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 grassland. 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 (1947a, 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.

Assuming 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 classifications. 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 constituted in themselves homogeneous 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 analysis of their social institutions 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 institutions 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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,