The Paiute Said They Burned Red-Haired Cannibal Giants — Then Miners Found the Remains

In 1911, guano miners broke through bat dung in a Nevada cave and found skeletal remains with red hair still attached and skulls that measured too large. The foreman, a Paiute man, recognized the site from his grandfather's stories about the Si-Te-Cah, red-haired giants his people had trapped and burned alive in that exact cave. Three university expeditions returned between 1912 and 1929, pulling out femurs that reconstructed to over 7 feet tall, sandals measuring 15 to 21 inches long, and tool marks on bone that matched defleshing patterns seen at confirmed cannibalism sites across the Southwest. The Paiute oral history, published in 1882 by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, described a siege: tribes united to exterminate the Si-Te-Cah after decades of raids and captive-taking, piling brush 10 feet high at the cave entrance and lighting it. Archaeologist Donald Tuohy found the burn layer in 1984, a mass of charcoal and ash running 18 feet along the cave mouth, carbon-dated to 1000 CE. Stable isotope analysis on skeletal samples showed one individual had grown up on a coastal diet, 310 miles from the cave. DNA testing on the red hair samples came back too degraded to sequence, contaminated by a century of handling. The largest femur ever cataloged from the site, held at Berkeley since 1912, has never had its measurement published. In 1979, someone broke into the Humboldt Museum, stole the display skull, scraped off its catalog markings, and dumped it in Reno two weeks later. That skull now sits in a locked vault, requested 14 times for examination and denied every time under repatriation law.