class="tdl">Early reservation period

307   Eastern Shoshone territory 310   Social and political organization 311 III. The Shoshone and Bannock of Idaho 315   Linguistics 315   General distribution of population 315   The Boise and Weiser Rivers 316   The middle Snake River 319   The Shoshone of the Sawtooth Mountains 322   The Shoshone of Bannock Creek and northern Utah 323   Fort Hall Bannock and Shoshone 325   Lemhi Shoshone 329 IV. Ecology and Social System 332 Bibliography   335   Map   Shoshone-Bannock
Subsistence Areas   facing 293

 

---

SHOSHONE-BANNOCK SUBSISTENCE AREAS

---

SHOSHONE-BANNOCK SUBSISTENCE AND SOCIETY

BY ROBERT F. and 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 constituted 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 passes 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 Pass at a gentle gradient only 7,550 feet in altitude. That the mountains were no great challenge is illustrated by the fact that Indians traveling from Green River to Wind River often preferred to take more direct routes through passes over 10,000 feet high rather than to follow the more circuitous trail over South Pass. Farther south, the Colorado Rockies and their passes 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 grass 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-grass 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 associated 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 analyze 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,