The extent of the territory in question and the complexity of the historical period in point, that preceding the treaties of 1863 and 1868, required considerable research. We spent the summer of 1954 on the Shoshone reservations at Wind River, Wyoming, Fort Hall, Idaho, and Duck Valley, Nevada. Some six weeks each were spent at Wind River and Fort Hall and a week at Duck Valley. At each of these places we spoke to the oldest informants available. Salvage ethnography of this type is generally an unrewarding and unsatisfying task, and it was complicated in this investigation by the fact that we were asking our informants to recall historical material that is often ill preserved in the oral tradition. Thus, an old Indian may well remember some custom connected with war or ceremony that he had either experienced or that had been told to him by an older person. But he would be less likely to recall the exact places where game could be found, the trails used, the organization and composition of the group that pursued the game, and so forth. This is especially true of the buffalo-hunting Shoshone, for any informant who actually took part in a hunt as a mature individual would have been in his late seventies, at least, at the time of our research. And informants did not, of course, distinguish clearly between pre-and post-reservation times. Only careful cross-checking would reveal whether the individual was speaking of the 1860's or the 1890's. As might be expected, it was virtually impossible to determine whether the data supposedly valid for the 1860's was true of the preceding decade or the one before that, and any student of Plains and Basin-Plateau history recognizes that such historical continuity cannot be assumed.