Man Before History

CHAPTER 2 MAN BEFORE HISTORY H uman beings have walked the mountains and deserts, the shores and fens of earth for thousands if not millions of years. We have no exact figures concerning the length of human habitation in what is Box Elder County, but we have evidence of human occupa tion going back several thousand years. Men, women, and children of whom we have scant record lived and died in the mountains, valleys, caves, and on the riverbanks of the area for generations. Our ignorance of the prehistoric inhabitants of Box Elder, except for the detritus they left, along with their mortal remains and vestiges of their habitations, is almost all-encompassing. We know nothing of their thought, religion, hopes and dreams, and plans. We can under stand these cultures, totally removed from our own in time, space, and cosmos, only on their own terms. We can only describe the bits and pieces we find left behind. Archaeologist David Madsen explains that prehistoric societies are usually seen "... in terms of extremes; either as ignorant savages blundering their way through life or as primitive spiritualists living in harmony with nature and the world around them. But the[y] . MAN BEFORE HISTORY 29 were just like every human group; some were cruel and some were benevolent; some were smart and some were a little slow; some worked hard and some were lazy. They were human beings, simply that, trying to raise children in a variable and sometimes harsh land scape."1 Part of the gap which separates us from these ancient peoples is their intimate connection with the land, and the variation and diver sity of land forms, climate, elevation, vegetation, and all the environ mental variables encountered in the cyclical yearly migrations of the ancients. That said, in the present discussion we must content ourselves with those of our culture here in these valleys and mountains of whom we have some evidence, and with the evidence we have found. That evidence takes us back some 10,000 years, to the time of the retreat of large glaciers, the last years of Lake Bonneville, and the change from a cool-wet climate to today's warm-dry climate.2 Any remains or evidence of human habitation of the pre-Bonneville period would have been obliterated during the 40,000 years the thou sand-foot-deep lake covered the land. The evidence we have of human habitation in our area dates from the time Lake Bonneville broke through Red Rock Pass and began its retreat, after caves and springs appeared, and after the cli mate warmed, becoming hospitable for human beings who occupied the area in small food-gathering groups.3 The lifestyle of these earliest known human residents of Box Elder prevailed through the millennia up to and including the Shoshoni, who inhabited the area upon the arrival of the early European and American explorers, and the later nineteenth-century settlers. Anthropologists have divided the 10,000 or so years of known habitation in Box Elder and the greater Eastern Great Basin into three cultural phases: Desert Archaic, Fremont, and Late Prehistoric (also known as proto-historic). According to the doyen of Utah archeologists, Jesse D. Jennings, "From 10,000 or more years ago, until A.D. 400, the only culture rep resented in Utah, as well as the rest of the Great Basin, was the Desert Archaic. That culture is characterized as a hunting-gathering one, a 30 HISTORY OF Box ELDER COUNTY flexible, highly adaptive lifeway that has characterized most of man's worldwide history."4 Their culture was not glamorous, nor complex socially, but they did develop highly specialized tools, utensils, and practices. Basket making was a highly developed craft. Jug-shaped baskets were lined with pifion gum or pitch to make them water tight. Stone tools were used to grind grains and seeds. Obsidian and other glasses were chipped to make sharp-edged projectiles. Clothing was made from animal skins and woven reeds and well-suited to the climate. Living accommodations were not permanent but varied, as groups traveled in their annual cycle for harvesting plants and hunt ing animals. The social order was simple but effective and was cen tered in the primary and extended family.5 Traces of their migratory patterns remain upon the landscape. Some of the ancients wintered in caves on Promontory and spent their summers in the lush Cache Valley. The traces of an ancient path can still be seen coming out of flat-bottom canyon on Wellsville Mountain, and descending to a spring near the valley floor east of Brigham City. According to Jesse Jennings, "The Fremont culture is uniquely Utahn, having developed in the state from an Archaic base after the transmission of certain technological complexes across the Southwest from Mexico."6 The innovations were primarily in the area of agri culture and included the cultivation of corn, squash, and beans.7 Another difference between the Archaic and Fremont cultures was the making of pottery, which the Fremont did and the Archaics did not. Another Fremont innovation, made possible by agriculture, was a more sedentary lifestyle with the development of permanent hous ing which consisted of subterranean areas under wood-and-mud structures. The Fremont amused themselves with gaming pieces made of bone or pottery and stone balls—between the size of a golf ball and tennis ball. Anthropologist James H. Gunnerson concludes: "The balls from the Fremont area have presumably been found associated with patterns of small pits pecked into the surface of nearly level bedrock. This association suggests some sort of game like marbles in which the balls would be rolled into the pits."8 MAN BEFORE HISTORY 31 The Fremont people were undoubtedly diverse in many ways. As David Madsen writes: Like the land, the prehistoric societies of the western Colorado Plateau and the eastern Great Basin can also be characterized by variation and diversity and are neither readily defined nor easily encapsulated within a single description. Some people were pri marily settled farmers, growing corn, beans, and squash in small plots along streams at the base of mountain ranges: some were nomads, collecting wild plants and animals to support themselves; still others would shift between these lifestyles. In some areas the population was relatively dense, in others only small groups were found widely scattered across the landscape. People living in this region may even have spoken different languages or had widely divergent dialects. Yet, despite the diversity of these lifestyles and the varied geography which structured their actions, these people seem to have shared patterns of behavior and ways of living which tie them together. Today we call these scattered groups of hunters and farmers the Fremont, but that name may be more reflective of our own need to categorize things than it is a reflection of how closely related these people were. "Fremont" is really a generic label for a people who, like the land in which they lived, are not easily described or classified.9 The Fremont were replaced, by A.D. 1300 by the third cultural group, again with ties to northern Mexico. The Shoshonian tribes (Shoshoni, Paiute, Gosiute, Ute) speak a Numic language, which has Uto-Aztecan roots. Their lifestyle and cultural practices were little different, even near the time of their first contact with history, in the early to mid-1800s, from those of the Desert Archaic peoples of ten thousand years before. Jesse Jennings notes that "it seems that the Shoshoni-speakers who were in possession of Utah upon first white contact were migrants from southern California and Nevada. They may have been a factor in the disappearance of the Fremont. The lin guistic evidence is firm as to the time and direction of expansion of the Shoshoni-speakers; what is lacking is knowledge of the nature of the contact with the Fremont, although there is repeated evidence of dual use of camp locations by both cultures."10 Having defined, at least briefly, the three stages of prehistoric 32 HISTORY OF Box ELDER COUNTY habitation in Box Elder, and having noted that the lifestyle of all three was substantially the same, we move to a discussion of how they lived, at least as can be reconstructed from what they left behind. Of their food supply and eating habits, Jennings notes that The major foods of a gathering population were always vegetal; meat made only modest and sporadic contribution to the diet. In recent years this has been observed and verified in several archeo- logical as well as ethnographic studies over the world. The reasons, once known, are painfully obvious. The over-riding facts are: (1) Plants are fixed in position, (2) they normally fruit every year (pifion is an exception) although abundance may vary, (3) they fruit at the same time each year, (4) collecting fruits does not endanger the species and their permanent availability is thus assured, and (5) much vegetal food can he saved or stored. Animals on the other hand, although highly prized, are subject to wide fluc tuation in abundance due to disease cycles, over-kill, or temporary climatic change. An example of periodic scarcity is the well-known (and probably ancient) reduction and increase of the jackrabbit population over a seven or eight year cycle. Another kind of scarcity would result from a successful antelope drive; a drive dec imates a local herd, so that several fawn crops are required to restore the herd to original strength before another harvest is war ranted.11 Harvesting of vegetable foods, and thus the travel or migration schedule of the people was dependent upon and dictated by the sea sonal cycle.

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