2. The early equestrian period, from 1700 to 1750 was distinguished by
the expansion of Shoshone-speaking peoples into the Canadian plains to
the north and southward toward Texas, where they became known as
Comanche.
3. After 1750, the northern tribes, especially the Blackfoot, acquired
the horse and firearms and drove the Shoshone south and west, where
they retreated beyond the Continental Divide, in contiguity with those
Shoshone who had remained in the Great Basin. By this time, the
Comanche had become differentiated from their northern colinguists.
4. The fur period began about 1810, and from this time, Shoshone
history became inextricably connected with that of the American
frontiers. Although the game supply declined during this epoch, the
Shoshone were not dispossessed from their hunting grounds and
continued substantially the same subsistence cycle.
5. The year 1840 saw the end of the fur trade and the beginning of
westward emigration. As will be seen, the buffalo herds west of the
Divide had disappeared by this date, and the Shoshone were
increasingly forced to seek winter supplies on the Missouri waters.
6. The Shoshone signed treaties in 1868 in which they were forced to
accept reservation life. At about this time, gold miners entered the
Sweetwater country, and the transcontinental railroad was completed.
The following decade saw the end of the buffalo in the west and the
introduction of open-range cattle grazing. Shoshone history then
became merged with the history of the American West.
During the periods of the fur trade and early emigration increasing
amounts of information on Shoshonean and Mono-Bannock speakers became
available. Political organization among these peoples was
characteristically amorphous, and the early diarists and chroniclers
had little basis for distinguishing subgroups in this vast region.
With the exception of the Paiute-Shoshone split, language differences
gave no firm basis for differentiation, and even this major division
of the Uto-Aztecan stock was commonly not recognized. Accordingly,
travelers classified the Indians of the region on the basis of their
most obvious characteristic, whether or not they possessed horses and
hunted buffalo. Alexander Ross observed (1924, pp. 239-240):
The great Snake nation may be divided into three divisions,
namely, the Shirry-dikas, or dog-eaters; the War-are-ree-kas,
or fish-eaters; and the Ban-at-tees, or robbers; but as a
nation they all go by the general appellation of Sho-sho-nes,
or Snakes. The word Sho-sho-nes means, in the Snake language,
"inland." The Snakes, on the west side of the Rocky Mountains,
are what the Sioux are on the east side--the most numerous and
powerful in the country. The Shirry-dikas are the real
Sho-sho-nes, and live in the plains, hunting the buffalo. They
are generally slender, but tall, well-made, rich in horses,
good warriors, well dressed, clean in their camps, and in their
personal appearance bold and independent.
The War-are-ree-kas are very numerous, but neither united nor
formidable. They live chiefly by fishing, and are to be found
all along the rivers, lakes, and water-pools throughout the
country. They are more corpulent, slovenly, and indolent than
the Shirry-dikas. Badly armed and badly clothed, they seldom go
to war. Dirty in their camp, in their dress, and in their
persons, they differed so far in their general habits from the
Shirry-dikas that they appeared as if they had been people
belonging to another country. These are the defenceless
wretches whom the Blackfeet and Piegans from beyond the
mountains generally make war upon. These foreign mercenaries
carry off the scalps and women of the defenseless
War-are-ree-kas and the horses of the Shirry-dikas, but are
never formidable nor bold enough to attack the latter in fair
and open combat.
The Ban-at-tees, or mountain Snakes, live a predatory and
wandering life in the recesses of the mountains, and are to be
found in small bands or single wigwams among the caverns and
rocks. They are looked upon by the real Sho-sho-nes themselves
as outlaws, their hand against every man, and every man's hand
against them. They live chiefly by plunder. Friends and foes
are alike to them. They generally frequent the northern
frontiers, and other mountainous parts of the country. In
summer they go almost naked, but during winter they clothe
themselves with the skins of rabbits, wolves, and other
animals.
Ross's "Ban-at-tees" undoubtedly include the people now termed the
Northern Paiute of Oregon; this seems confirmed by his placement of
the western limits of the "Snakes" at the western end of the Blue
Mountain Range in Oregon. The loose inclusion of the Oregon Northern
Paiute as Snakes results in some obscurity in the early sources. They
are frequently (and on valid linguistic grounds) lumped with the
Bannock, as was done by Ross. It is noteworthy that contemporary Fort
Hall informants still speak of the Oregon Paiute as Bannocks.
The distinction between mounted and unmounted peoples continues in
Zenas Leonard's journal (1934, p. 80):
The Snake Indians, or as some call them, the Shoshonie, were
once a powerful nation, possessing a glorious hunting ground on
the east side of the [Rocky] mountains; but they, like the
Flatheads, have been almost annihilated by the revengeful
Blackfeet, who, being supplied with firearms, were enabled to
defeat all Indian opposition. Their nation had been entirely
broken up and scattered throughout all this wild region. The
Shoshonies are a branch of the once powerful Snake tribe, as
are also the more abject and forlorn tribe of Shuckers, or,
more generally termed, Diggers and Root-eaters, who keep in the
most retired recesses of the mountains and streams, subsisting
on the most unwholesome food, and living the most like animals
of any race of beings.
Russell also commented that half the Shoshone live in large villages
and hunt buffalo, while the other half travel in small groups of two
to ten families, have few horses, and live on roots, fish, seeds, and
berries (Russell, 1955, p. 143). Wilkes follows this same dichotomy
(1845, 4:471-472):
The Snakes, or Shoshones, are widely scattered tribes, and some
even assert that they are of the same race as the Comanches,
whose separation is said to be remembered by the Snakes: it has
been ascertained, in confirmation of this opinion, that they
both speak the same language. The hunters report that the
proper country of the Snakes is to the east of Youta Lake and
north of the Snake or Lewis River; but they are found in many
detached places. The largest band is located near Fort Boise on
the Snake River, to the north of the Bonacks. The Snakes have
horses and firearms, and derive their subsistence both from the
chase and from fishing. There are other bands of them, to the
north of the Bonacks, who have no horses, and live on acorns
and roots, their only arms being bows and arrows. In
consequence of the mode of gaining their subsistence, they are
called Diggers and are looked upon with great contempt.
Wilkes further commented (p. 473) that there had been a general
north-to-south tribal pressure in which the Blackfoot had occupied
former Shoshone lands: "the country now in possession of the Snakes,
belonged to the Bonacks, who have been driven to the Sandy Desert."
Father De Smet reported that the "Shoshonees or Root-diggers" had a
population of 10,000, divided into "several parties" (De Smet, 1906,
27:163). The missionary claimed they were called Snakes because they
burrowed into the earth and lived on roots, and commented (ibid.):
They would have no other food if some hunting parties did not
occasionally pass beyond the mountains in pursuit of the
buffalo, while a part of the tribe proceeds along the banks of
the Salmon River, to make provision for the winter, at the
season when the fish come up from the sea.
Albert Gallatin described the various Shoshone populations and their
orbits in 1848, as follows (Hale, 1848, p. 18):
Shoshonees or Snake Indians ... bounded north by Sahaptins,
west by the Waiilatpu, Lutuami, and Palaiks; extend eastwardly
east of the Rocky Mountains.... The country of the Shoshonees
proper is east of Snake River. The Western Shoshonees, or
Wihinasht, live west of it; and between them and the Shoshonees
proper, another branch of the same family, called Ponasht or
Bonnaks, occupy both sides of the Snake River and the valley of
its tributary, the Owyhee. The Eastern Shoshonees are at war
with the Blackfeet and the Opsarokas. The most northern of
these have no horses, live on acorns and roots, are called
diggers, and considered by our hunters the most miserable of
the Indians.
Gallatin's division is the first, to our knowledge, to apply the terms
Eastern and Western Shoshone.
In Schoolcraft's Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge the Shoshone are
described in terms consistent with previously published material
(1860, 1:198):
The various tribes and bands of Indians of the Rocky Mountains,
south of latitude 43 deg., who are known under this general name
[Shoshonee], occupy the elevated area of the Utah basin. They
embrace all the territory of the Great South Pass between the
Mississippi Valley and the waters of the Columbia.... Traces of
them, in this latitude, are first found in ascending the
Sweetwater River of the north fork of the Platte, or Nebraska.
They spread over the sources of the Green River ... on the
summit south of the Great Wind river chain of mountains, and
thence westward, by the Bear river valley, to and down the
Snake river, or Lewis fork of the Columbia. Under the name of
Yampa-tick-ara, or Root-Eaters, and Bonacks, they occupy, with
the Utahs, the vast elevated basin of the Great Salt Lake,
extending south and west to the borders of New Mexico and
California.... They extend down the Sae-ap-tin or Snake River
valley, to north of latitude 44 deg., but this is not the limit to
which the nations speaking the Shoshonee language in its
several dialects, have spread. Ethnologically, the people
speaking it are one of the primary stocks of the Rocky Mountain
chain.
Other general descriptions of the Shoshonean-speaking peoples of the
Basin and Rocky Mountain areas are found in the literature of the
period, but add little to the foregoing accounts, which give us a
picture of a population sharing a common language (except the Bannock)
and living in peaceful relations with one another. They were roughly
divided into mounted and unmounted populations located in the eastern
and western parts of the territory, respectively. While the mounted
people appeared to have had some degree of political cohesion and
military effectiveness, the "Diggers" are uniformly represented as
politically atomistic, impoverished, and weak in the face of their
enemies.
Since a work of this type relies heavily upon identification of
peoples mentioned in historical sources, it would be well to review
the varying nomenclature applied to the Shoshone.
Most early writers designated the Shoshonean-speaking population as
"Shoshonees" or "Snake Indians." The term "Snake" was generally
applied indiscriminately to the Northern Paiute of Oregon and to
Bannock and Shoshone groups in southern Idaho. Frequently only the
mounted people were considered true "Snakes," as in Wilkes's statement
that "the proper country of the Snakes is to the east of the Youta
Lake and north of the Snake or Lewis River; but they are found in many
detached places" (Wilkes, 1845, 4:471). He goes on to say (p. 472)
that some Snakes have no horses, but these he locates north of the
Bannock.
Although de la Verendrye's "Gens du Serpent" can only be presumed to
be Shoshone, there is little doubt that the "Snake" of whom Thompson's
Blackfoot informant spoke were Shoshone. Lewis and Clark were told by
the Indians of the Columbia River that they lived in fear of the
"Snake Indians," but this was in reference to a tribe of the Deschutes
River in central Oregon (Lewis and Clark, 1904-06, 3:147). Those
Indians whom they met on the Lemhi River in Idaho were, however,
termed "Shoshonees." The name, "Snake," was rapidly applied to almost
any Indians between South Pass and the Columbia River. In March, 1826,
Peter Skene Ogden reported a "Snake" camp of two hundred on the Raft
River (Ogden, 1909, 10 (4):357). These Indians were undoubtedly either
Shoshone or Bannock, as their location indicates. Nathaniel Wyeth
traveled in the Raft River country in August, 1832, and similarly
spoke of seeing "Snakes" (Wyeth, 1899, p. 164). Without making any
sharp distinctions between the Indians sighted, Wyeth, in the same
region, mentioned "Diggers" (pp. 164, 167), "Pawnacks" (p. 168), and
"Sohonees" (ibid.). In 1839, Farnham saw "a family of Root Digger
Indians" on the Snake River, near the mouth of Raft River (Farnham,
1843, p. 74). These Indians were no doubt Shoshone, but the term was
also applied to Northern Paiute, for Ogden encountered "Snakes" while
on a trapping expedition in the Harney Basin of Oregon in 1826 (Ogden,
1910, 11 (2):206), as did John Work six years later (Work, 1945, p.
6). The failure to recognize the Northern Paiute as being
linguistically distinct from the Shoshone continued for some time. In
1854, Indian Agent Thompson reported from the Oregon Territory that
among the Indians under his jurisdiction were "Sho-sho-nies," who were
divided into three major groups: the "Mountain Snakes," "Bannacks,"
and "Diggers" (Thompson, 1855, p. 493).
North of the present boundary of the state of Nevada, "Snake" and
"Shoshone" or variations thereof were the names commonly applied to
all the Indians. Frequently, "Snake" meant specifically Paiute and
Bannock, or any mounted Indians, as distinguished from the footgoing
"Diggers." From the fact that these terms were applied to Indians in
widely separated regions and having different languages, it can only
be concluded that the nomenclature designated no particular group
having political, cultural, or linguistic unity.
"Snake" was but infrequently applied to the Indians south of Oregon
and Idaho, where the term "Shoshone" was more widely used. The
unmounted Shoshonean-speaking peoples of Utah and Nevada were also
commonly referred to as "Diggers" or "Root Diggers," a name frequently
given to the unmounted Shoshone of Idaho. Washington Irving referred
to those Indians seen on the Humboldt River by Walker's party in 1833
as "Shoshokoes" (Irving, 1873, p. 384). Zenas Leonard, who was a
member of Walker's expedition, referred to the Indians of the Humboldt
River region as "Bawnack, or Shoshonies" (Leonard, 1934, p. 78), but
Father De Smet spoke of all the unmounted people of the Great Basin as
"Soshocos" and described their abject poverty (De Smet, 1905, 3:1032).
In 1846, Edwin Bryant entered the Great Basin en route to California.
Of the Shoshone he said: "The Shoshonees or Snakes occupy the country
immediately west of the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains" (Bryant,
1885, p. 137). He differentiated this powerful, mounted people from
the "miserable Digger Indians, calling themselves Soshonees," whom he
met west of Great Salt Lake (p. 168). As he continued down the
Humboldt River in Nevada, he noted: "All the Digger Indians of this
valley claim to be Shoshonees" (p. 195), but despite this affirmation,
he continued to refer to them as "Diggers." Similarly, two Indians met
by Bryant's party near Humboldt Sink in Northern Paiute territory were
called "Digger Indians" (p. 211). Howard Stansbury, who explored the
Great Salt Lake region in 1849, referred, however, to the Indians west
of the lake as "Shoshonees or Snake Indians" (Stansbury, 1852, p. 97).
The Western Shoshone were generally called "Diggers" by the emigrants
who took part in the gold rush to California. One of them, Franklin
Langworthy of Illinois, stated: "All the Indians along the Humboldt
call themselves Shoshonees, but the whites call them Diggers, from the
fact that they burrow under ground in the winter" (Langworthy, 1932,
p. 119). Reuben Shaw, another "Forty-niner," referred to the Indians
on the California road along the Humboldt as "Diggers" (Shaw, 1948,
p. 123), "Root Diggers" (p. 119), and "Humboldt Indians" (p. 130). In
1854 Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith explored the route of the forty-first
parallel in search of a possible railroad route and encountered
Gosiute, Western Shoshone, and Northern Paiute Indians. He referred to
all of them as "Diggers," and he apparently used this term generically
for all the impoverished, horseless Indians between Salt Lake City and
the Sierra Nevada Mountains. At Deep Creek, in Utah, he "found a band
of twenty Shoshonee Indians encamped, besides women and children. They
are mounted, and contrast strikingly with their Goshoot neighbors
(Diggers) ..." (Beckwith, 1855, p. 25). Beckwith classed only mounted
Indians as Shoshone: in Butte Valley, Nevada, the inhabitants of a
"Digger wick-e-up" fled from the party, "taking us for Shoshonees" (p.
26). After leaving Western Shoshone territory he spoke of "Digger
Indians, who call themselves Pah-Utah, however" (p. 34).
The name "Shoshone" became more commonly applied to the Western
Shoshone after they had had increased contact with the whites. The
French traveler, Jules Remy, spoke of them as "Shoshones, or Snakes"
in 1855 (Remy and Brenchley, 1861, p. 123), and the British explorer,
Richard Burton, distinguished the "Shoshone" from the "Gosh-Yuta"
(Burton, 1861, p. 567) and the "Pa Yuta," or Northern Paiute, in 1860
(p. 591). The term "Shoshonee" was applied by Indian Agent Holeman to
the Indians of Thousand Spring Valley, Nevada (Holeman, 1854, p.
443), and to those of the Humboldt River (p. 444); However, on Willow
Creek, Utah, Agent Garland Hurt met a group of mounted Indians whom he
called "Shoshonees, or Snakes proper, from the Green River country"
(Hurt, 1856, p. 517). He distinguished these from the "Diggers" of the
Humboldt River (p. 779). Thus the distinction between the mounted
Shoshone and the unmounted people of the more arid regions of the
Great Basin continued, despite the recognition of their unity of
language. This implicit recognition may be found in the statement made
by Brigham Young (1858, p. 599):
The Shoshones are not hostile to travelers, so far as they
inhabit this territory, except perhaps a few called "Snake
diggers," who inhabit, as before stated, along the line of
travel west of the settlements.
It is possible to document almost endlessly the ways in which the
labels "Shoshone," "Digger," and "Snake" were applied in turn or at
the same time to Shoshone-Comanche and Mono-Bannock speakers alike.
Since political or social significance has frequently been attributed
to Indians' names--both those bestowed by the whites and those by
which the several sectors of the Shoshone population referred to each
other--we will discuss this nomenclature in the context of each
section of the following report.