Shoshone

The Shoshone, who call themselves Newe, "the people", have their homelands in the desert basins of Nevada and Utah and in the mountains and valleys of Idaho and Wyoming. Their language belongs to the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan family. Shoshone communities today fall into four broad divisions: the Eastern Shoshone of Wyoming, the Northern Shoshone of southern Idaho, the Western Shoshone of Nevada, California and northern Utah, and the Goshute of western Utah and eastern Nevada.

The name comes from sosoni, a Shoshone word for tall grasses; some neighbours called them "grass house people" after homes built of it. Early American explorers and some tribes called them the Snake Indians, and in 1805 Meriwether Lewis wrote of the "Sosonees or snake Indians". Bands were traditionally named after where they lived and what they ate, such as the Buffalo Eaters of Wyoming, the Salmon Eaters of the Lemhi valley, the Sheep Eaters of the mountains, and the Pinenut and Ricegrass Eaters of the Nevada basins.

The Shoshone spread from the western Great Basin north and east into Idaho and Wyoming, and some Eastern Shoshone groups were already on the plains east of the Rockies by 1500. They were among the first northern peoples to take up horses and guns, and for a time they ranged into southern Alberta and much of Montana, raiding the Blackfoot. One Shoshone branch moved far to the south and by 1700 had emerged as the Comanche. After about 1750, as the Blackfoot, Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho gained horses and guns of their own, the Eastern Shoshone were pushed back towards the mountains. A Lemhi Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, served as a guide to the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

In the 1820s–1840s the Eastern Shoshone were major players in the Rocky Mountain fur and bison-hide trade, and the trappers' rendezvous along the Wind River Range were held at old Shoshone trade-fair sites. Chief Washakie, a renowned warrior who spoke English, allied his people with the United States and negotiated treaties at Fort Bridger in 1863 and 1868, which secured the Wind River Reservation. In 1876 Eastern Shoshone warriors fought beside the US Army against the Lakota and Cheyenne at the Battle of the Rosebud.

Elsewhere, settlers moving onto Shoshone hunting lands sparked war. On the Bear River in today's Idaho, US troops attacked a Northwestern Shoshone winter camp in 1863, killing an estimated 250 people, many of them women and children; it was the greatest loss the Shoshone suffered at American hands. Northern and Western Shoshone, allied with the related Bannock, fought the Snake War of 1864–1868 and the Bannock War of 1878. In 2008 the Northwestern Band bought the massacre site to protect it and build a memorial.

The 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley described a Western Shoshone territory of tens of thousands of square miles in the Great Basin. Western Shoshone leaders maintain that they never gave up title to it, and most tribal leaders opposed the 2004 act under which Congress set aside $160 million as payment for it. They have protested nuclear testing and gold mining on their lands and have issued their own passports.

Shoshone people belong to many federally recognised tribes, often sharing reservations with Northern Paiute, Bannock or Arapaho neighbours. The largest include Wind River in Wyoming, shared with the Northern Arapaho since 1878, Fort Hall in Idaho with the Bannock, and Duck Valley on the Nevada–Idaho border. About 1,000 people speak Shoshoni, and Idaho State University teaches the language.

Our maps for 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Shoshone territory, labelled "Shoshoni", across the Great Basin and the Rockies. On the 1650 map it borders the Blackfoot, the Crow, the Arapaho, the Ute, the Northern and Southern Paiute and the Nez Perce.