Northern Shoshone is a modern, anthropological term used to distinguish a region of Shoshone culture. The Northern Shoshone and Bannock (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 between Shoshone groups) and Northern Paiutes. Northern Shoshones incorporated elements of Great Basin, Plateau, and Great Plains culture. 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 Shoshone and Northern Paiutes were often referred to as Diggers), but their name for themselves was Nomo, or "People."
Location 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, Idaho.
Population The precontact population of up to 30,000 had been cut by 90 percent by the mid-nineteenth century. In 1990, the Fort Hall Reservation population was 3,035 Indians.
Language 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 mutually unintelligible with central Numic.
Historical Information
History 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 tipis 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 (mid-eighteenth 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 centers in the Snake and Lemhi River Valleys (for example, the so-called Sheepeaters), lived in scattered settlements and remained sedentary and peaceful.
Sacajawea, a Shoshone woman, served as a guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804. In this early-twentieth-century painting by Charles M. Russell, Sacajawea uses sign language to communicate with Chinook Indians. Her diplomatic and navigational skills saved the party on more than one occasion.
The Lewis and 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 Dreamers 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 50 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 descendants.
Religion 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 wolf and coyote. Ceremonial occasions that featured round dances included the spring salmon return, the fall harvest, and times of adversity.
Government 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 Snake and Lemhi River-area bands 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.
Customs 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. Many groups often intermarried, visited, and shared ceremonies and feasts. Social networks were wide and strong.
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. 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.
Dwellings Fort Hall and Lemhi people lived in Plains-style tipis after about the eighteenth century. Otherwise, Northern Shoshones typically built conical dwellings of sagebrush, grass, or woven willow branches. A similar structure was used for sweat lodges and menstrual huts.
Diet 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 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.
Key Technology Fish were caught with nets, weirs, basket traps, harpoons, and spears. They were also attracted at night with torches. Steatite (soapstone) was used for items such as bowls and pipes. Women made coiled and twined sagebrush-bark and -root baskets and containers. They applied pitch to the interior to make them watertight. Boiling was accomplished by dropping hot stones into water baskets. Rawhide containers, perhaps painted with geometric designs, were also used.
Women carried willow stick and buckskin cradle boards on their backs. Digging sticks were hardened and sharpened by fire, which was in turn made with a drill. The Bannock used some pottery, horn utensils, and salmon-skin bags.
Trade Trade was extensive in the area. Many Plateau as well as northern Plains Indians received the horse by way of the Shoshone. Their main trade partners were the Flathead, Nez Perce, Crow, Umatilla, and Cayuse, with whom they traded buffalo skins, salmon, horses, and mules. There were also friendly relations and trade with the Northern Paiute. Annual trade fairs occurred at places like the Green River (Wyoming), the Cache Valley (Utah), and Pierre’s Hole (Idaho).
Notable Arts The chief art, especially in the late prehistoric and historic periods, was rawhide painted with geometric designs. The Northern Shoshone and Bannock also made beadwork with geometric designs. Their petroglyphs are at least several thousand years old. Various other art objects have been made from a variety of materials, including stone, wood, and clay.
Transportation Horses arrived in the mid- to late seventeenth century; before that, dogs helped with transporting goods. Hunters used snowshoes in winter. The Bannock used tule rafts.
Dress After they entered the mounted period, people dressed similarly to Plains Indians. They wore elk-skin clothing decorated with quillwork or beadwork in summer. Men wore leggings and fringed shirts, and women wore dresses, knee-length leggings, and elk-tooth necklaces. In the winter both sexes wore buffalo-skin, elk-skin, or deerskin moccasins as well as antelope, deer, buffalo, or mountain sheep robes. Otherwise, the traditional dress was breechclouts and rabbit-skin robes. Feathered headdresses were worn for ceremonial purposes.
War and Weapons Weapons included cedar, elk, or sheep horn bows; poison-tipped arrows kept in otterskin quivers; and stone war clubs. Obsidian was used for knives and arrowheads. Defensive equipment included antelope-skin armor and buffalo-skin shields. Among the peoples’ traditional enemies were the Blackfeet and possibly the Nez Perce. In later aboriginal times, the Shoshone acquired Plains war customs such as counting coup and taking scalps. Their Scalp Dance was also acquired from Plains groups.
Contemporary Information
Government/Reservations Fort Hall Reservation, Bannock, Bingham, Caribou, and Power Counties, Idaho (1868; Bannock and Northern Shoshone), contains 523,917 acres. The 1990 Indian population was 3,035. A constitution and by-laws were approved in 1936, and a corporate charter was ratified the following year. Government is provided by an elected business council. Most of the land is in Indian hands.
Duck Valley Reservation, Owyhee County, Idaho, and Elko County, Nevada (1877; Shoshone and Paiute), contains 289,819 acres. The 1990 Indian population was 1,021. An Indian Reorganization Act-based constitution and by-laws were adopted in 1936. Government is provided by a tribal council.
The Northwestern Band of Shoshoni Indians (roughly 400 population in 1995) live near Fort Hall, Idaho, although their land base, the Washakie Reservation (184 acres) is in Utah.
Economy At Fort Hall, important economic activities include public fishing and hunting, high-stakes bingo, tribal income from leases and mineral rights, several small businesses, and some agriculture. The tribe operates a 20,000-acre irrigation project.
Many people also work for the tribal government. The people also receive interest and investments from a $15.7 million land claims award to the Northern and Eastern Shoshone in 1968. A proposal to open a casino is tied up in court. Un- and underemployment is a major problem.
Legal Status The Bannock Tribe (Shoshone-Bannock), the Shoshone Indians, and the Northwestern Band of the Shoshoni Nation are federally recognized tribal entities.
Daily Life Despite centuries of intermarriage, many people still identify themselves as Bannock or Shoshone. Both languages are still spoken. Children attend public schools. A new clinic opened in 1990. The museum and library at Fort Hall are just two of the ways by which the people stay in touch with their Indian identities. Other ways include bilingual education, a weekly newspaper, and active religious observances such as the Sun Dance and the Peyote cult. The reservation runs adult education and youth recreation programs. It also hosts many traditional festivals, including a week-long celebration in August and an all-Indian rodeo.
