JSTEWARD1941-008 - primary ethnography
Reese River and Ione Valley Shoshoni bullroarer
United States - Reese River and Ione Valley, Lander and Nye counties, Nevada - North America - Great Basin
Function not recorded
Source term: Bull-roarer
On the Reese River the bullroarer was reckoned a recent thing — present, but post-contact rather than old in the valley. That is unusual in the Basin, where the whirled slat turns up in nearly every valley canvassed and is nowhere else called late. The circumstances fit: Ione Valley and Reese River people had been drawn onto the Fallon reservation among Northern Paiute and Shoshoni from half of Nevada, and a toy travels faster than a rite.
- Object
- Not described; the Great Basin form is a flat wooden slat swung on a cord from a short handle stick.
- Function
- Not recorded; the instrument's presence here was reckoned post-contact.
- Source
- Steward 1941, printed p. 307, element 1870 'Bull-roarer' entered 'R?' for column Sf - 'Recent, that is, post-Caucasian' plus 'Informant uncertain or his answer ambiguous' (key, printed p. 271). Informant dossier, printed p. 214: 'MJ, full-blood Shoshoni woman, born ca. 1870 or 1875 in Ione Valley; fairly coöperative and well informed; with her husband, JF…
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 307, element 1870 (column Sf, R?); informants pp. 213-214
- Source confidence
- low to medium Upper Reese River, Lander County, Nevada. The list is explicitly a joint one for Reese River and Ione Valley; the Ione Valley alternative anchor is about 39.0, -117.6, some twenty miles southwest.