Shoshone

01Summary

Horse-riding bison hunters in the Rockies and fishers and gatherers on the Snake River Plain and in the Great Basin, in the country around South Pass and Fort Hall. The Eastern Shoshone under Washakie kept peace with emigrants, but bands farther west were squeezed by the traffic, and violence on both sides led to the Bear River Massacre of 1863.

02History

The Shoshone call themselves Newe, 'the people.' Early travelers often called them the Snake Indians. In the trail years they lived in many separate bands: the Eastern Shoshone, horse-riding bison hunters of the Wind River and Green River country, Northern Shoshone and Bannock bands along the Snake River, and Western Shoshone bands across present-day Nevada and Utah who fished, gathered seeds and roots, and hunted smaller game.

Fort Bridger and Fort Hall drew Shoshone families to trade with travelers. But traffic on the trails grew more than fivefold in 1849 and nearly doubled again the next year, and the emigrants' herds stripped the grass and drove off the game Shoshone families lived on. The great treaty council of 1851 near Fort Laramie left the Shoshone out, though Washakie brought about 80 men and their families to it.

Along the Snake River, where food was scarce even in good years, conflict grew. Some emigrants killed Shoshone people for no reason, and Shoshone and Bannock men raided wagon trains and killed emigrants in several attacks. In January 1863 Colonel Patrick Connor's California Volunteers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone winter camp on the Bear River, in present-day Idaho, and killed at least 250 people, many of them women and children. Some estimates run much higher. It was one of the deadliest attacks on Native people in American history.

Washakie's Eastern Shoshone signed treaties at Fort Bridger in 1863 and 1868, and the second created the Wind River Reservation. Northern Shoshone and Bannock bands were placed on the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho, where promised supplies often failed to arrive. Sacagawea, who traveled with Lewis and Clark in 1805 and 1806, was a Lemhi Shoshone woman.

03Notable leaders

• Washakie
  Eastern Shoshone leader, c. 1804-1900, who kept his people allied with the United States for half a century.
• Pocatello (Tondzaosha)
  Shoshone leader, c. 1815-1884, whose band raided emigrant trains on the Oregon and California trails. He was not at the Bear River camp when it was attacked, though some of his people were, and he later chose to settle at Fort Hall.
• Sacagawea
  Lemhi Shoshone interpreter with the Lewis and Clark expedition. Most historians date her death to 1812, but Shoshone tradition at Wind River holds that she lived there until 1884.

04Today