Enroute to Atsugewi burials no one was permitted to look back, and water was sprinkled along the path to prevent the dead person’s spirit from returning to the village. At the grave the dead were asked aloud please not to look back, for if they did other members of their families would die soon.
Cremation, that is, burning of corpses was rare among tribes of the Lassen area. At the battlefield and in other instances of death far from home, especially in the case of mountain Maidu, burning was done occasionally. After this the bones were collected, wrapped in buckskin, and then buried.
The flexed bodies of the dead were always placed in graves facing eastward. Widows customarily attempted to throw themselves into the graves, but were restrained from doing so. A basket of water was invariably placed next to the body, and most personal property of the deceased was broken and also placed in the grave. The amount of property so disposed of varied with the tribe. Mountain Maidu and especially the Yana tribes put practically everything in the grave. The latter even went so far as to include many gifts of a nature not normally associated with the sex. Aprons and baskets, for instance, might be placed in a man’s burial. Among Atsugewi the relatives retained some of the property of the deceased. Atsugewi might place some food on the grave and mark it with a vertical stick, but it was not tended later, and the site was generally soon lost.
In winter a person might be buried shallowly in the floor of a living house. Next spring the house would be torn down and the dirt walls caved in. There was variation not only between, but within tribes as to the final disposition of houses of the deceased. They might be burned down, a common practice, or they were torn down, abandoned, temporarily deserted, or torn down and rebuilt. If to be lived in again, purification of some sort was always practiced, either by burning juniper boughs in the house, smoking tobacco, bringing in aromatic plants, or treating the main beams. Among Yana tribes the family seems to have habitually abandoned the house right after the funeral and to have burned the whole thing including property and food of all the inmates, retaining only the barest necessities of life such as sleeping robes.