The Shoshones, or Snakes, are a tribe inhabiting the country about the headwaters of the Green and Snake Rivers, and a part of a great family of the same name, including the Comanches, Utahs, and Kiowas. They occupy nearly all of the great Salt Lake Basin, to the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada, and extend also easterly to Texas. The Shoshonees proper are divided into many bands under various names, the most important being the Buffalo-Eaters, of Wind River; the Mountain Sheep-Eaters, of Salmon River, and the Western Shoshonees, near Boise, separated from the rest of the tribe by the kindred Bannacks, numbering in the aggregate, with some lesser tribes on the Humboldt, between five and six thousand souls. Our first knowledge of them was through Lewis and Clarke, who found them west of the Rocky Mountains on the waters of the Columbia, but are supposed to have at one time inhabited the plain-country east of the mountains. James Irwin, United States Indian agent, in his report to the Commissioner, says: "They emigrated north about 1781, and proceeded to the upper waters of Green River under a leader or chief called Shoshone, or Snake. At this point they divided, one party going over on the Oregon slope, who are now called Western Shoshones, and have an agency in common with the Bannacks at Fort Hall. The other party constitute the eastern band of Shoshones, and have roamed around the Wind River Mountains from the time mentioned until 1868, when a treaty was made at Fort Bridger, that provided a reservation for them embracing the Wind River Valley. Recently they entered into a contract with the Government by which they ceded a portion of their reservation, leaving them a district perhaps 50 miles in length, and 30 in breadth, embracing a beautiful valley on the east side of the Wind River Mountains. They now number about 1,800 souls, and must have diminished greatly since the time of Lewis and Clarke. Their life was a continued warfare; at first with the Crows and Blackfeet, and since then with the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Sioux, and all this time contending almost naked with the elements and struggling for subsistence." _List of illustration._ 657-8. VILLAGE IN SOUTH PASS. During the expedition of 1870, the United States Geological Survey of the Territories came across the above village of Shoshones, numbering nearly one hundred lodges, encamped among the southern foot-hills of the Wind River Mountains, where the above and some of the following views were secured. They were under the well-known chief Washakie, and were on their way to the Wind River Valley to hunt buffalo for the winter's supply of food and clothing. Although the village had all the appearance of being a permanent abiding-place, yet the following morning, before the sun was an hour high, there was not a tent in sight, and the last pack-pony with trailing lodge-poles had passed out of sight over the hills to the eastward.