The Shoshone, along with the Paiute and other tribes of the Great Basin, speak of an older race—massive, powerful, and feared. These were not spirits or metaphors. They were flesh and blood. According to the oral accounts passed down for generations, these giants were cannibals, red-haired and hostile, and they once roamed the very lands that settlers would later carve Nevada into.
The most detailed accounts come from the Paiute, but the Shoshone held the same warnings. The giants were known as Si-Te-Cah, often translated as “tule-eaters,” though this name may obscure more than it reveals. The tule reed was said to be their means of transport across water, but the tribes described their appetite as being focused on something far more gruesome: human flesh.
Sarah Winnemucca, daughter of the Paiute chief and a literate interpreter between her people and the U.S. government in the 19th century, wrote clearly of these beings. She described how they were hunted, how they would abduct and consume the native people. Eventually, according to her account and those of other elders, the tribes united against them. The giants were driven into a cave—the one now known as Lovelock Cave—and trapped inside. Brush was heaped at the entrance and set alight. Smoke filled the interior. Some giants perished in the flames. Others, it’s said, may have escaped underground.
This account isn’t merely folklore. When miners entered Lovelock Cave in the early 20th century searching for bat guano to use as fertilizer, they found something else. Skeletons. Dozens of them, buried beneath the layers. Among these remains were reports of individuals over eight feet tall, with features uncharacteristic of local tribes—some with red hair, mummified and dry in the cave’s arid interior.
By 1911, archaeological teams from the University of California were brought in. What followed was a sanitization of the narrative. Items were collected, massive sandals and oversized tools, remnants of a culture, but little of it saw public light. The Smithsonian’s involvement has been mentioned more than once, always in hushed tones. As usual, items disappeared. Records were fragmented.
The Shoshone knew these caves long before any settler named them. Their warnings were clear. There were beings beneath the ground, and they were not dead. Some were sealed. Some were buried. But others, they believed, had moved deeper beyond reach, into the chambers that honeycomb the realm beneath Nevada and the larger interior West.
What modern archaeology frames as “myth,” the Shoshone and Paiute remember as history. They offer no metaphor in these stories. The bones once found at Lovelock support their account, not the reverse.
So the question remains: Why are these accounts marginalized, when the physical evidence once lay in plain view? Who had reason to bury the record of a war beneath the earth? And why do the caves still echo in the stories, as if the giants had never truly vanished but were simply waiting for the right conditions to emerge again?
