Native Americans of the Great Basin

Paiute, Northern

"Northern Paiute" includes a number of seminomadic, culturally distinct, and politically autonomous Great Basin groups. The name is a modern construction; aboriginally, these groups were tied together only by the awareness of a common language. "Paiute" may have meant "True Ute" or "Water Ute" and was applied only to the Southern Paiute until the 1850s. Their self-designation is Numa, or "People." Non-Natives have sometimes called these people Digger Indians, Snakes (Northern Paiutes in Oregon), and Paviotso. The Bannock Indians were originally a Northern Paiute group from eastern Oregon.

Traditionally, the groups now known as Northern Paiute ranged throughout present-day southeast Oregon, extreme northeast California, extreme southwest Idaho, and northwest Nevada. Bannock territory included southeastern Idaho and western Wyoming (the Snake River region). The highly diverse environment included lakes, mountains, high plains, rivers, freshwater marshes, and high desert. Elements of California culture entered the region through groups living on or near the Sierra Nevada. Presently, Northern Paiutes live on a number of their own reservations, on other nearby reservations, and among the area's general population. The Paiute population in the early nineteenth century was roughly 7,500, excluding about 2,000 Bannocks. Northern Paiute is part of the Western Numic (Shoshonean) branch of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family.

Religious power among the Northern Paiute resided in any animate or inanimate object, feature, or phenomenon. Any person could seek power for help with a skill, but only shamans acquired enough to help, or hurt, others. A power source would expect certain specific behaviors to be followed. Most power sources also had mythological roles.

Shamans, male and female, were religious leaders. Their power often came in a recurring dream. They cured by sucking, retrieving a wandering soul, or administering medicines. Disease could be caused by soul loss, mishandling power, or sorcery. Some shamans could also control weather. Special objects as well as songs, mandated by the power dream, helped them perform their tasks. Power could also be inherited or sought by visiting certain caves.

The sun was considered an especially powerful spirit, and many people prayed to it daily. Some groups celebrated rituals associated with communal food drives or other food-related events.

The nuclear family, led (usually) by senior members, was the main political and economic unit. Where various families came together, the local camp was led by a headman who advised, gave speeches on right behavior, and facilitated consensus decisions. The position of the headman was often, although not strictly, inherited in the male line. Camp composition changed regularly. Other elders were selected to take charge of various activities such as hunts and irrigation projects.

The traditional headman system was replaced at least in part by the emergence of chiefs during the mounted, raiding years of the 1860s and 1870s.

A Bannock family in Idaho during the nineteenth century. In the spring of 1878, settlers’ livestock had destroyed much of the camas prairie of southeastern Idaho, an area favored by the Bannocks (originally a Northern Paiute group from eastern Oregon) for its abundance of camas roots, an important part of the tribe’s diet. The conflict led to the Bannock War. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Headmen returned during the early reservation years, however, followed by elected tribal councils beginning in the 1930s.

Dwelling style and type were marked by great seasonal and regional diversity. Wickiups, used mostly in the summer, were huts of brush and reeds over willow pole frames. The winter house in the north was a cone-shaped pole framework covered with tule mats and earth. Some western groups included a mat-covered entryway. All had central fires. In the mountains, people built semisubterranean winter houses of juniper and pine boughs covered with branches and dirt. Dispersed winter camps consisted of two or three related families (roughly fifty people). In late prehistoric times, the Bannocks used buffalo skin teepees during the winter.

Diet also varied according to specific location. Plants supplied most food needs: roots, bulbs, seeds, nuts, rice grass (ground into meal), cattails, berries, and greens. Roots were either eaten raw or sun-dried and stored. Pine nuts and acorns were especially important. Animal foods included fowl (and eggs), squirrel, duck, and other small game as well as mountain sheep, deer, buffalo, and elk. Rabbits were hunted in communal drives. Small mammals were either pit roasted, boiled, or dried for storage. Lizards, grubs, and insects were also eaten. Trout and other fish were crucial in some areas, less important in others. Fish were usually dried and stored for winter. Some groups cultivated wild seed-bearing plants. The Bannocks fished for salmon in the Snake River and hunted buffalo in the fall.

People later called the Bannocks, or Snakes, acquired horses as early as the mideighteenth century. They soon joined the Northern Shoshone in southern Idaho in developing fully mounted bands and other aspects of Plains culture, including buffalo hunting, extensive warfare, and raiding for horses.

Early Northern Paiute contacts with fur traders such as Jedediah Smith (1827) and Peter Skene Ogden (1829) were friendly, although a party led by Joseph Walker (1833) massacred about 100 peaceful Indians. When reached by whites, the Indians already had a number of non-Native items in their possession, such as Spanish blankets, horses, and Euro-American goods.

Most Northern Paiutes remained on foot until the late 1840s and 1850s. Around this time, heavy traffic on the Oregon and California Trails (in the late 1840s) and the gold rush of 1848 brought many nonNatives through their territory. These people cut down pinon trees for fuel and housing, and their animals destroyed seed-bearing plants and fouled water supplies. Mining resulted in extensive and rapid resource degradation. New diseases took a heavy toll during this period. Indians responded by moving away from the invaders or attacking wagons for food and materials. White traders encouraged thefts by trading supplies for stolen items and animals. Some Indians began to live at the fringes of and work at white ranches and settlements.

Gold and silver strikes in the late 1850s fueled the cycle of conflict and violence. Local conflicts during this period included the brief Pyramid Lake War in 1860, the Owens Valley conflicts in 1862-1863, and the Coeur d'Alene War (1858-1859), which grew out of the Yakima war over white treaty violations. In the Snake War (1866-1867), Chiefs Paulina and Weawea led the Indians to early successes, but eventually the former was killed and the latter surrendered. Survivors settled on the Malheur Reservation (Oregon) in 1871. Winnemucca, who represented

Several hundred Northern Paiute in the 1860s and 1870s, participated in the Pyramid Lake War and, with his daughter Sarah, went on to serve as a negotiator and peacemaker. In 1873, he refused to take his band to the Malheur Reservation, holding out for a reservation of their own. The Bannocks, too, rebelled in a short-lived war over forced confinement on the Fort Hall Reservation and white treaty violations.

Beginning in 1859, the United States set aside land for Northern Paiute reservations. Eventually, a number of small reservations and colonies were created, but ultimately much of the designated land was lost to non-Indian settlers. Most Northern Paiutes, however, drifted between reservations, combining traditional subsistence activities with a growing dependence on local Anglo economies. Conflict on several reservations remained ongoing for decades (some issues are still pending) over issues such as water rights (Pyramid Lake, Walker River), white land usurpation, and fisheries destruction (Pyramid Lake). Refugees from the Bannock War were forced to move to the Yakima Reservation; from there many ultimately moved to the Warm Springs Reservation.

The government also established day and boarding schools from the late 1870s into the 1930s, including Sarah Winnemucca's school at Lovelock. Sarah Winnemucca, who published Life Among the Paiutes in 1884, also worked tirelessly, although ultimately unsuccessfully, for a permanent Paiute reservation. Northern Paiute children also attended Indian boarding schools across the United States. Most traditional subsistence activities ceased during that period, although people continued to gather certain foods. New economic activities included cattle ranching at Fort McDermitt, stock raising, haying, and various businesses.

In 1889, the Northern Paiute Wovoka, known to the whites as Jack Wilson, started a new Ghost Dance religion. It was based on the belief that the world would be reborn with all Indians, alive and dead, living in a pre-contact paradise. For this to happen, Indians had to reject all non-Native ways, especially alcohol, live together in peace, and pray and dance. The Ghost Dance followed a previous one established at Walker River in 1869.

Family organization remained more or less intact during the reservation period. By about 1900, Northern Paiutes had lost more than 95 percent of their aboriginal territory. Most groups accepted the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) and adopted tribal councils during the 1930s. Shamanism has gradually declined over the years. The Native American Church has had adherents among the Northern Paiutes since the 1930s, and the Sweat Lodge Movement became active during the 1960s.

See also Dams, Fishing Rights, and Hydroelectric Power; Ghost Dance Religion; Horse, Economic Impact; Reservation Economic and Social Conditions; Sweat Lodges; Wovoka.

Paiute, Owens Valley

"Owens Valley Paiute" is the name given to a number of Paiute groups distinguished in part by their semisettled, cooperative lifestyle as well as their irrigation practices. They were largely responsible for bringing elements of California culture into the southern Great Basin. Non-Natives formerly included them with the Monache or Mono Indians. "Paiute" may have meant "True Ute" or "Water Ute" and was applied only to the Southern Paiute until the 1850s. Their self-designation is Numa, or "People."

Traditionally, the groups now known as Owens Valley Paiute controlled the Owens River Valley, more than eighty miles long and an average of seven miles wide. The fertile and well-watered region, east of the southern Sierra Nevada, contains a wealth of environmental diversity. Presently, Owens Valley Paiutes live on a number of their own reservations, on other nearby reservations, and among the area's general population. In the early nineteenth century there were about 7,500 total Paiutes (perhaps 1,500 to

2,000 Owens Valley Paiutes). The Owens Valley Paiutes' dialects of Mono are, with Northern Paiute, part of the Western Numic (Shoshonean) branch of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family.

Religious observances were centered on round dances and festivities associated with the fall harvest. Professional singers in elaborate dance regalia performed in a dance corral. The girls' puberty ceremony was also important.

The cry was an annual Yuman-derived mourning ceremony for those who had died during the previous year. A ritual face washing (the first time since the death that the face was washed) marked the end of the official spousal year of mourning.

Male and female shamans were primarily doctors and religious leaders. Their power often came in a recurring dream. They cured by sucking, retrieving

A wandering soul, or administering medicines. Disease was caused by soul loss, mishandling power, or sorcery. Special objects, as well as songs mandated by the power dream, helped them perform their tasks. They might acquire a good deal of clandestine political power by making headmen dependent on them.

Owens Valley Paiutes lived in semipermanent base camps, or hamlets, named for natural features. The camps were semipermanent in that usually the same families occupied them intermittently throughout the year and from year to year. This level of social organization showed some similarities to California tribelets. Within the camps families were completely independent. Families might share or coordinate in subsistence activities, but doing so was informal and unstructured.

Hamlets in a given area cooperated in intermarriage, irrigation, rabbit and deer drives, funerals, and the use of the sweat house. The headmen or chiefs directed the communal activities. Their other duties included conducting festivals and ceremonies, overseeing construction of the assembly lodge, and determining the death penalty for a shaman accused of witchcraft. The position was hereditary, usually in the male line.

Although many people maintained the dams, an elected irrigator was responsible for watering a specific area. In the summer, most families pursued hunting and gathering activities. They generally occupied their valley dwelling places in the spring, the time of irrigation; in the fall, the time of social activities; and in the winter, unless the pine nut or Indian rice grass crops failed.

For irrigation, Owens Valley Paiutes used temporary dams and feeder streams of summer flood-waters. Their main tool was a long wooden water staff. They used nets to catch rabbits and fish. Fish were also speared or poisoned and often dried and stored for winter.

Hunting technology differed according to location, but usually featured a sinew-backed juniper bow, arrows, nets, snares, and deadfalls. Twined and coiled basketry included burden baskets with tumplines for distance (even transmountain) carrying and seed beaters. Fire was made with a drill, and smoldering, cigar-shaped fire matches were used to transport it. Roots were dug with mountain mahogany digging sticks. Nuts were ground and shelled with manos and metates or with wood or stone mortars and stone pestles. Some women made pottery, from the midseventeenth to the midnineteenth centuries.

Owens Valley Paiutes first saw non-Natives in the early nineteenth century (although they may have seen Spanish explorers earlier). These early explorers, trappers, and prospectors encountered Indians who were already irrigating wild crops.

Military and civil personnel surveyed the region in the late 1850s with an eye toward establishing a reservation for local Indians. The first nonIndian settlers arrived in 1861. These ranchers grew crops that fed nearby miners and other whites. As the white population increased, so did conflicts over water rights and irrigated lands. Whites cut down vital pinons for fuel. Hungry Indians stole cattle, and whites retaliated by killing Indians. As of early

1862,  however, the Indians still controlled the Owens Valley, because they formed local military alliances.

Camp Independence was founded in July 1862 as a military outpost. Fighting continued well into

1863,  until whites got the upper hand by pursuing a scorched-earth policy. Many Indians surrendered but were back in the valley in a few years. By this time, however, whites had taken over most of their best lands, and a diminished Indian population was left to settle around towns, ranches, and mining camps, working mostly as laborers. Indians on newly reserved lands, increasingly including Western Shoshone families, worked mainly as small-scale farmers.

Indian schools opened in the late nineteenth century, although formal reservations were not established until the twentieth. Too small for ranches, the early reservations supported small-scale farming as the main economic activity. However, many Indians still lived on nonreservation lands and on other, non-Paiute reservations.

From the early twentieth century through the 1930s, the city of Los Angeles bought most of Owens Valley, primarily for water rights. This development destroyed the local economy, eliminating the low-level Indian jobs. The city also proposed new ways to dispossess and consolidate the remaining Indians at that time. Ultimately, most Indian people approved of the series of land exchanges (those at Fort Independence rejected the plans). During the 1940s, the federal government built new housing and sewer and irrigation systems on the new Indian lands.

See also Dams, Fishing Rights, and Hydroelectric Power; Economic Development; Reservation Economic and Social Conditions; Water Rights.

Paiute, Southern

"Southern Paiute" is a designation for approximately sixteen seminomadic, culturally distinct, and politically autonomous Great Basin groups, such as Kaibabs, Kaiparowits, Panguitches, Shivwits, Moa-pas, Paranigets, and Panacas. Their self-designation is Nuwu, or "Person." The Chemehuevis were originally a Southern Paiute group. "Southern Paiute" is a modern construction and is more a linguistic than a cultural convention. "Paiute" may have meant "True Ute" or "Water Ute" and was applied to the Northern Paiute only after the 1850s. To the north and northeast, some Southern Paiute groups merged with the Western and Southern Utes. Numic-speak-ing Southern Paiutes came into their historic area around 1000, perhaps from around Death Valley. They gradually replaced Hopis in the south and may have learned agriculture from them.

Southern Paiutes lived and continue to live in southwest Utah, southern Nevada, northwest Arizona, and southeast California. The San Juan Paiutes lived east of the Colorado River. Southern

Paiute territory encompasses a great environmental diversity, including canyons and high deserts of the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin. The entire early nineteenth-century Paiute population was roughly 7,500. Southern Paiute languages belong to the Southern Numic (Shoshonean) branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Their languages and those of the Northern Paiutes were mutually unintelligible.

Shamans provided religious leadership; they cured and conducted ceremonies such as the girls' puberty rite. They could be men or women, although women were more often considered evil. Power dreams, perhaps dreamed in a special cave, also provided instructions and songs.

Disease was attributed to sorcerers, a ghost-inspired poisonous object (necessitating the removal of the object by sucking), or soul loss (cured by the shaman's recapturing the soul). The mourning ceremony, or cry, was undertaken by wealthy relatives of a recently deceased person (in the past three months to a year) so they could eat and sleep well. It was a feast at which many items were destroyed.

Southern Paiute posed in front of an adobe house in the early twentieth century. (Library of Congress)

Camp groups were composed of one to ten or fifteen households, many of whom were related. They were led by a headman as well as by the best hunters and gatherers. Headmen served in an advisory capacity. This position tended to remain in the family and among men but did not necessarily pass from father to son (except for the Chemehuevis and Las Vegas).

The basic social unit was the nuclear family. Each group generally gathered food, hunted, and camped together. Each was associated with a specific though nonexclusive geographic territory.

People married early; girls might be pre - or postpubescent. Most marriages were monogamous. Gender-determined rituals over infants' navel stumps underscored the priority placed on hunting for men and industry in domestic chores for women. Both new parents observed postpartum behavior and food restrictions.

Meat that a boy killed was given away to the elderly until he reached puberty. Puberty rites for both sexes included bathing, body painting, hair trimming, and physical endurance. Relatives prepared a corpse, then underwent behavior and food restrictions. Most groups cremated their dead. The dead person's possessions were burned or buried, and his or her house was torn down and moved. Some groups occasionally killed a relative as company for the deceased. There was a permanent taboo on using the name of the dead.

Springs were considered inheritable private property. People commonly gambled on traditional hand and other games such as shinny (a variation of hockey), four-stick, hoop-and-pole (in which an arrow is shot through a rolling hoop), and target. Other games included ring and pin as well as athletic contests.

Southern Paiutes migrated seasonally, following the food supply. Their diet was based on hunting, gathering, and some agriculture (mostly corn, beans, and squash, using floodplain or ditch irrigation). Tobacco patches and grasslands were burned to encourage growth.

Women gathered wild plants, including golden-rod and grass seeds, roots, pine nuts, yucca dates, cactus fruit, agave, nuts, juniper berries, mesquite, and screwbean. Grasshoppers, caterpillars, ant larvae, and insect grubs were also eaten. Seeds were parched, ground, and eaten as mush or as bread. Men hunted small game, the major source of protein, with the assistance of spirits and/or shamans. Rabbits were especially important. They were hunted individually or driven communally into 100-yard-long nets. Big game included deer, antelope, and mountain sheep. Some groups fished occasionally.

The Southern Paiutes encountered a Spanish expedition in 1776 but adopted neither horses nor much else of Spanish culture. However, diseases and some material items may have preceded actual contact. Some groups were practicing agriculture before 1800.

By 1830, the trail established by the first Spanish explorers was in heavy use. The increased traffic depleted the area's natural resources. The trail also facilitated raiding and trading parties by both Indian and non-Native peoples. Mounted Utes and Navajos, and later Spanish expeditions and American trappers were engaged in raiding for and trading in Southern Paiute slaves. Starving Southern Paiutes sometimes sold their children for food. One effect of this situation was the Paiutes' selfremoval from areas that were economically productive but close to slave raiders. The loss of a significant percentage of their young also contributed to the population reduction that was well under way by this time.

Mormon settlers arrived in 1847. At first participants in the slave trade, they had it legally abolished by the mid-1850s (although they continued to "adopt" Indian children). However, their practice of establishing settlements and missions on the best land, thereby depleting Native resources and squeezing the Indians out, soon left the latter as beggars. Many Mormons alternated between seeing Indians negatively, as did most Americans, and positively, because of a perceived connection to biblical Israelites. About the same time, the Chemehuevis split off and moved down the Colorado River.

Some groups retaliated against whites by raiding their settlements. In a move to head off violence, six Mormon Southern Paiute headmen agreed in 1865 to move their people to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, the home of their Ute enemies. The treaty remained unratified, however, and was later abandoned. By the 1870s roughly 80 percent of Southern Paiutes had died as a result of starvation and disease (Southern Paiute death rates exceeded birth rates well—in some cases, halfway—into the twentieth century). Survivors had begun the process of acculturation, gathering into larger camps and working in the new white towns.

By executive order, a reservation (Moapa) of roughly 3,900 square miles was established in Nevada for the Southern Paiutes in 1872. Although

Few Indians moved there, it was expanded in 1874 with the idea that Southern Paiutes would be turned into farmers and ranchers. Soon, however, the reservation was greatly reduced in size. When promised federal support was not forthcoming, conditions began rapidly to deteriorate.

Meanwhile, Indians in southern Utah were either seeking wage work or trying desperately to hold on in their traditional locations. In the late 1880s, after a local white rancher persuaded the government to remove the Shivwits from their lands, the Shivwits Reservation was established in southern Utah. Though it was later expanded, the land was never good enough to support the population, even without the inevitable conflicts over water and range rights. Many residents eventually moved away. Several small Mormon-affiliated farming communities had also been established by 1885.

Several reservations were created for the Southern Paiutes in the twentieth century (although one, the San Juan Paiute Reservation, was returned to the public domain shortly after an oil company expressed interest in the parcel). In the mid-1950s, the Utah Paiutes (Shivwits, Indian Peaks, Koosharem, and Kanosh bands) were removed from federal control (terminated), although policy dictated that this would not happen until the people were ready and willing to take care of themselves. (The groups were restored in 1980.) The immediate effects of this action included a tremendous loss of the modest land base (through individual allotment sales and nonpayment of taxes), greater impoverishment, exploitative leases to non-Indians, removal of health services, and greatly increased social problems. When people tried to hunt rabbits again for survival, they discovered that many animals had been poisoned by fallout from the Nevada nuclear test site. Perhaps not surprisingly, many people left the reservation during these years.

In 1965, Southern Paiutes were awarded $8,250,000 (27 cents an acre) as official compensation for their aboriginal land. The bands used their shares in different ways, but nearly all provided for some direct per-capita payments as well as long-term concerns. New federal programs during this time also helped lift many Indians out of dire poverty and provide them with decent housing. During the 1960s, many people were poisoned with the insecticide DDT as a result of government and farmer spraying. Women basketmakers, who pulled willow twigs through their teeth, were especially hard hit.

See also Demographics, Historical; Disease, Historic and Contemporary; Reservation Economic and Social Conditions.

Shoshone, Eastern or Wind River

Eastern, or Wind River, Shoshones make up a group grounded in Great Basin traditions who modified their culture to include elements from Plains and postcontact cultures. The Comanches broke away from the Eastern Shoshones about 1700 and moved south toward Texas. The term "Shoshone" is of dubious origin and is not a self-designation.

Beginning at least as early as 1500, the Comanche-Shoshones began expanding eastward onto the Great Plains and adopting wide-scale buffalo hunting. The Eastern Shoshones lived in present-day western Wyoming from at least the sixteenth century on, expanded into the northern Great Plains through the eighteenth century, and then retreated in the nineteenth century. They were loosely divided into two groups: Mountain Sheep Eaters to the north and west and Buffalo Eaters to the east and south. Most Eastern Shoshones now live on the Wind River Reservation, in Fremont and Hot Springs Counties, Wyoming. There were perhaps 3,000 Eastern Shoshones in 1840. The Eastern Shoshones spoke dialects of Shoshone, a Central Numic (Shoshonean) language of the Uto-Aztecan language family.

The Eastern Shoshones knew two basic kinds of religious practice. One was aimed at an individual's obtaining the assistance of supernatural powers from spirits. In exchange for power, such spirits, which could also be dangerous, demanded adherence to strict behavioral taboos. Power was gained either through dances or by sleeping in sacred places. Success in obtaining power was marked by a vision through which the power transferred skills or protections as well as songs, fetishes, and taboos. Power might also be transferred from one shaman to another by blowing. Should a person's power depart, a shaman had to recapture it lest the person die. Shamans did not so much control power as they were dependent on it.

The other kind of religious practice was designed to ensure the welfare of the community and nature as a whole by the observance of group ceremonials. The Father, the Shuffling (Ghost), and

The Sun Dances were all addressed toward beneficent beings. The first two, during which men and women sang sacred songs, often took place at night in any season except the summer. The Shuffling Dance was particularly important to Mountain Sheep Eaters.

The four-night and three-day Sun Dance was held in the summer and featured exhaustion owing to dancing and the lack of water. Introduced from the Plains around 1800, it symbolized the power and cohesion of the tribe and of the generations. It was an occasion for demonstrating virility, courage, and supernatural powers. Male dancers first participated in ritual sweats and other preparations, which began as early as the preceding winter. The ceremony itself, held around ten outer poles encircling a buffalo head mounted on a center pole, was followed by a great feast of buffalo tongues. Little boys were charged with grabbing the tongues.

Spirit places, things, and people were inherently dangerous and included ghosts, whirlwinds, old or menstruating women, death, and illness. Illness was seen as coming from either a breach of taboo or malevolent spirits. Sacred items and activities included sweating, burning certain grasses and wood, smoking wild tobacco, eagle feathers, paints, and certain songs. The peyote cult began on the reservation around 1900.

Centralization was the key to successful buffalo hunting and warfare and thus to eighteenth - and nineteenth-century Eastern Shoshone survival. During prosperous times (for instance, during periods of strong chieftainships) and when they came together seasonally as a tribe (for instance, for the spring buffalo hunt and the summertime Sun Dance), the Eastern Shoshones numbered between 1,500 and 3,000.

A chief was at least middle-aged and of military or shamanistic training. He had authority over hunting, migration, and other issues. He and his assistants controlled the two military police societies. His several distinctions included possessing a painted teepee and a special feathered headdress. He also acted as chief diplomat for external disputes.

The Eastern Shoshones separated into between three and five bands in winter, camping mainly in the Wind River Valley. Each band had a chief as well as military societies. Bands were loosely identified with particular geographic regions. Membership fluctuated, with extended family groups joining different Shoshone bands or perhaps even bands of other tribes such as the Crows.

Shoshone women were in general subordinate to men, chiefly because menstruation was believed to set them apart as sources of ritual pollution. The younger wife or wives usually suffered in instances of polygyny. Widows were dispossessed. At the same time, women gained status as individuals through their skills as gatherers, crafters, gamblers, midwives, and child care providers. Particularly during the fur trade period, alliances with white trappers and traders were made with daughters and sisters, leading to important interethnic ties.

Social status positions were earned through the use (or nonuse) of supernatural power, except that age and sex also played a role. Infants and small children were not recognized as sexually different. Boys began their search for supernatural power around adolescence. "Men" were those who were married and members of a military society.

Girls helped their mothers until marriage, which was arranged shortly after the onset of puberty. Menstrual restrictions included gathering firewood (a key female chore) and refraining from meat and daytime sleeping. A good husband was a good provider, although he might be considerably older.

Wealth and prestige accrued to curers, midwives, good gamblers, hunters and traders, and fast runners. Property was often destroyed or abandoned at death. Generosity was a central value: Giveaways for meritorious occasions were common. Men cared for war and buffalo horses, women for packhorses. High-stakes gambling games included the traditional hand and four-stick dice game, double-ball shinny (a variation of hockey, for women), and foot races.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, the state of war was more or less continuous, and warfare took a great toll on the Eastern Shoshones. There were two military societies. About 100 to 150 brave young men were Yellow Brows. The recruitment ritual included backward speech (no for yes, for example). This fearless society acted as vanguards on the march. They fought to the death in combat and had a major role keeping order on the buffalo hunt. Their Big Horse Dance was a highly ritualistic preparation for battle. Logs were older men who took up the rear on the march. Both groups were entitled to blacken their faces.

Shamans participated in war by foretelling events and curing men and horses. As many as 300 men might make up a war party. Traditional enemies included the Blackfeet and later the Arapahos, Lako-

Tas, Cheyennes, and Gros Ventres. During the mid-to late nineteenth century, the principal ally of the Shoshones was the U. S. Army.

The spring and especially the fall were the times for war. At these times the Eastern Shoshones generally fought as a tribe. Men made handle-held shields from thick, young buffalo bull hide. Rituals and feasting accompanied their manufacture. Each was decorated with buckskin and fringed with feathers. Weapons included sinew-backed bows, obsidian-tipped arrows, and clubs. Successful warriors were entitled to paint black and red finger marks on their teepees.

With the acquisition of horses about 1700, the Shoshones also began widespread raiding and developed a much stronger and more centralized leadership. It was roughly at this time that the Comanches departed for places south. Armed with firearms, the Blackfeet and other tribes began driving the Eastern Shoshones off the westward Plains beginning in the late eighteenth century. Major smallpox epidemics occurred during that period, and the Eastern Shoshones adopted the Sun Dance introduced around 1800. Extensive intermarriage also occurred with the Crows, Nez Perce, and Metis.

During most of the nineteenth century, the Eastern Shoshone, under their chief, Washakie, were often allied with whites and grew prosperous. During the peak of the fur trade, from 1810 to 1840, the eastern Shoshones sold up to 2,000 buffalo skins a year. When settlers began pouring into their territory in the 1850s, the Eastern Shoshones, under Washakie, tried to accommodate them. In the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 they received 44 million acres; this figure was later reduced to fewer than 2 million. During the next fifteen or so years they lived in a roughly traditional way on their reservation.

Because the Shoshone fought with the U. S. Army against the Lakotas on many occasions, they felt betrayed when the government placed the Ara-pahos, their traditional enemies, on their reservation in 1878. The disappearance of the buffalo in the 1880s spelled the end of their traditional way of life. From the late nineteenth century and into the midtwentieth century, the Eastern Shoshones, confined to reservations, experienced extreme hardship, population loss, and cultural decline. They had no decent land, hunting was prohibited, government rations were issued at starvation levels, and they could find no off-reservation employment because of poor transportation and white prejudice.

Disease, especially tuberculosis, was rampant. Life expectancy was roughly twenty-two years at that time. The Indian Service controlled the reservation.

A slow recovery began in the late 1930s. Land claims victories brought vastly more land as well as an infusion of cash (almost $3.5 million). Concurrently, the tribal council, hitherto relatively weak, began assuming greater control of all aspects of reservation life. By the mid-1960s, the incidence of disease was markedly lower, owing in large part to the diligent efforts of women. Indicators such as housing, diet, economic resources (such as oil and gas leases), education, and real political control had all increased. Life expectancy had risen to forty to forty-five years. Traditional religious activity remained strong and meaningful. And yet severe and ongoing problems remained, including continuing white prejudice and a corresponding lack of off-reservation job opportunities, out-migration, slow economic development, and fear of the growing strength of the Arapaho.

See also Buffalo; Horse, Economic Impact; Sun Dance; Warfare, Intertribal; Women in Native Woodlands Societies.

Shoshone, Northern

"Northern Shoshone" is a modern, anthropological term used to distinguish a region of Shoshone culture. The Northern Shoshones and Bannocks (originally a Northern Paiute group) shared a number of cultural traits with the Paiute and the Ute Indians as well as with so-called Eastern or Wind River Shoshones (there was no aboriginal distinction among Shoshone groups) and Northern Paiutes. Northern Shoshones incorporated elements of the Great Basin, Plateau, and Great Plains cultures. The term "Shoshone" first surfaced in 1805. Other Indians and non-Indians sometimes referred to some Shoshone and Northern Paiute groups, particularly mounted bands, as Snake Indians (sedentary Shoshones and Northern Paiutes were often referred to as Diggers), but their name for themselves is Nomo, or "People." Shoshone is part of the Central Numic (Shoshonean) division of the Uto-Aztecan language family. The Bannocks spoke Western Numic, also a Shoshonean language, although it was mutually unintelligible with Central Numic.

In the early nineteenth century, Northern Shoshones lived mostly in Idaho south of the

Salmon River or on the Snake River plains and the mountains to the north. This region, on the border of the Columbia Plateau, has a relatively dry climate. It contains the Sawtooth and Bitterroot Mountains, valleys, river highlands, and the Snake and other rivers and creeks. Today, most Northern Shoshones live in and around Bannock, Bingham, Caribou, and Power Counties in Idaho. The pre-contact population of up to 30,000 had been cut by 90 percent by the midnineteenth century, mainly by epidemics of European diseases.

Northern Shoshones used dreams and visions to acquire helping spirits. Such spirits instructed people on the use of medicines with which to activate their power. Certain food and other restrictions might also be imposed. Spirits might cure illness, protect an individual from arrows, or hurt other people.

Most or all men could cure, although there were also professionals. Their methods included herbs, charms, and sweats. They gained their supernatural power through dreams, visions, and visits to remote, spirit-dwelling places.

There was a concept of a creator, but creative agency was proscribed to mythological characters such as the wolf and coyote. Ceremonial occasions that featured round dances included the spring salmon return, the fall harvest, and times of adversity.

Loosely organized groups were characteristic of Great Basin culture. Traditionally, the Northern Shoshone were organized into seminomadic bands with impermanent composition and leadership. Some bands had chiefs; others, particularly in the west, had neither bands nor chiefs.

Life on the Plains called for higher forms of organization, both to hunt buffalo and to defend against enemies. In the fall, for instance, the bands in the area of the Snake and Lemhi Rivers came together for councils, feasts, and buffalo hunts. During these times, the more eastern bands were led by a principal chief and several minor chiefs. However, these offices were still nonhereditary, loosely defined, and somewhat transitory. Also, with more complex social organization, band councils arose to limit the power of the chiefs. Some "police" or soldier societies may also have existed to keep order during hunts and dances.

Equality and individual autonomy were cardinal Shoshone values. Just as social organization was fairly undeveloped, especially to the west, there was also little barrier to social interaction. Local groups were named by the foods they ate, but the same band might have several names, and the same name might apply to several bands. Many groups often intermarried, visited, and shared ceremonies and feasts. Social networks were wide and strong. Most marriages were monogamous. Both marriage and divorce were simple and common. The dead were wrapped in blankets and placed in rock crevices. Mourners cut their hair, gashed their legs, and killed one of the deceased's horses. Some private property (such as tools and weapons) was recognized, but private ownership of land or subsistence areas was not.

As a source of sustenance, roots (such as prairie turnips, yampa root, tobacco root, bitterroot, and camas) were steamed in earth ovens for several days or boiled. Berries (such as chokecherries and service berries), nuts, and seeds were also important foods, as were grasshoppers, ants and other insects, lizards, squirrels, and rabbits.

Big game included antelope, deer, elk, and mountain sheep. Buffalo were Native to parts of the region but became especially important in the seventeenth century, when people would travel for the fall hunt to the Plains (east of Bozeman) and then back to the Snake River in the winter or early spring.

Salmon was the most important fish. In fact, the salmon fishery was one of the key distinguishing features between the Northern Shoshone and the Eastern Shoshone. People also caught sturgeon, perch, trout, and other fish on Columbia and Snake River tributaries.

The Paiute-speaking Bannock were among the first local groups to acquire horses, in the late seventeenth century. At that time, they migrated from eastern Oregon to Shoshone territory near the Snake River and organized fully mounted bands and engaged in group buffalo hunts. They and the Northern Shoshones also began to raid for horses and assumed many other aspects of Plains culture, such as teepees and warrior societies, yet the Bannock continued to interact with their Northern Paiute relatives. Sacajawea, a Shoshone woman, served as a guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804. Her diplomatic and navigation skills saved the party on more than one occasion.

Continuing their move east to the western extremity of the northern Plains, the Shoshone were soon (mideighteenth century) driven back by the gun-wielding Blackfeet. Some Northern Shoshone groups did not become mounted until the nineteenth century or used the horse only as a pack animal. Such groups, particularly those away from the cen-

Ters in the Snake and Lemhi River Valleys (for example, the so-called Sheepeaters), lived in scattered settlements and remained sedentary and peaceful.

The Meriwether Lewis and William Clark party (1804-1806) may have been the first non-Indians in the area. Anglos soon opened trading posts at Pend Oreille Lake (British, 1809) and the Upper Snake River (Northwest Company, 1810). Throughout the 1810s and 1820s, white trappers ranged across Shoshone territory, destroying all beaver and buffalo west of the Rockies. Other game suffered as well, as did the traditional Northern Shoshone way of life. Indians also acquired much non-Native technology during this time, including firearms, iron utensils, and alcohol, and new diseases took a heavy toll.

By the 1840s, the fur trade had collapsed. Non-Indians began arriving en masse after the California gold rush and the opening of the Oregon Trail, further stressing the delicate local ecology. In 1847, the Mormons arrived. By the 1860s, the buffalo had all but disappeared. Relatively quickly, many Northern Shoshone groups faced starvation. They began to raid white settlements and wagons in retaliation, an activity that quickly brought counterraids. This kind of conflict persisted throughout the 1860s and 1870s, although the Fort Hall Reservation (originally 1.8 million acres) was created by treaty in 1868.

The Bannocks, however, had resisted confinement to Fort Hall. Some peoples' resistance was a direct influence of the Dreamer Cult founded about 1860 by the Wanapum Smohalla. The continued destruction of their way of life—led by the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo, inadequate rations, white ranchers' crowding, and violence committed against them when they continued subsistence activities guaranteed by treaty—led to a major revolt in 1878. Its immediate cause was Anglo hog herding in a camas root area forbidden to them by treaty. The Bannocks and some Northern Paiute bands, under the Bannock chief Buffalo Born and the Paiutes Egan and Oytes, engaged the soldiers for several months that summer. Ultimately, the Paiutes were settled among the Yakima in Washington, and the Bannocks, held as prisoners of war for a while, were permitted to return to Fort Hall.

The Sheepeater War also took place in 1878, when roughly fifty central Idaho Bannocks and Shoshones, who lived primarily on mountain sheep, began raiding settlers who were encroaching on their subsistence area. At first eluding the army, they were eventually captured and placed at Fort Hall.

Other Shoshones, too, fought to retain their traditions; most ended up at Fort Hall.

The United States created the Lemhi Valley Reservation in 1875, but its people were moved to Fort Hall when the reservation was terminated in 1907. Meanwhile, the Fort Hall Reservation itself shrank by more than two-thirds as a result of encroachments by the railroads, timber, mining, highway, and other interests. Dawes Act (1887) allotments further reduced it in size. Life at Fort Hall was marked by irrigation problems; major projects in the early twentieth century benefited white farmers only. Other serious problems included the flooding of good bottomlands by the American Falls Reservoir. Major economic activities during that time included sheep and cattle ranching. A phosphate mine opened after World War II.

Fort Hall Indians acquired the Sun Dance from Plains Indians, via the Wind River Shoshone, during the 1890s. Some also adopted the Native American Church in 1915. The government awarded them a land claims settlement of more than $8.8 million in 1964; another, smaller settlement was received in 1971 by the Lemhi Valley descendents.

See also Dreamer Cult; Fur Trade; Horse, Economic Impact; Smohalla; Sun Dance.

Shoshone, Western

The Western Shoshone were a number of Shoshon-ean-speaking groups generally inhabiting a particular area. Many groups were known to whites as Diggers. Their self-designation is Newe. The Goshutes (Gosiutes) are ethnic Shoshones, despite considerable intermarriage with the Utes and the existence of a 1962 court ruling legally separating them from the Western Shoshone. Little pre-1859 scientific ethnographic data exist on the Western Shoshone. Their aboriginal population may have numbered between 5,000 and 10,000, although it had declined to roughly 2,000 by the early nineteenth century. The Western Shoshone spoke three central Numic languages—Panamint, Shoshone, and Comanche— all members of the Numic (Shoshonean) branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family.

Most Western Shoshone bands lived in harsh environments such as the Great Salt Lake area (Goshutes) and Death Valley (Panamints). Their territory stretched from Death Valley through central Nevada into northwestern Utah and southern Idaho.

Rabbit-Tail, Shoshone member of Captain Ray’s scout company, with bracelets and ornamented vest. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Most Western Shoshones today live on a number of reservations within their aboriginal territory. They also live in nearby and regional cities and towns.

Apo, the sun, was a principal deity. Anyone could obtain supernatural powers through dreams and visions, although medicine men (bugahant) served as religious leaders. Most groups recognized three kinds of shamans: curers of specific ailments, general curers, and self-curers or helpers. Curing was effected by sucking and by the laying on of hands. In theory, men and women could both be shamans, although only men may have practiced curing. Shamans were also capable of capturing antelopes' souls and helping to drive them into corrals. Some groups may not have had shamans at all.

People used several hundred herbal remedies to cure nonsupernatural ailments such as cuts and bruises. The round dance was basic to ceremonial celebration. In some areas the dance was associated with courtship or rainmaking. Festivals were often held in times of plenty.

Groups in small winter villages were composed of family clusters and named for an important food resource or a local geographic feature. Thus, the territory and not the composition of the group was definitive. Group membership was not fixed and groups were not bands per se. Chiefs or headmen had little authority other than directing subsistence activity.

In general, the Western Shoshone adapted very successfully to a relatively harsh environment. They used sticks to beat grasses and dig roots, as well as using seed beaters of twined willow. Coiled and twined baskets were important in grass collection, as was a twined winnowing tray. Waterproof baskets allowed people to forage far from water.

Other tools and equipment included stone metates for grinding seeds; snares, traps, and deadfalls to hunt cottontails and rodents; bows of juniper and mountain mahogany; wildcat skin quivers; stone or horn arrow straighteners; and some pottery. Western Shoshones were first visited by non-Natives—the Jedediah Smith and Peter Skene Ogden parties—in the late 1820s. Other trappers and traders passed through during the next twenty years. Despite the willingness of some groups, such as the Walker party, to massacre Indians, the latter were relatively unaffected by early contacts with nonNatives.

The Mormons, who ultimately had a huge impact on the Goshute Shoshones, began arriving to stay in 1847. The white presence increased throughout the 1840s and 1850s, but the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1857 turned the stream into a flood. By then, degradation of the natural environment was well under way. New diseases also stalked the region, severely affecting both human and animal populations. Indians responded by either retreating farther from white activity or, less often, by raiding, stealing, and begging.

The Pony Express, established in 1860, passed through the center of Western Shoshone country. Supply depots at important springs displaced Indians, which encouraged attacks and then Army reprisals. By 1860, Mormons had invaded Goshute territory, and miners and ranchers were closing in on the rest of Western Shoshone lands. Grazing, plowing, and woodcutting (pinon and juniper pine) destroyed subsistence areas and forage land. Indians began to work for settlers as wage laborers to fend

Off starvation. Euro-American clothing, technology, and shelter quickly replaced the traditional variety.

Federal negotiations with the Great Basin tribes began in the 1850s, in part to check sporadic violence against settlers. The first treaties with Western Shoshone groups were signed in 1863. They called for Indians to give up hostilities, settle down eventually, and receive goods annually worth a total of $50,000. In return, the settlers could stay. Significantly, the Indians never actually ceded any land.

The army soon began rounding up Indians. When no reservations near good land with water were established during the 1870s, some Shoshones joined Northern Paiutes and Bannocks in their wars of resistance. In 1879, the Shoshones refused an order to move to the Western Shoshone (Duck Valley) Reservation. Despite the extreme disruption of their lives, elements of traditional culture survived, such as religious beliefs (except among the Goshutes) and limited subsistence patterns. Most Shoshones still lived unconfined after 1900.

The percentage of Western Shoshones living on reservations peaked at fifty in 1927. Most carried out semitraditional subsistence activities combined with seasonal or other wage work in mines and on ranches and farms. In an effort to enlarge the reservation population, the United States encouraged Northern Paiutes to settle at Duck Valley. Finally, accepting the fact that most Western Shoshones did not and would not live at Duck Valley, the government created a series of "colonies" during the first half of the twentieth century.

In 1936, the Paiutes and most Shoshone groups organized the Paiute-Shoshone Business Council. Chief TeMoak and his descendents were considered the leaders of this effort. The U. S. government refused to recognize the traditional TeMoak council, however, and instead organized their own TeMoak Bands Council. This split culminated when the traditionalist-backed United Western Shoshone Legal Defense and Education Association (1974) argued that the TeMoak Bands Council did not represent Western Shoshone interests and further that the Western Shoshones never ceded their land. The courts rejected their claim in 1979 and ordered them paid $26 million in compensation. In 1985, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1979 payment legally extinguished their title to the disputed 24 million acres.

See also Land, Identity and Ownership of, Land

Rights; Mormon Church; Reservation Economic and Social Conditions.

Shoshone, Wind River

See Shoshone, Eastern or Wind River.

Ute

The Utes consisted of roughly eleven autonomous Great Basin bands. In the eighteenth century, the eastern bands included the Uncompahgres (or Tabe-guaches), Yampas and Parusanuchs (or White River Band), Mouaches, Capotes, and Weeminuches, and the western bands included the Uintahs, Tim-panogots, Pahvants, Sanpits, and Moanunts. The word "Utah" is of Spanish derivation, probably borrowed originally from an Indian word. Their selfdesignation is Nunt'z, "the People." With Southern Paiute, Ute is a member of the Southern Numic (Shoshonean) division of the Uto-Aztecan language family. All dialects were mutually intelligible.

Aboriginally, Utes lived in most of present-day Utah, except the far western, northern, and southern parts; Colorado west of and including the eastern slopes of the Rockies; and the extreme north of New Mexico. Today, the three Ute reservations are in southwest Colorado, the Four Corners area, and north central Utah. From roughly 8,000 in the early nineteenth century, the Utes declined to about 1,800 in 1920. In 1990 approximately 5,000 lived on reservations, and roughly another 2,800 lived in cities and towns.

The Utes and their ancestors have been in the Great Basin for as many as 10,000 years. They lived along Arizona's Gila River from about 3000 to about 500 BCE. At that time, a group of them began migrating north toward Utah, growing a high-altitude variety of corn that had been developed in Mexico. This group, who grew corn, beans, and squash and who also hunted and gathered food, is known as the Sevier Complex. Another, related group of people, known as the Fremont Complex, lived to the northeast.

In time, the Fremont people migrated into western Colorado. When a drought struck the Great Basin in the thirteenth century, the Fremont people moved into Colorado's San Luis Valley, where they later became known as the Utes. They became one of the first mounted Indian peoples when band members escaped Spanish captivity and brought horses home in the midseventeenth century. Communal buffalo hunts began shortly thereafter. Mounted

Warriors brought more protection, and larger camps meant more centralized government and more powerful leaders as well as a rising standard of living. Utes also facilitated the spread of the horse to peoples of the Great Plains.

Utes believed that supernatural power was in all living things. Curing and weather shamans, both men and women, derived additional power from dreams. A few shamans, influenced by Plains culture, undertook vision quests.

One of the oldest of Ute ceremonies, the ten-day Bear Dance, was a welcome to spring. Bear is a mythological figure who provides leadership, wisdom, and strength. Perhaps originally a hunting ritual, the dance, directed by a dance chief and his assistants, signaled a time for courtship and the renewal of social ties. It was also related to the end of the girls' puberty ceremony. An all-male orchestra played musical rasps to accompany dancers. The host band sponsored feasting, dancing, gambling, games, and horse racing. The Sun Dance, of Plains origin, was held in midsummer.

Before the midseventeenth century, small Ute hunting and gathering groups were composed of extended families, with older members in charge. There may also have been some band organization for fall activities such as trading and hunting buffalo.

With the advent of horses, band structure strengthened to facilitate buffalo hunting, raiding, and defense. Each band now had its own chief, or headman, who solicited advice from constituent group leaders. By the eighteenth century, the autonomous bands came together regularly for tribal activities. Each band retained its chief and council, and within the bands, family groups retained their own leadership.