Notes

TRADE
The valley Maidu traded considerably with the Wintun. They received beads - that is, money - above all else. The beads were counted by tens, not measured, although handled on strings. From the valley and hills the beads flowed into the high Sierra, together with salmon, some salt, and nuts of the digger pine which grows only at moderate elevations. The return was that of a hunting people: bows and arrows and deerskins, sugar-pine nuts, and perhaps some other local food products. Wild tobacco from the border district of Honey Lake appears to have been traded in all directions.

Maidu dress was similarly scant in the summer heat of the valley and the snowy winter of the mountains. A dear or puma skin with the hair side next to the body, a rabbit skin blanket, or a pair of skins sewn together, was worn as a mantle at need; but there was no true garment.

The mountaineers are said to have donned grass-stuffed moccasins for travel in the snow. The calf was protected by a deerskin legging, the hair side inward, tied above the knee and wound to the leg with a thong. The moccasin was of the usual California variety: unsoled, single piece, seamed up the front, and coming well above the ankle.

The netted cap completed the costume of Maidu men. It was indispensable in ceremony, through allowing headpieces to be skewered into the contained hair; and was convienent in many occupations, although we are uncertain whether it was worn habitually.

Women's clothing was constituted essentially of two shredded bark aprons, preferably of maple, the front one smaller and tucked between the legs when the wearer sat down. Grass may also have been used, and old women occasionally went naked. Outdoors in winter, women added moccasins and a skin robe.

Hair was most frequently trimmed with a glowing coal, but a flint edge bearing on a stick is also mentioned. Combs of porcupine tails, pine cones, and pine needles were in use. Only hair on the face was pulled out.

The Maidu are on the fringe of the tattooing tribes. In the northern valley the women wore three to seven vertical lines on the chin, plus a diagonal line from each mouth corner toward the outer end of the eye. The process was one of fine close cuts with an obsidian splinter, as among the Shasta, with wild nutmeg charcoal rubbed in. For men there existed no universal fashion: the commonest mark was a narrow stripe upward from the root of the nose. As elsewhere in California, lines and dots were not uncommon on breast, arms, and hands of men and women; but no standardized pattern seems to have evolved except the female face.

Ornaments were worn in the ear chiefly by women, in the nose only by men. Girls had their lobes pierced in the adolescence dance. Where the Kuksu society existed, the perforation of the septum occurred more ceremoniously in the initiation of boys. Ear ornaments were pieces of haliotis on thongs; or more characteristically, incised bird bones or polished sticks, with or without feather tufts or shell pendants. The horizontal nose ornament was a feather, a pair of feathers, or a feathered stick.