No. JSTEWARD1941-008
Reese River and Smoky Valley Shoshoni bullroarer
United States · Great Smoky Valley, Smith Creek Valley, Reese River and Ione Valley, Nye and Lander counties, central Nevada · North America · Great Basin
Function not recorded
Source term: Bull-roarer
Under the Toiyabe and Desatoya ranges the bullroarer was known from Great Smoky Valley north to Smith Creek and the Reese River. Great Smoky Valley's people wintered along the creeks off Arc Dome and at the hot springs they called Üdü'ba, 'hot water'; each fall, after the pine-nut harvest, Captain John led a five-day festival and then announced the ten-day rabbit hunt. In Smith Creek Valley, west of Austin, people burned the brush in hill basins and sowed wild seed there, and in the drought of 1935 Old Wagon Jack offered to bring rain for five hundred dollars. On the Reese River and in Ione Valley the instrument was reckoned a recent, post-contact arrival.
Particulars
- Object
- The Great Basin form: a flat wooden slat swung on a cord from a short handle stick.
Sources
- Julian H. Steward, 'Culture Element Distributions: XIII, Nevada Shoshoni,' Anthropological Records 4:2 (1941), p. 307, element 1870; informant notes pp. 213-214; key p. 271; also pp. 211, 250, 262 View · archived
- Julian H. Steward, Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 120 (1938), pp. 104-106 (Smith Creek Valley), 109-110 (Great Smoky Valley) View