The red-haired giants of Lovelock Cave

Northern Paiute oral tradition; the cave excavations of 1911-1924 are documented archaeology

Lovelock Cave, near Lovelock in Churchill County, Nevada, is a rock shelter about 150 feet long and 35 feet wide above the Humboldt Sink. The currents and waves of Lake Lahontan, a huge Pleistocene lake, carved it, and an earthquake later brought down the overhang at the mouth. The dry air preserved what people left there over more than 4,000 years. It was in use as early as 2580 BC and occupied most heavily from about 1000 BC, a pair of sandals from the cave has been radiocarbon dated to 10,000 years ago, among the oldest footwear in the world, and a gun cache and a human coprolite date its last use to about 1850.

Science arrived second. In 1911 two miners, David Pugh and James Hart, dug out a layer of bat guano 3 to 6 feet deep, about 250 tons, and shipped it to a fertilizer company in San Francisco, dumping most of what turned up on a heap outside. When the ancient refuse grew so thick that the guano could no longer be screened from it, they called the University of California, and in 1912 Llewellyn Loud recovered roughly 10,000 artifacts. In 1924 Loud and Mark Raymond Harrington, with Paiute assistants, found a cache of eleven duck decoys, eight of them painted and feathered, made from bundled tule; two were later dated to about 300 BC and 130 BC. Coprolites show that 90 percent of the diet came from the Humboldt Sink, mostly Lahontan cutthroat trout, ducks and mudhens. The cave was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 24, 1984.

Paiute oral history tells of the Si-Te-Cah, a tribe of red-haired cannibal giants that the Paiute trapped inside the cave and smoked to death. Guano miners told of a mummified man 6 feet 6 inches tall, but no proof of it has been found. Every party that has worked the site since 1912 recovered human remains, now in museum collections, and none of them reported giants. Adrienne Mayor suggests the giant story was started by entrepreneurs setting up tourist displays, that mammoth and cave bear bones about 100 miles north are easily mistaken for a giant's, and that very dark hair can turn rusty red after death. The cave is reached by a long dirt road from Lovelock.