Kumush is the creator of the Modoc, the allied people of the Klamath, and in dialect and spelling his name is the same as the Klamath Gmok'am'c (K'mukamtch). His signature act, recorded in full by Jeremiah Curtin from the Modoc narrator Koalakaka, is the descent to the underground world of the spirits with his daughter: there the spirit-people dance by night and become dry bones by day, and after six days and nights Kumush climbs back bearing a basket of their bones, stumbling on the way, and scatters them upon the earth to become the several tribes, whom he names and to whom he gives their countries, settling the Modoc about Tule Lake and Mount Shasta. He is also held to have ordained the first shamans.