Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and SocietyMurphy, Robert F. (Robert Francis)
History
Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society
Murphy, Robert F. (Robert Francis)
Bannock Indians; Shoshoni Indians
In 1831, an American Fur Company trapper, Warren Angus Ferris, noted
that the two main Crow bands were located chiefly on the Yellowstone
River and its tributaries, but their "war parties infest the countries
of the Eutaws, Snakes, Arrapahoes, Blackfeet, Sious, and Chayennes"
(Ferris, 1940, p. 305). He had this to say of the Eastern Shoshone (p.
310):
Of the Snakes on the plains there are probably about four
hundred lodges, six hundred warriors, and eighteen hundred
souls. They range in the plains of Green River as far as the
Eut Mountains; southward from the source to the outlet of Bear
River, of the Big Lake; thence to the mouth of Porto-nuf
[Portneuf], on Snake River of the Columbia.... They are at war
with the Eutaws, Crows, and Blackfeet, but rob and steal from
all their neighbors.
Ferris saw few Indians in his travels through the Jackson Hole area in
1832 and 1833. However, in "Jackson's Little Hole," presumably at the
south end of Hoback Canyon, he noted, in August, 1832, several large,
abandoned camps, which he assumed were those of the "Grosventres of
the prairies" (p. 158). The supposed Gros Ventre party was later seen
on the Green River and was said to have consisted of 500 to 600
warriors (pp. 158-159). These may well have been Blackfoot, for Zenas
Leonard reported a Blackfoot attack on the upper Snake River in
western Wyoming in July, 1832 (Leonard, 1934, p. 51). The Indians most
frequently sighted in the Green River region, however, were the
Shoshone. In June, 1833, Ferris saw "several squaws scattered over the
prairie engaged in digging roots" (Ferris, 1940, p. 205). These women
apparently belonged to "some fifty or sixty lodges of Snakes, ...
encamped about the fort [Bonneville's] who were daily exchanging their
skins and robes, for munitions, knives, ornaments, etc., with the
whites" (ibid., p. 206).
Further evidence of the virtual absence of the Shoshone from Missouri
waters in the fur period comes from Zenas Leonard. When preparing to
spend the winter of 1832-33 on the Green River, the trappers met a
party of 70 to 80 Crow who said "they were going to war with the Snake
Indians--whose country we were now in--and they said also they
belonged to the Crow nation on the East side of the mountains"
(Leonard, 1934, pp. 82-83). These Crow stole horses from the party,
and the trappers pursued them to their village at the mouth of the
Shoshone River, near modern Lovell, Wyoming. In the summer of 1834,
Captain Bonneville's trappers, one of whom was Zenas Leonard, trapped
on the waters of Wind River, but no mention is made of Shoshone
(ibid., pp. 224-226). In October, however, they met the Crow in the
Big Horn Basin, and they wintered on Wind River in their company (pp.
255-256). No Shoshone were reported in the area.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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