The Rocky Mountain range was not an insuperable obstacle to
communication between the Indian tribes east and west of the
Continental Divide. The Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfoot, and other
peoples of the Plains often crossed the range for purposes of hunting,
warfare, and trade. And the tribes of the Basin-Plateau region also
traversed the spine of the continent with much the same ends in mind.
But their needs were more urgent, for in the late historic period the
western part of the Great Plains of North America constituted the last
reserve of the bison, the game staple of the Indian population of the
western slope of the Rockies. Thus was established the pattern of
transmontane buffalo hunting, first reported by Lewis and Clark and
studied latterly by many anthropologists. The present volume
represents a further contribution to this research.
The Rocky Mountains are traversible by horse in all sections. In
Montana, the passes are only 5,000 to 7,000 feet in elevation, and the
Indians crossed over the same routes followed today by highways. The
Wyoming Rockies similarly presented no serious problem to nomadic
peoples. Although the Yellowstone Park area posed some difficulty for
travel, a more southerly route led over South Pass at a gentle
gradient only 7,550 feet in altitude. That the mountains were no great
challenge is illustrated by the fact that Indians traveling from Green
River to Wind River often preferred to take more direct routes through
passes over 10,000 feet high rather than to follow the more circuitous
trail over South Pass. Farther south, the Colorado Rockies and their
passes are far more lofty, but even these high ranges did not totally
prevent travel. None of these areas, of course, could be traversed in
the winter. When the snow left the high country in late spring and
early summer, however, the mountains were not only avenues of travel,
but they were also hunting grounds. None of the buffalo hunters relied
completely on that animal for food, and the high mountain parks
abounded in elk, bighorn sheep, moose, and deer. Streams were fished,
berries were gathered along their banks, and roots were dug in the
surrounding hills. For the tribes living on their flanks, the
mountains afforded an important source of subsistence.
If the Rocky Mountains did not effectively isolate Plains societies
from those of the Basin-Plateau, differences in environment certainly
did. Plains economy was based upon two animals, the horse and the
buffalo, both of which depended on sufficient grass for forage. The
horse diffused northward along both sides of the mountains, and the
richest herds were probably found among the Plateau tribes and not in
the Plains (cf. Ewers, 1955, p. 28). The greatest herds of buffalo
were found east of the Continental Divide, however, although smaller
and more scattered herds roamed the regions of higher elevation and
rainfall, immediately west of the Rockies, until about 1840. Thus,
although the standard image of "Plains culture" is derived from the
short-grass country east of the Divide, the tribes living west of the
mountains were also mounted and also had access to buffalo. Their
varying involvement in this subsistence pursuit and its associated
technology, combined with the diffusion of other items of culture,
resulted in what Kroeber has called "a late Plains overlay" of culture
in the area (Kroeber, 1939, p. 52).
The spread of Plains culture into the Basin-Plateau area has been
described by Wissler, Lowie, and others, the emphasis usually being
upon traits of material culture. Less research has been devoted to the
impact of equestrian life and the pursuit of the buffalo on the social
structure of the people of the Intermountain area. This is in itself
surprising, for a great deal of conjecture has revolved around just
this question, but in the course of research upon the societies of the
Plains proper. Such inquiry has often attempted to compare Plains
societies of the horse period with those of the pre-horse era,
revealed through archaeology and ethnohistory. In this volume, we
attempt to approach the problem through both ethnohistory and a type
of controlled comparison. That is, using the mounted, buffalo-hunting
Shoshone and Bannock as our example, we will relate their social and
economic life not only to the Plains, but to the Basin-Plateau area to
the west and to their unmounted colinguists who resided there. In this
way, we may analyze similarities and differences and attempt to answer
the question of whether certain basic social modifications did indeed
follow from the buffalo hunt.
The Indian inhabitants of western Wyoming and southeastern Idaho, the
subjects of this study, have their closest linguistic affinities with
the peoples to the west. The languages of this area are well known and
we need only briefly recapitulate their relationships. Those peoples
of the Basin-Plateau area known in the ethnographic literature as
Shoshone, Gosiute, Northern Paiute, Bannock, Ute, and Southern Paiute
all belong to the Uto-Aztecan linguistic stock and are thus related to
the Hopi and Aztec to the south and the Comanche of the southern
Plains. Within this larger grouping a number of subfamilies have been
identified. Those with which this report is concerned are the
Shoshone-Comanche and Mono-Bannock. The Shoshone-speaking peoples of
the Basin-Plateau area include the Northern, Eastern, and Western
Shoshone and the Gosiute, all of whom speak mutually intelligible
dialects. The area occupied by this population extends from the
Missouri waters on the east to beyond Austin, Nevada, on the west, and
from the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho to southern California. There are
no sharp linguistic divisions within this vast region, and phonemic
shifts are gradual throughout its extent. The Mono-Bannock division
comprehends the speakers of Northern Paiute living in the region east
of the Sierra Nevada from Owens Lake, California, to northeastern
Oregon and the Bannock Indians of southeastern Idaho, who stem
directly from the eastern Oregon Paiute.
Despite the continuity of language between the Shoshone and Bannock of
Wyoming and Idaho and the simple Basin people to the west, it has long
been obvious that the first two were culturally marginal to the
Plains. Wissler listed the Northern and Eastern Shoshone and the
Bannock among the Plains tribes, but he excluded them from his
category of groups typical of the area and described them as
"intermediate" (Wissler, 1920, pp. 19-20). Kroeber, however, was more
aware of the historical recency of Plains culture and described the
Idaho Bannock and Shoshone and the Wind River (Eastern) Shoshone as
forming "marginal subareas" of the Basin (Kroeber, 1939, p. 53). As
such, they are included in his Intermediate and Intermountain Areas.
Kroeber noted specifically of the Eastern Shoshone (p. 80):
These people, in turn, live in an area which belongs to the
Rocky Mountains physiographically, with the Basin
vegetationally: it is sagebrush, not grassland. Wind River
culture must have been of pretty pure Basin type until the
horse came in and they began to take on an overlay of Plains
culture. It was about this time, apparently, that the Comanche
moved south from them.
Shimkin, who made an intensive study of the Eastern Shoshone of the
Wind River Reservation, is inclined to emphasize their Plains
affiliation (1947_a_, p. 245):
Wind River Shoshone culture has been essentially that of the
Plains for a good two hundred years; pioneer ethnographers have
vastly overemphasized the Basin affiliations.
Assuming that this 200-year period dates approximately from the time
of Shimkin's field work in 1937-1938, this would extend the Plains
cultural position of the Shoshone back to the time at which the
Blackfoot were just acquiring horses, a period in which the use of the
horse had yet to reach the tribes north and east of the Missouri River
(Haines, 1938, pp. 433-435). Although Shimkin rightly states (1939)
that the Shoshone were among the earliest mounted buffalo hunters of
the northern Plains, it is most questionable whether one can speak of
a "Plains culture" at that time, in the sense that the term has been
used in culture area classifications. It would seem that the
resolution of this problem depends upon the questions of the degree of
stability of Plains culture and of the extent to which it is
autochthonous to the Plains.
Implicit in the discussions above is the attempt to ascertain whether
the buffalo-hunting Shoshone were one thing or another--as if the
alternatives constituted in themselves homogeneous units--or how much
their culture was a blend. Hultkrantz has taken a rather different
approach to the problem in his statement (1949, p. 157):
The conclusion is that the culture of the Wind River Shoshoni
exhibits a strange conflicting situation. It belongs neither to
the foodgatherers of the west nor to the hunting cultures of
the east--it is something sui generis. To ascribe it to anyone
of its bordering cultures is to lose the dynamic aspect of the
cultural evolution of the tribe.
He thus sees the eastern Shoshone as synthesizers and transformers of
cultural material derived from both eastern and western sources; their
culture is a blend of the two, but it is not a simple compound of
them. The present work does not attempt to answer the question of the
relation of the content of the culture of the equestrian Shoshone to
that of peoples to the east and west but will focus attention upon
social structure. And it will do this, not through a consideration of
outside influences upon the Shoshone, but by analysis of their social
institutions and the relationship of them to economic life.
Our note on the length of involvement of the Shoshone in Plains Indian
culture leads us to inquire briefly into the time depth of this
culture and its relation to the expansion of the American frontier.
Although it is quite probable that certain cultural traits and social
institutions characteristic of later Plains life had antecedents in
the pre-equestrian period, the possession of herds of horses was the
basis of later patterns of amalgamation and incipient stratification.
It also had much to do with the intensification of warfare. The horse,
according to Haines (1938), spread from the Spanish Southwest to more
northerly areas along both sides of the Rocky Mountains. Its diffusion
along the western slope of the range was presumably the more rapid,
and Haines gives evidence indicating that the Shoshone had horses
about 1690 to 1700, at which time the animal was found no farther
north than the Arkansas-Oklahoma border in the Plains (ibid., p. 435).
From this Shoshone center, the use of the horse spread north to the
Columbia River, the Plateau, and the northern plains. It followed an
independent route north from Texas to the Missouri River and the
fringe of the woodlands.
Their early acquisition of the horse may have allowed the Shoshone to
penetrate the northern plains as far as Saskatchewan in the early
eighteenth century, for David Thompson's journals tell of warfare
between the Blackfoot and Shoshone in that region at some time in the
1720's or early 1730's (Tyrell, 1916, pp. 328 ff.). The northerly
extension of the Shoshone in the early horse period, and perhaps
before, has been discussed and generally accepted by many students of
the area (cf. Wissler, 1910, p. 17; Shimkin, 1939, p. 22; Ewers, 1955,
pp. 16-17; Hultkrantz, 1958, p. 150). There is little information on
Shoshone population movements between this date and the journey of
Lewis and Clark. In 1742 the de la Verendrye brothers undertook an
expedition into the northern plains of the United States and reported
upon the ferocity of a people known to them as the "Gens du Serpent,"
presumably the Snake, or Shoshone. De la Verendrye wrote of these
people (Margry, 1888, p. 601):
No nation is their friend. We are told that in 1741 they
entirely laid waste to seventeen villages, killed all the men
and old women, made slaves of the young women and traded them
to the sea for horses and merchandise.
The Gens du Serpent are not precisely located, but the explorers were
told by the "Gens de Chevaux" that they lie in the path to the western
sea. Later, a "Gens d'Arc" chief invited them to join in an expedition
against the Gens du Serpent on "the slopes of the great mountains
that are near the sea" (p. 603). They later found an abandoned enemy
village near the mountains, but returned without further contact.
Shimkin believes that this village was in the Black Hills (Shimkin,
1939, p. 22), but the journals are most hazy on geography. The
previously cited information from the Gens d'Arc chief suggests that
the group was located farther west, in the vicinity of the Rocky
Mountains. It must be remembered, however, that there has been
considerable contention among historians, not only over the route of
the de la Verendrye brothers, but over the identification of the Gens
du Serpent. L. J. Burpee has reviewed (1927, pp. 13-23) various
conflicting interpretations of the journals, and the matter can hardly
be considered settled.
By this period, the Blackfoot and other northern tribes were already
armed with guns (see Ewers, 1955, p. 16; Haines, 1938, p. 435),
obtained through commerce with the French and English traders of
Canada. They had also become mounted, and it may be surmised that the
Shoshone lost their equestrian advantage at almost the same time that
their enemies acquired guns. Thus the Shoshone retreat from the
Canadian plains may well have begun before 1750, as Thompson's
narrative indeed suggests (Tyrrell, 1916, pp. 334 ff.). The process
was certainly complete by 1805, when Lewis and Clark found the Lemhi
River Shoshone hiding in the fastnesses west of the Bitterroot Range
and lamenting their loss of the Missouri River buffalo country to
better-armed groups. The Shoshone, once masters of the northern
Plains, had fallen upon bad times. They complained to the explorers
that they were forced to reside on the waters of the Columbia River
from the middle of May to the first of September for fear of the
Blackfoot, who had driven them out of the buffalo country with
firearms (Lewis and Clark, 1904-06, 2:373). Their forays into the
Missouri drainage were made only in strength with other Shoshone and
their Flathead allies (2:374). The Shoshone apparently were able to
utilize areas of Montana adjacent to the Bitterroot Range, for signs
of their root-digging activities were seen on the Beaverhead River
(2:329-334). This pattern of transmontane buffalo hunting described by
Lewis and Clark remained essentially the same until its final end
after the establishment of the reservation, and will be described in
detail later in this work.
It is possible now to discern three periods in this early phase of
Shoshone history. The first, the footgoing period, is unknown, and
little can be inferred of Shoshone location and movements. The second
period is characterized by the acquisition of the horse, and we would
conjecture that a good deal of territorial expansion took place after
that time. The Comanche differentiated from the main Shoshone group at
the beginning of the eighteenth century. Although the Comanche
maintained communication with their northern colinguists, the
territories of the two groups were not contiguous by the end of the
century, and their histories followed separate courses. The extension
of the Shoshone into the northern Plains may possibly have predated
the acquisition of the horse, for it seems quite likely that they
occupied fairly extensive areas east of the Rockies in the footgoing
period. But, on the other hand, it seems unlikely that in the period
immediately preceding 1700, the most probable date for the acquisition
of the horse, they extended from the Arkansas River on the south to
the Bow River in Saskatchewan. This would be especially unlikely if
later distribution of Shoshone-speakers in the Basin-Plateau was
substantially the same in the earlier period also. We would
conjecture, then, that equestrian life gave the Shoshone the mobility
to extend into the Canadian buffalo grounds but that they were pushed
back beyond the divide well before 1800. As Shimkin has noted, the
ravages of smallpox and the resulting decline of population probably
contributed to their territorial shrinkage (Shimkin, 1939, p. 22).
By 1810, the early explorations of Thompson, Lewis and Clark, and
others bore fruit in the commercial exploitation of the far Northwest.
The fur trade had already reached the Plains and the Rockies in
Canada, and a fierce competition was being waged by the Hudson's Bay
Fur Company and the North West Company for the patronage of the
Indians there. The British interests pushed southward from Canada, and
in 1809 David Thompson established North West Company trading posts on
Pend Oreille Lake at the mouth of the Clark Fork River and another
farther up that stream within the borders of present-day Montana. At
the same time, American traders were pushing westward, and Andrew
Henry crossed the Continental Divide to locate his trading post on
Henry's Fork of the Snake River in 1810. Also, John Jacob Astor's
Pacific Fur Company established the ill-fated Astoria post at the
mouth of the Columbia River in 1811. Although this particular American
enterprise foundered, Manuel Lisa, the guiding spirit of the Missouri
Fur Company, penetrated the Missouri River country and founded a post
on the Yellowstone River at the mouth of the Big Horn in 1807. From
this point his trappers spread into the near-by mountain country. The
most famous of these mountain men was John Colter, who trapped the
country of the Blackfoot and Crow and discovered Yellowstone Park.
The northern Plains and Rockies had thus been entered and partially
explored by 1812, and increasing numbers of trappers poured into the
new Louisiana Purchase and the lands beyond. Astor stepped into the
territory of the Missouri Fur Company after Lisa's death in 1820, and
in 1822 the Western Division of his American Fur Company was
established. Fort Union was built on the upper Missouri to serve as
the headquarters of Astor's mountain realm, and steamboats served the
post after 1832. A decade before this date, the Rocky Mountain Fur
Company was established, and in the following year, 1823, the
company's trappers began to exploit intensively the drainages of the
Wind River and the upper Snake and Green rivers. The Rocky Mountain
Company established a new pattern of trading. Eschewing the rigid and
hierarchical organization of the British companies, it relied mainly
upon the services of free trappers, who gathered once a year at agreed
places to meet the company's supply trains. These gatherings, the
famous trappers' rendezvous, were held in the summer at various places
in Shoshone country--Pierre's Hole, Cache Valley, or the Green River.
The trappers of the Rocky Mountain Company and later of the American
Fur Company invested every fastness of the Shoshone hunting grounds in
relentless pursuit of the beaver, the vital ingredient of the
gentleman's top hat. The intense traffic in the Shoshone region was
abetted by the penetration of the Snake River drainage by Donald
McKenzie of the North West Company, beginning in 1818, and later by
Peter Skene Ogden, under the auspices of the Hudson's Bay Company. The
climax of fur trapping came in the middle of the decade of the
1830's, for at the peak of activity the commerce collapsed.
Competition between the various trading companies had been ruinous,
the streams had been thoroughly trapped out, and the beaver hat went
out of fashion. By 1840, the fur trade in the northwest part of the
United States was substantially ended.
During the period 1810-1840 the Shoshone and their neighbors lost the
isolation they had formerly enjoyed and came into close contact with
the whites. The latter were of a different type than those with whom
the Indians later had to deal. They lived off the land, but at the
same time they did not dispossess the Indians from their hunting
grounds. Although there were sporadic clashes between the trappers and
Shoshone and Bannock groups, relations were largely amicable. The
trappers married Indian women and lived for varying periods with
Indian bands. And both found a common enemy in the Blackfoot. The
Indians also traded with the whites and through them obtained
firearms, iron utensils, and other commodities, including the raw
liquor of the frontier. But the American companies apparently did not
attempt to utilize Indian labor to the same extent as did the British
companies. The bulk of the fur yield was garnered by the free trappers
and not by Indians. The Shoshone traded some small animal furs and
buffalo robes to the whites, but they also sold meat, horses, and
other commodities. They never became fur trappers in the same complete
way as did the northern Algonkian and Athapaskan peoples.
After the decline of the fur trade, the Shoshone did not return to
their pristine state of isolation. In the early 1840's, shortly after
the debacle of the beaver trade, a strong surge of immigration from
the States to Oregon began. The road to Oregon followed trails well
marked by the trappers. It ascended the Platte and North Platte rivers
and thence to the South Pass via the Sweetwater. From South Pass the
trail went down to Fort Bridger, established in 1843, and then turned
to the northwest and Fort Hall on the Snake River. The California
branch of the trail bent southwest before reaching Fort Hall and
descended the Humboldt River. The initial trickle of emigration grew
into a great stream, and after the discovery of gold in California the
Oregon Trail became a great highway to the west.
Busy though the trail was, the emigrants had but a single purpose.
This was to cross the "Great American Desert," or the Plains, and
reach the promised lands of the Pacific Coast. Except for the
immediate environs of the emigrant road, the mountain country
contained fewer whites than during the previous decade. This situation
soon changed. In 1847 the Mormon migration reached the Salt Lake
Valley, and during the following years Mormons settled adjacent areas
of Wyoming and Idaho. Miners poured into the Sweetwater River country
of Wyoming in the 1860's and in 1869 Fort Stambaugh was established at
South Pass to protect them and the emigrant road. This route, however,
had already seen its greatest days, for the Central Pacific Railroad
was completed in the same year.
The Wild West was substantially ended by this date, and the Shoshone
signed treaties in 1868 which gave those of Wyoming the Wind River
Reservation and those of Idaho the Fort Hall Reservation.
Sedentarization of these buffalo-hunting nomads was completed during
the 1870's, by which time the region was being settled by white
ranchers and their Texas herds. Shortly after 1880, the buffalo herds
had been almost completely exterminated, and so also had Plains Indian
life.
The era from 1700 to 1880 was thus one of great change for the
Shoshone. We recapitulate its principal periods.