How close are the Klamath sweat lodges to Crater Lake? Is the one at Algoma still in existence?
Crater Lake National Park was really not used much by the Indians, I don’t think. They were marsh people. I used to think fish were their principal food and then, after we did the Nightfire Island study, I came to the conclusion that the big thing was the millions and millions and millions of birds that were here (11). They had two migrations a year, and then they had the eggs. Bird eggs were a big deal in the diet of the [Indians]. They were not mountain-type Indians, the Klamath and the Modocs. The marshes were the places. Except, they would go to Huckleberry Mountain, which was near Crater Lake. It was a big thing for them. Here’s this sweet stuff. You take a people that don’t have sugar and those huckleberries were very attractive. Charlie Ogle said they’d go out and leave their hayfields to pick huckleberries in the huckleberry season. They’d also go up there to get kinnikinniuk [to] smoke (12). It grows there. I talked to an Indian and he said that’s where he’d get kinnikinniuk.
On Huckleberry Mountain?
No, in the Crater Lake National Park area.
In the park.
Beyond those two things, I don’t think they spent much time in the mountains, either at Crater Lake or the Sky Lakes.
There’s quite a lot of archeological evidence under the pumice around Crescent Lake. In the Nightfire Island study, I revealed the date of the major eruption of Mount Mazama. [The discoveries] around Crescent Lake… Cressman first told me about it and wrote about it. Somebody uncovered it in a road cut and he went out there. He gave me a paper that he’d published on it. But low water washes out Indian artifacts from under that seven thousand-year-old pumice, or rocks nearly 7,000 years old.
They would have been from people on the west side of the mountains?
I don’t know. Time may prove that there were very ancient people on the west side of the Cascades. I know of two or three evidences of Clovis-type projectile points being found over there. You have to have erosion to uncover that stuff, and if people find something like that and they are not afraid to let you know about it.
