Creation: Case Closed

The Earth was created here:


Google Earth has a better shot of it, the exact spot is within 500 meters of these coordinates: 39°39'21.59"N 121°49'49.12"W. That is 5.5 miles south of Chico, CA, home of party town USA and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Also, former home of the indigenous and not extinct Maidu people. I learned years ago that the raft from which the earth was created was grounded at Ta'doiko, and in this post I gave my first stab at finding the place. As you can see, I was way off, my guess was that it would be a prominent mountain top, it turns out to be the opposite, just a spot in the floodplain of the Sacramento River, Lassen Peak turns out to have been just a northern border of their territory. Whatever was once at Ta'Doiko (like the legendary tree Hu'kiimtsa that grew 12 different kinds of acorns) is now long gone, and fertilizer for whatever orchards and fields you can make out in that map. I found the place with google's invaluable help, they scanned Alfred Kroeber's 1925 Indians of California (from which the Maidu of the link above took much of their information) which, amazingly had a slightly different spelling of Ta'doiko labeled on a map, here, page 446.

Since I was on such a roll, I decided to find another place place mentioned in the complete version of the story than the one I blogged.

Marysville Buttes is where the spirits of the dead go to eat spirit food. Again, the internet is amazing for the resources it could provide. I found the entire history of the NGS's markers, and one mentioning that the marker formerly locating Marysville Buttes has its carving scratched out and renamed Sutter Buttes ( I later found that Wikipedia says the same thing, and the first google hit for marysville buttes is sutter buttes). The history of the marker went back to 1876. This holy site later became the staging ground for many of General Fremont's attacks on the Natives and Mexicans who were in charge of California at the time. It even later, and more provokingly, became an ICBM missle storage facility. How's that for spirit food? Marysville Buttes is here, just a few miles south of Ta'doiko.

There is more to that story Ku'ksuu, the first man must be what the Kuksu cult is named after. The Kuksu Cult is best called a religion, and it spanned at least a dozen different langauge communities and tribes spanning from the Sierras to the Bay area and south as far as Bakersfield, I think. I also think Father-of-Secret-Society is a representative of teh Kuksu Cult (its also called a secret society) and got 'written in' at some point by the old story tellers.

The world began off the Durham-Dayton Highway, near Fimple Road. Case closed.