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mortuary gifts that are always found in-other Indian graves - even modern - and those at Lehmann represented a period cohering many years."

 

The book, "Nevada Place Names" by Rufus W. Leigh offers the following information on Lehman Caves on page 52:

    "...When the new entrance was cut through, examination of the cave-in debris disclosed two Indian skeletons. Indians did not dig graves; they used natural recesses for burial wherever possible. There is traditional evidence that the cave was known to the aborigines from circa 1,000 A.D. In Caucasian times, whites have recorded old Indian legends of it..."

 

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#52 --- Page 132 of "The Journal of American Folklore", Vol.49, carries the following story of the Taos Indian emergence account, from Mt. Blanca (120 miles north-east of Alamosa, in southern Colorado, in the Sangre de Cristo range):

    "All the Indians were created by Our Father the Sun (Tulena Kitamena) and placed in a lake in (inside) Mt. Blanca. The Earth, Our Mother (Pauna Kikana), took care of us. The Sun told each tribe where it had to live. He told them to leave Mt. Blanca and to go to the plains and to the mountains where they now live. And he gave the plains Indians buffalo, elk, deer and antelope skins and hair and also bows and arrows so that they could live by hunting. He told them to go east and west. To the Pueblo Indians he gave seeds and corn and pumpkins and other plants and fruits and told them to go to the south. He also gave them bows and arrows and deer skins. They had to live by hunting and from the products of the earth.

    "The Taos Indians were the chosen people of the Sun and from the beginning he told them that they had to honor the Sun and make sacrifices for him so that he