coverage, notwithstanding the happier ethnographic outcome, caused worry, grief, and turmoil in this budding professional's life. In any case, Corbett Mack as a consequence proved more willing than ever to fully discuss with me his life, as an opiate addict and otherwise.
Corbett Mack
Alas, teaching and a variety of projects directed on behalf of the Yerington Paiute Tribe carne to occupy many of those postdoctoral dissertation years. In truth, too, I resisted publishing data on Smith and Mason Valley opiate addiction because of an inability to resolve an ethical dilemma: did I wish to establish a reputation on the discovery of what had caused so much anguish, misery, and suffering for friends in a host community I not only felt attachment to but worked for? While I was directing a Title IV U.S. Indian Education Project for the Yerington Paiute Tribe in the early 1980s, however, when our editor precipitously quit, and I was thrust into his role, a frenetic search for materials to include in Numu fa Dua, a tribal "newspaper" designed for use in an after-school tutoring center in Paiute culture and language (Hittman, ed., 1979-82), threw me back onto my ethnographic heels, so to speak. Since neither the Education Committee nor the Tribal Council objected to my devoting most of an entire issue to opiates (and peyote), I reestablished contact with my field notebooks and came to realize just how much about Corbett Mack's life I actually knew. Some glimmering of its book potential led me to publish autobiographical snippets from Corbett Mack's life in a featured column of our tribal newspaper entitled "Conversations with an Old-Timer," as well as to work up a draft of Corbett Mack's life story for a Nevada publisher. That was why on 17 October 1982 I thought to interview Amos Mencarini, the Italian-American potato grower on whose Smith Valley ranch Corbett and his wife Celia Mack lived and worked for nearly thirty years. More years needed to pass following rejection of the manuscript before I would again consider publishing Corbett Mack's life story (and the story of Paiute opiate addiction). And so it was that upon completion of the Wovoka Centennial Project (1986-89) for the Yerington Paiute Tribe, I once again began to feel strongly about these subjects. If Jack Wilson, whose biography I wrote for this tribe (Hittman 1990), was the Great Man, Corbett Mack, I came to realize, was the tribe's Everyman.
Organizationally, this book is very much inspired by Paul Radin's Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, which Brumble rightly or wrongly writes "is generally credited with having ignited the interest in autobiography for ethnographic purposes" (1988:57). The 159 sections of Corbett Mack: The Life of a Northern Paiute are followed by endnotes numbered to match the section numbers. The endnotes include historical and explanatory data and commentary regarding culture. (Radin's 96-page volume, by contrast, had 351 footnotes.) "Most Indian autobiographies [do] contain a mixture of narrative and cultural essay," another literary critic (W. F. Smith 1975:238)
