when I was a
little girl old Indians who had lost someone would cry a lot and let the
tears run down their faces and not wash their faces until they were real
dirty and black with fire smoke." Crying at a funeral was expected and in
fact positively sanctioned. At a funeral conducted while I was present the
sheriff arrested a drunken Washo who was wailing quite loudly. The Indians
were all bitter about this because: "All of us cry at a funeral whether we
are drunk or not. That's the way the Washo do it." (This funeral was that
of a murder victim and the sheriff was present because he feared there
might be a reprisal attempt.)

A newspaper report of a funeral in Genoa, Nevada, in the late 1880's
records that the Indians had borrowed a wagon from a white man to
transport the corpse (that of a well-known Indian woman) to the burying
ground. The wagon was followed by a large crowd of weeping mourners.

Modern funerals usually take place under the auspices of a funeral
director, and generally services are performed by a Christian minister
from the Stewart Indian agency. After the white minister has left, it is
usual for an older Indian to approach the casket and repeat the old
funeral prayers. The reason for waiting until the minister leaves is to
avoid hurting his feelings. My informants said the prayers made the older
Indians feel more comfortable. It is usually not necessary to burn the
deceased's home, but his belongings are disposed of. There is an
increasing tendency to tend graves and put flowers on them. The cemetery
at Stewart appears to be well decorated with flowers. Two old Indian
graves near Lake Tahoe are regularly visited and jars of flowers placed on
them.(8)

When the husband of one of my informants died, following a twelve-year
illness spent in a secondary house, she went to visit a daughter living
near Lake Tahoe. When she returned to Dresslerville her two sons had torn
down the shed and disposed of all their father's possessions. In deference
to their mother's rather modern views about funerals, nothing had been
placed in the casket.

While I was in Dresslerville an Indian of about forty put the torch to the
house in which his mother and father had lived. The house had been
unoccupied since their deaths. While the house burned no effort was made
to extinguish the fire or to call the fire department. A nearby rancher
saw the fire and summoned the fire department, but the Indians refused to
tell the fir