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The Shoshone, Shoshoni, or Snake are a Native American group consisting of several bands. They are closely related to the Paiutes, Comanches, and Utes and share very similar Shoshone languages. The Shoshone lived in a wide area around the Great Basin and Great Plains areas in a number of bands headed by chiefs with shifting membership. The Shoshone adopted a horse culture but had trouble competing with tribes to their east who had better access to European trade and weapons. Famous tribe members include Washakie, Sacagawea who guided the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and Pocatello whose name was used by the city of Pocatello, Idaho.
There are three large divisions of the Shoshone - the Northern, the Western and the Eastern. The Northern concentrated in eastern Idaho, western Wyoming, and north-eastern Utah. The Eastern lived in Wyoming, northern Colorado and Montana. Conflict with the Blackfoot, Crow, Lakota, Cheyennes, and Arapahos pushed them south and westward after about 1750. The Western ranged from central Idaho, northwestern Utah, central Nevada, and in California about Death Valley and Panamint Valley. This group is sometimes called the Panamint. The Idaho groups of Western Shoshone were called Tukuaduka, or Sheep Eaters while the Nevada/Utah ones were called the Gosiute and the Toi Ticutta (cattail eaters). From the Lewis and Clark expedition: Among the buffalo hunters were the Lemhi Shoshones, who had once lived on the plains of what is now Montana. The Lemhi band had superb horsemen and brave warriors but had grown poor and hungry of late. Their musket-bearing enemies - the Blackfeet, Atsinas and Hidatsas - had driven the band from the rich buffalo plains into the mountains. The band’s attempts to return to the plains and hunt buffalo put them at risk for attacks like the one in the spring of 1805, when the Atsinas killed or captured many Shoshone men, stole their horses and destroyed most of their tepees. Their enemies had acquired muskets from Canadian fur traders, but the Shoshones traded with the Spanish, who had refused to give them firearms. The Lemhi Shoshones sought such weapons to protect themselves and to hunt. Because of the great losses they had suffered, the Shoshone men and women had cut their hair at the neck in a show of mourning. But Meriwether Lewis later noted, “Notwithstanding their extreem poverty they are not only cheerful but even gay, fond of gaudy dress and amusements...” In August 1805, the Lemhi Shoshones were living in the mountains, sustained only by roots, berries and, infrequently, fish and small game. They were preparing for another buffalo-hunting venture to the plains. On August 13, some Shoshone women gathering food a few miles from their village saw four strangers drawing near. It was Lewis and three of his men. Fearful at first, the women saw that the men were friendly after Lewis laid down his gun, gave them trinkets and painted their faces with vermilion, a symbol of peace. The women convinced an arriving war party of 60 Shoshones that the strangers were friendly, and Lewis confirmed this with more gifts for the warriors, including an American flag. The principle chief, named Cameahwait (One Who Never Walks) welcomed Lewis and his men, and from that point the Shoshones treated them as guests, sharing what food the Indians had and providing the men with a tepee for their stay. Lewis and his men were the first white people the Shoshones had ever seen. At camp, Cameahwait described to Lewis the impassable rivers and shores ahead, confirming that no all-water route could take the Corps through to the Pacific Ocean. They would have to traverse the daunting Bitterroot Mountains to continue the expedition. Horses would be crucial for such a mountainous trek, and the Corps hoped to acquire some from the Shoshones’ impressive herd of about 700. In the days before Lewis had met the Indians, he had written, “If we do not find [the Shoshones], I fear the successful issue of our voyage will be very doubtful.” Cameahwait and a group of warriors traveled with Lewis to join Clark’s camp and negotiate for horses. Communicating via a translation chain, the Shoshones and the captains had begun negotiating when a great coincidence occurred: Sacagawea, who was raised as a Shoshone but had been kidnapped years earlier by Hidatsas, recognized Cameahwait as her brother. After an emotional reunion, the negotiations proceeded and Cameahwait agreed to sell the Corps the horses they needed. The Shoshones were most concerned about securing guns in return. Lewis wrote that Cameahwait told him, “If we had guns, we could live in the country of the buffaloe and eat as our enimies do, and not be compelled to hide ourselves in these mountains and live on roots and berries as the bear do.” Lewis pledged that upon the Corps’ return to the East, “whitemen would come to them with a number of guns and every other article necessary to their defence and comfort.”
By the 1840s, the Northwestern Shoshoni had adopted most of the Plains Culture, using the horse for mobility and the hunting of game. Chief Pocatello especially led his band on numerous hunts for buffalo in the Wyoming area. Pocatello also gained notoriety as a reckless and fearless marauder along the Oregon and California trails. The Wasatch Mountains provided small game for the Northwestern bands, but of even greater importance were the grass seeds and plant roots which grew in abundance in the valleys and along the hillsides of northern Utah before the cattle and sheep of the white man denuded these rich areas and left many of the Shoshoni tribes in a starving condition and to suffer under the ignominy of being called "Digger Indians." Before white penetration, the Great Basin and Snake River Shoshoni had been among the most ecologically efficient and well-adapted Indians of the American West. The tragic transformation for the Northwestern Shoshoni to a life of privation and want came with the occupation by Mormon farmers of their traditional homeland. The white pioneers slowly moved northward along the eastern shores of Great Salt Lake until by 1862 they had taken over Cache Valley, home of Bear Hunter's band. In addition, California-bound emigrants had wasted Indian food supplies as the travelers followed the Salt Lake Road around the lake and across the salt desert to Pilot Peak. The discovery of gold in Montana in 1862 further added to the traffic along the route. The young men of Bear Hunter's tribe began to strike back in late 1862, raiding Mormon cattle herds and attacking mining parties traveling to and from Montana. The Indian aggression came to an end on 29 January 1863. On the morning of that day, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor and about 200 California Volunteers from Camp Douglas in Salt Lake City assaulted the winter camp of Bear Hunter's Northwestern group of 450 men, women, and children on Beaver Creek at its confluence with the Bear River, some twelve miles west of the Mormon village of Franklin in Cache Valley. As a result of the four-hour carnage that ensued, twenty-three soldiers lost their lives and at least 250 Shoshoni were slaughtered by the troops, including ninety women and children in what is now called the Bear River Massacre. Bear Hunter was killed, and the remnants of his tribe under Sagwitch and the chiefs of nine other Northwestern bands signed the Treaty of Box Elder at Brigham City, Utah, on 30 July 1863, bringing peace to this Shoshoni region. After the signing of the Box Elder agreement, government officials attempted to get all of the Northwestern Shoshoni to move to the newly founded Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho. After several years of receiving their government annuities at Corinne, Utah, near the mouth of the Bear River, the Indians bands finally gave up their homelands in Utah and settled at Fort Hall, where their descendants live today. As a result of their move to Idaho, the Northwestern Shoshoni have been lost to Utah history although for centuries they had lived in northern Utah. It is time for Utah historians to make the Shoshoni a prominent part of the state's history along with the Navajo, Paiute, and Ute tribes. The estimated population of Northern and Western Shoshoni was 4,500 in 1845. 3,650 Northern Shoshoni and 1,201 Western Shoshoni were counted in 1937 by the United States Office of Indian Affairs. The Northern Shoshone fought conflicts with settlers in Idaho in the 1860s which included the Bear River Massacre and again in 1878 in the Bannock War. They fought with the U.S. Army in the 1876 Battle of the Rosebud against their traditional enemies, the Lakota and Cheyenne. In 1982 the Western Shoshone, who also invited "unrepresented tribes", made a declaration of sovereignty and began issuing its own passports as the Western Shoshone National Council.
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| Brigham D. Madsen, The Northern Shoshoni (1980), The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre (1985), and Chief Pocatello: The White Plume (1986). Lewsis & Clark, PBS.org www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/native/sho.html American Indian Almanac by Terrell Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes by Carl Waldman Atlas of Indians of North America by Legay |
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