This Autobiography was written by LaVan in 1996 and is a lengthy 251 page book. After his death I finished his final chapter and closed his lifes story. There is so much more I would like to add but for now, this just gives you an idea of who my father was.
"I once had a dream that I awoke floating in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean with a friend. We soon drifted to the shore and found ourselves among a strange foreign looking people. They were Pilgrims, dressed and living in a strict and rigorous self-sacrificing manner as they did in the sixteen hundreds. I have always felt that this dream symbolized my birth among a people foreign to my spirit."
I, LaVan Martineau, was born in the middle of the depression on January 3, 1932 in Kanab, Utah. My Father was working in the Kaibab Mountains near Jacob's Lake, Arizona, at the time. When my mother's labor pains started they drove to Kanab and I was born in an upper room of a second story house.
I had a happy childhood and loved both of my parents. I had a younger sister named Betty. We were never abused or mistreated and always had our basic needs and never went hungry. In time, both of my parents became alcoholics and this resulted in waiting in the car on many Friday and Saturday night while they were in the bars drinking. They always took us with them so they could keep an eye on us rather than leaving us at home. This never really bothered my sister and I because at our young age, we always found ways to entertain ourselves as most children do.
My father’s sole law was never to lie to him. This created a great respect in my heart for him. In later life I always wanted to raise my own children with the same standards of leniency with no other law than that of honesty. In doing this, I was not disappointed in them. My father always said if I wanted to smoke or drink like him, I was never to do it behind his back, I was to come and ask him. One time my sister and I did sneak a cigarette and he broke us of that by giving us several and making us smoke them.
My mother died when I was 10 and my father when I was 18, both as a result from alcohol. My mother had a bad kidney and heart from drinking and the doctor thought she had a cold or something minor and gave her sulfa. To an alcoholic this was deadly and it killed her, she died 8 July 1942.
In 1945 my dad married Margaret Greenfield, the best thing that became of the marriage was my half brother Donald Martineau born in June of 1945. Dad and Margaret eventually separated but she would come back to Cedar to visit occasionally. My sister and I would also visit her in San Jose, California, throughout our lives and remained friendly until she died in 1991.
My dad would pass out with a cigarette in his hand which would fall into the couch and burn holes in it. I can't remember how many times we caught the couch smoldering. My dad must have went to sleep in the front room and dropped his cigarette on the couch. It appears that he then woke up and went into the back room to go to sleep. The front room caught fire and he awoke to check on it. As he opened the adjoining door, the full force of fire blasted him, and he died in the doorway.
After my dads funeral not one of my aunts or uncles asked if I had a place to stay so Edrick Bushhead, a Paiute Indian told me to come and stay with him. He lived in a sheep wagon about twelve feet long with no wheels. He said "if you're relatives don't want you, then I'll take you in.” Years later one of my aunts heard that I mentioned this to some people and she criticized me for it by saying " You know I am a cripple and it would have been hard for me" She had been on crutches from a knee injury that never healed when she fell down her cellar steps. However, she had a nice home and was well off. I never really told her Edrick had one arm cut off at the shoulder, had no job, and lived in the sheep wagon. My sister went to live with my dad's drinking buddy until she married at an early age.
Edrick and I worked side by side in the fields as we followed the migratory work bunching onions, carrots and topping sugar beets. He would do this with one arm better than I could do with two. We worked in Richfield, Utah to bunch carrots at a Japanese farm, this was a great experience. On the north side of the farm a group of about twenty-five Paiutes were encamped in tents, and then closer to the farm about one hundred Navajos. After each day's work, all the young Paiute boys would drive down to the Sevier River near Sigurd for a swim. In the spring of 1951 I was invited to go to a ranch near Gray's Lake, Idaho to work on a cattle ranch, there I herded cattle and mended fences.
During the two summers after my dad's death I went to the Whiterocks, Utah area to visit the Northern Utes. This was when I had my first experience Bear Dancing and seeing the Sun Dance. It was great to see many of the elderly men with braids, wearing a bandana around their necks and their large reservation hats. Several would be standing together talking in the sign language to the Shoshonis who spoke a different language, and also to those who had become deaf through age. This was when I first took an interest in learning the sign language that later became so helpful to me in studying petroglyphs.
In the fall of 1951 I received an order from the Selective Service to leave on December 12 and report in at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake for a physical examination. I knew that a person didn't have much choice of profession when drafted, so I talked to a couple of Paiutes my age and we decided to join the Air Force.
While we were on the train from Salt Lake to Lackland, Texas we were herded by a couple of Air Police. I thought they really had the life just riding back and forth on the train. Therefore, when it came time to make three choices of a profession in the Air Force, I put Air Police as my first choice, Weather as a second choice, and Control Tower Operator as a third choice. I was then asked a few questioned by an evaluator to see what I had done in my life to help him choose what I was best suited for. He then asked me what that consisted of and I said "I herded cows". He figured that if I could herd cows I could herd airplanes, so after I graduated from basic training I was assigned to attend the Control Tower Operator School in Biloxi, Mississippi.
The job as an Air Traffic Controller is very demanding and a controller has to memorize a lot of information about every air base in his area. This takes considerable time and a person doesn't really feel confident in this until after about six months. I was still a corporal at the time, and after six months I was assigned the job of ARTC Supervisor or Crew Chief because of the time and experience. I even had a Master Sergeant who just arrived under me in my crew. This job was great in this respect as rank only meant a higher pay. It was really as though rank never existed in Air Force Control. I received the rank of Sergeant (Airmen First Class) in February of 1953 while at McChord. Our Center was located in the same Quonset hut as the Cryptanalysis department and most of my tent mates were cryptographers. They sent all the messages in codes throughout Korea. The science of breaking codes always intrigued me, and with this exposure, I later studied it in earnest.
I had my first experience with politics in Korea as I saw General Mac Arthur fired because he wanted to win the war. General Mark Clark also landed once at Kimpo in bad weather and his pilot ignored my command to hold before landing. I wrote him up in a Discrepancy Report as he put himself above the safety rules governing all air traffic. I knew nothing would be done about it but it was fun writing up a General.
The day before I left Korea, 27 July 1953, happened to be the last day of the war and I couldn’t believe how quite it was the day I left. No F-86’s constantly scrambling to the north plus all the other air traffic. The quietness was so stunning and strange.
The girl I was later to marry, Doris Kanosh, a Paiute from Koosharem Band in Utah, was my love during my time in Korea. The following is an article written about her birth: Deere Kanosh was expecting an increase in his family and his young wife, Adrine, had negotiated a two dollar loan from me to purchase the needed layette of four diapers and enough outing flannel to line the papoose basket and to make one little gown. At 3:00 A.M. one morning I answered a knock at my door and there stood Clarence, Adrine’s brother. “Adrine pretty sick. She want you to come quick” was his laconic announcement. Then he turned to leave, I called him back and wrote a note for him to take her to a doctor. I told him to come back if the doctor refused to go to Adrine. The doctor took Adrine to the hospital where her baby was born during the day. On the following day Adrine ran away from the institution leaving her baby behind because she did not know where to find it. She walked nearly a mile to the Indian camp and the following day her mother went and brought the baby home. Adrine did not like anything about the hospital---the twilight sleep, the warm room, the clean white sheets, the bath---and believe it or not, she left because there was too much exposure and it was all too shocking to her modesty. She prefers the Indian way. Her truancy with its long walk apparently did her no harm. The baby’s name was Doris Kanosh. Written by William R. Palmer, Cedar City, Utah, Utah State Historical Quarterly, Vol. 12, p. 4:
Dr. McQuarrie, of Richfield, Utah, states that Doris Kanosh was the fist Indian born in a hospital in the state of Utah. Deere Kanosh says that the reason they went to Cedar to have their baby in the hospital was to please the doctor who urged them to do so.
We were married in the Manti Temple at Manti, Utah. It was at the Castle Air Force Base that my first child, a daughter named Dorena was born. Doris gave birth to our second girl Sophia in October of the following year.
When my four years were up in the Air Force I was offered $1500 if I would re-enlist, and also a choice of being sent to any Air Force Base in the world. I had been away from the Indians too long, and also the wild and beautiful mountains of Utah, therefore, I turned down this tempting offer and left the Air Force. I still had four more years to serve in the reserve and then I received an honorable discharge on 30 November 1959. My time serving in the Air Force was a great experience for me and a time of learning. I think that one of the most disappointing things that I learned was that a soldier’s loved ones at home are so wrapped up in their own lives that there is no one really cheering for you. In fact, when you return home, you find that some never knew you had left. This happens with many soldiers and it is discouraging since they were putting their lives on the line for country and loved ones.
I had a dream one night while I was living in Cedar City that shaped a great deal of my life. A gas station attendant disappeared one night and the Sheriff’s Department was asking everyone to help search and locate his body as foul play appeared to be involved. At this time in my life I figured I had become somewhat skillful in interpreting my dreams. Therefore, as I went to bed a couple of days after his disappearance I prayed that I would dream of the whereabouts of his body. I dreamed of following a road to the north and then to the west. At the end of this road I saw something that appeared to be ancient Egyptian.
When I awoke, I figured the dream was telling me where to go to find the body. I jumped in my car and picked up some Indian friends of mine and we followed the directions in my dream. I went north to the town of Summit and then west on a dirt road that lead through Parowan Gap to the petroglyphs. When I saw the panels, I was impressed by three symbols that appeared to represent villages. About a month earlier I had been talking to an archaeologist who was excavating at Paragonah, and he told me of three Fremont villages; the one at Paragonah, one near Fillmore and one further north. The position of these three villages-like symbols corresponded to the locations of these Fremont ruins so I figured I had partially interpreted the panel. It was this event that got me started on my life long study of petroglyphs. My dream had led me to them instead of the missing attendant. I then realized that this mission was more important than using my dreams to help the Sheriff’s Department. They eventually found his body at Wildcat Hill north of Beaver, Utah. My partial interpretation of the large panel was wrong but it was what got me started. The elderly Paiutes of the area told me that these writings did have meaning and so I knew I was on the right track.
My first real blow in life came after four happy years to a fine Indian girl who neither drank or smoked, who had “worked” in the church, and who was the light of my life. The blow came at the birth of our third child. I took her to the hospital about two in the morning. I was not allowed to witness the birth but I listened through the doorway and I heard the doctor say it was a girl. I knew that this was a mistake as we both dreamed it was a boy. I wanted to tell him but I knew he wouldn’t believe me. The delivery took about four hours, and about half way through the doctor called in another doctor to help him. They had made a judgment error, when they reached in to feel the baby with rubber gloves on, they felt its mouth and assumed it was the crotch of a baby girl and they spent too much time trying to turn the baby around. They finally decided to just pull the baby out, and when they did, Doris’ uterus was ruptured.
They rushed Doris to the operating room to operate and try to stop the bleeding. I was sitting in the reception room, and as the sun came up on that cold September morning, the doctor came over to me and said “Well, Doris is dead!” She died of shock due to a ruptured uterus on 22 September 1958. The baby was a healthy boy but he died also. Since Doris was an Indian they hadn’t taken any X-rays. If they would have let nature take its course, the baby would have come out head first and alright.
Doris was the first Indian born in a hospital in Utah, but ironically, she also died in a Utah hospital. I didn’t personally hold the doctors to blame at the time but it kind of set me against doctors as a profession. There were some other similar errors and deaths in this hospital but fate seems to have a way of balancing things. The doctor’s son became sick while he was in his internship in becoming a doctor. He was given the wrong medication and died from another doctor’s error.
I remained in Richfield for about 8 months after my wife died and then began to travel seeking to find the answer to some of the perplexing question of life. I left my two girls with their mother-in-law and returned home often.
While I was still living in Richfield, I went to the St. George area to work as an extra in the movies. I think the first movies was” They Came to Cordura” with Gary Cooper, filmed in 1958 During this period of travel and bouncing back and forth between Richfield, Shivwits and the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona.
About this time, during one of my visits to Shivwits (or Sham as all the Paiutes call it), I met Evalina McFee and took a liking to her. I wrote to her from San Carlos and received a letter that showed me that her feelings were mutual so I drove to Shivwits. We hit it off right away and got married the Indian way on November 4, 1962. By the summer of 1963, I picked up my two daughters, Dorena and Sophia, who had finished the school year in St. George. The Shivwits Reservation then became our home, and the girls were with me from then on.
When it came time for Evalina to give birth to our first child, a daughter named Carmen, we searched for the oldest doctor in town. We then waited outside the hospital until the labor pains got so close, that by the time the doctor got to the delivery room, all he had to do was catch the baby.
Evalina had become pregnant a few years later, and it was about time for her to deliver. It began to rain the day before and some of us were worried that something was going to happen to her in childbirth. I took her to the hospital and again waited outside until her labor pains were close, and then we went in and she gave birth to our daughter Jetta. She wasn’t in pain more than 45 minutes, and things couldn’t have went better. After the birth, everyone was relaxing and happy, especially me. However, the feeling that we had, that something bad was going to happen, came true the next day about 12:30 P.M. when my daughter Sophia was killed.
Sophia was playing cowboys with her sister Dorena in the culvert under the highway. She followed the urge to dash across the highway on her stick horse and was struck by a speeding car. She never saw it coming, and the driver didn’t see her in time to swerve. This was the main highway between St. George and Las Vegas, and it passed right through the main residential area of the Shivwits Reservation. The speed limit was 65. Sometime after her death I asked the highway department to post a slower speed limit through the residential area of the reservation but my advice went unheeded. In August of that same year another Paiute was killed on the same spot.
A year later in June, after our traditional wait out in front of the hospital, my third daughter from Evalina was born. We still had the same old doctor, and he never once charged us for the three births. We named our daughter Shanandoah. Her features and character are very similar to Sophia’s, and both had dimples in the same place.
While living at Shivwits, I occasionally found jobs working in the movies. Some of the movies I worked in as an extra were: “Sargents Three,” “Wagon Train,” “The Appaloosa” and “Alexander the Great.” In this movie I was one of Alexander the Great’s horse soldiers. I also served as a stand-in for John Cassavetes. When the movie was finished he asked me to go to Hollywood with him to be his stand-in. I refused as I knew I had many more important things to do in my life.
It was also during this time that I really began to study petroglyphs in earnest. I found many on the Shivwits Reservation and in Washington County. I knew that this was one of my missions in life to decipher the rock writings, so I sacrificed a lot to be able to spend most of my time recording panels in fields and studying them at home. I couldn’t do this and hold down a full time job at the same time. Most of the universities and scholars would not share their photographs and information, so I decided I had to do it all on my own.
Prior to coming to Shivwits, I studied a lot of panels in Sevier County, and due to my early belief in the Book of Mormon and the Nephites and Lamanites, I had erroneously ascribed many panels to them. This was the only pre-conceived idea I ever had concerning the origin of some of the petroglyphs. However, my cryptanalysis exposure in the Air Force led me to evaluating my pre-conceived ideas scientifically, and most of my interpreations based on this misconception were trashed. However, during these Richfield years, I did develop a good understanding of the structure of rock writing and all was not lost.
Washington County, Utah became one of the worst counties in the country for petroglyph destruction. When they put in Gunlock Dam, at least 40 boulders were covered. I went to the State, County, the Contractor, and even the front end loader to try and get them to take one hour and move most of the rocks above the water level of the reservoir so the public could view them later. I got no response whatsoever.
When the road was widened to the dam, many more were destroyed. Also when the pipeline was put in around the base of the Black Hill in St. George, Utah, many more were destroyed that could have also been protected.
It was in the Shivwits area that I began to discover panel locators, and some maps written upon rocks. These were very helpful because they could be geographically proven. It was also during these years that I discovered the relationship of rock writing to sign language. Evalina was great in giving me my freedom to travel alone and do what I needed, so I still visited many reservations, learned more of the sign language.
In 1967 I was attending a Sun Dance at Whiterocks, Utah, and met K.C. Den Dooven who was the publisher of the Western Gateways magazine in Flagstaff, Arizona. This magazine was somewhat similar to Arizona Highways. He was visiting a lady there who told him about me. He came to the Sun Dance and we talked. He saw the worn pages in my notebook that were so worn from thumbing through them that they looked a hundred years old. This convinced him that my research was in earnest and he asked me to write some articles on petroglyphs for Western Gateways. I accepted and wrote him a series of articles. These articles were entitled “Is it a Language” and came out in 3 different issues: Autumn 1968, Winter 1968, and the July issue of 1969.
After the favorable response he received from the magazine articles, he asked me to write a book. I declined at first, and said I wasn’t ready; I wanted to wait until I could read the entire writing system before I wrote a book. He finally convinced me that I should come out with what I already knew, so I conceded. Our contract was signed on 10 May 1968.
I finished my manuscript for my book, The Rocks Begin to Speak while in San Carlos, Arizona, and KC received the manuscript in full on 26 October 1970. It came out in January of 1973 and I received many good reviews. There were a few skeptics, but overall I was happy with them. Arizona Highways published an extract from my book in May of 1973, and through the following years I received many offers to lecture throughout the country. I didn’t except all of them as my purpose in life was not to become famous. I basically accepted lecture offers when they happened to be at a time I was in a certain area.
In the fall of 1973 I was flown to Ball state University in Muncie, Indiana, to give some lectures on my work with petroglyphs. B.K. Swartz Jr., the archaeologist there, and Charles L. Houck, the linguist, were interested in my work. In 1981 the three of us wrote up a joint venture on interpreting petroglyphs. It appeared in volume one of the “Occasional Papers of the American Committee to Advance the Study of Petroglyphs and Pictographs.”
In 1974 I was invited by the school on the Hualapai Reservation at Peach Springs, Arizona, to come and spend a week taking trips out to petroglyph sites to read them to the school children. We have been making our annual trek to Peach Springs ever since that time and have been to almost every petroglyph site in northwest Arizona and parts of Nevada in school busses and four-wheel drives. Lucille Watahomigie and her husband Philbert worked at the school and were basically responsible for most of these trips. Their school rated among the top four Indian Schools in the nation for cultural achievements.
Each summer, as we traveled to powwows, we also recorded thousands of rock writings sites throughout the United States and Canada. I eventually accumulated over twenty thousand photographs and 6743 sketches, and these numbers are still growing. The majority of these were recorded with the help of my girls, and the powwows helped finance our trips.
Our visits to hundreds of reservations throughout the States and Canada also gave me the opportunity to learn many things from the various Indian cultures that was to become very helpful in deciphering the writings from each area. I also gleaned bits of information pertaining to symbols still surviving among some tribes, and even met a few Indians who could still read a panel or two as handed down to them by their fathers.
My knowledge of the sign language was also greatly enhanced as I visited the Utes, Arapahos, Sioux and the Blackfeet, in the United States, and the Blood, Piegan and the Crees in Canada. There are only a few signs that vary in this large area, and even with these small variances, the
sign language of any one of these tribes can be fully understood by any of the others. I gained numerous unpublished signs that I plan on publishing in order that they might be preserved.
Much of the money I earned from royalties and lectures always went back into gas and photographs needed to continue my research. I have actually spent a small fortune in my work, and this research has been under welfare conditions. My income throughout my life has qualified me for welfare and many other subsidies including self-help housing, but I have always rejected these hand outs in order to remain independent and free to come and go as I please. Any person tied to welfare, or who is in debt has little freedom.
At the time of this writing I have spend 40 years devoting almost my entire life, seeking to decipher the history of the American Indian as contained in the rock writings. Studying them has almost become my entire life, and I have often spent anywhere from four to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out working on them. I could have been a rich man if I had of pursued some of the professions I became skilled in such as Air Traffic Control, surveying, and numerous other things. If I was eager and greedy, I could also have made up a lot of hasty interpretations and published many books to enhance my wallet. I have only written one book so far on petroglyphs as I still want to wait until I can finish reading them before I publish any more.
I haven’t let the envy of a very few hinder me in what I know is best for all Indians. History is replete of how the envy of a few Indians has destroyed entire cultures, and I am not going to let that envy do the same in my field. An envious person always complains that others are making money in preserving their culture which often discourages them from doing it. Yet, that envious person will never make any effort on his own to do that preserving, and if offered money as a consultant, he will be the first to accept it.
This envy not only applies to Indians, but to many so called “Rock Art Experts” who ignore the science of cryptanalysis and come up with every theory imaginable, from records of equinoxes, solstices, sheep counting, messages from outer space, art, doodling, numerous other unproved ideas. They completely ignore all that the Indians of the last century had to say about them such as being based on the sign language and consisting of records of everything important. The fields of archeology and petroglyph study have become a fruitless field hindered with weeds of politics. When politics color interpretation and history, it is no longer history.
I don’t know how many moccasins and shoes I have worn out following literal Indian trails grown over with time in order to check out tentative translations of maps and locators but they must be in the hundreds. They were the first to back up my theories, because if I found geographical proof of what the writings said, then I knew I was right. Confirmation of symbol translation on geographical paths have now led me to the migration and religious paths preserved upon the rocks down through the ages. A language becomes self proving when hundreds of examples of a word meaning the same thing proves out each time it is found, and now the personal rewards are forthcoming. I feel as a Columbus discovering a new world and viewing its many hidden wonders all alone, because others doubt that I can read it. The white men’s road became too steep for me because it wasn’t my road. The Indian road also became steep but I never quit, and now I am over the top and the translation process is all down hill. I am following hundreds of paths that have been grown over too long with the weeds of time, disuse, prejudice, neglect, scorn, politics, and envy. I am learning what people don’t really want to know.
