Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society Part 1

Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society.

by Robert F. Murphy and Yolanda Murphy.

PREFACE

During the years 1954 to 1957, the authors engaged in ethnographic and historic research on the Shoshone and Bannock Indians under the sponsorship of the Lands Division of the Department of Justice in connection with one of a number of suits brought by Indian tribes for compensation for territory lost to the advancing frontier. The action was brought jointly by the Shoshone Indians of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada, and the Bannock of Idaho; it excluded the Shoshonean speakers of California, and the Bannock remained separate from the suit brought by their colinguists, the Northern Paiute of Oregon and Idaho.

Most anthropologists are aware of the ethnographic issues involved in the Indian lands claims cases, for the profession has had an active role in them. Of central importance, of course, is the question of the extent of territory used and occupied by the tribe in litigation.

Other basic problems include the determination of the nature and composition of the groups involved, the rhythm of their seasonal activity, their political ident.i.ty, and the actual time at which they occupied and used the terrain. Beyond these specifically anthropological considerations, other professionals have had an equally important role in delivering expert testimony in the cases, and we wish only to note in pa.s.sing that historians, land appraisers, attorneys, and others have had much to do with their outcome.

The extent of the territory in question and the complexity of the historical period in point, that preceding the treaties of 1863 and 1868, required considerable research. We spent the summer of 1954 on the Shoshone reservations at Wind River, Wyoming, Fort Hall, Idaho, and Duck Valley, Nevada. Some six weeks each were spent at Wind River and Fort Hall and a week at Duck Valley. At each of these places we spoke to the oldest informants available. Salvage ethnography of this type is generally an unrewarding and unsatisfying task, and it was complicated in this investigation by the fact that we were asking our informants to recall historical material that is often ill preserved in the oral tradition. Thus, an old Indian may well remember some custom connected with war or ceremony that he had either experienced or that had been told to him by an older person. But he would be less likely to recall the exact places where game could be found, the trails used, the organization and composition of the group that pursued the game, and so forth. This is especially true of the buffalo-hunting Shoshone, for any informant who actually took part in a hunt as a mature individual would have been in his late seventies, at least, at the time of our research. And informants did not, of course, distinguish clearly between pre-and post-reservation times.

Only careful cross-checking would reveal whether the individual was speaking of the 1860's or the 1890's. As might be expected, it was virtually impossible to determine whether the data supposedly valid for the 1860's was true of the preceding decade or the one before that, and any student of Plains and Basin-Plateau history recognizes that such historical continuity cannot be a.s.sumed.

Because of these limitations on the reliability of informants, most of our work was by necessity based on ethnohistoric research. Every attempt was made to examine the most important literature on the area and period. The total number of sources scrutinized far exceeded the bibliography at the end of this monograph, for many of them contained data that were at best scanty and superficial and at worst totally false. Despite our best efforts to approximate an adequate historical criticism, some of the data presented were found in works that can be used only with great caution. Alexander Ross, for example, has reported much material of doubtful authenticity, and one may labor long and hard in the accounts of Jim Beckwourth to separate fact from a delightful tendency to make the story exciting and his own personage more impressive. It is a wry commentary on the veracity of the mountain men that John Coulter's account of Yellowstone Park was long laughed at by his own peers as being simply an addition to a s...o...b..lling folklore of the fur country. Among other dubious sources, we can add W. T. Hamilton and the Irving account of Captain Bonneville's adventures. The problem of criticism becomes particularly difficult during the fur period from about 1810 to 1840 owing to the paucity of sources available for cross-checking particular data.

Bonneville and Ross are especially rich in information, most of which cannot be easily verified. The choice became one of dismissing them altogether or using them. We elected to use them, but we have attempted restraint in drawing any important conclusions from them.

The monograph follows substantially the report submitted to the Indian Claims Commission. It has been edited, and we have also shifted emphasis at certain points to our own special interests. These are concerned with the relations between the social groups of the Basin and those of the Plains and the impact of the ecology of either region upon the social structures of the native population. A few qualifications should be noted. The limitations imposed by our a.s.signment and by time did not allow the collection of as full a range of material on social structure as would be wished. Also, we have excluded any discussion of the Shoshone of Nevada, for our field work there was far too brief. Our one week at Duck Valley only served to reinforce our opinion of the truly masterful ethnography represented by Steward's "Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups," and we could add little to his work.

Finally, we wish to acknowledge our indebtedness to the Board of Editors of the University of California Publications in Anthropological Records for their valuable comments and to our many friends on the reservations visited for their friendship and cooperation. We have also profited greatly from discussions with Drs.

Sven Liljeblad, ke Hultkranz, and Julian Steward. This work owes much of whatever merit it may be found to have, and none of its shortcomings, to all these people.

Robert F. Murphy Yolanda Murphy

I. THE NORTHERN AND EASTERN SHOSHONE

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 const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.ses 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 Pa.s.s at a gentle gradient only 7,550 feet in alt.i.tude. That the mountains were no great challenge is ill.u.s.trated by the fact that Indians traveling from Green River to Wind River often preferred to take more direct routes through pa.s.ses over 10,000 feet high rather than to follow the more circuitous trail over South Pa.s.s. Farther south, the Colorado Rockies and their pa.s.ses 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 gra.s.s 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-gra.s.s 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 gra.s.sland. 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.

a.s.suming 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 cla.s.sifications. 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 const.i.tuted in themselves h.o.m.ogeneous 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 a.n.a.lysis of their social inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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 compet.i.tion 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.

Compet.i.tion 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 Pa.s.s via the Sweet.w.a.ter. From South Pa.s.s 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 Sweet.w.a.ter River country of Wyoming in the 1860's and in 1869 Fort Stambaugh was established at South Pa.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al periods.