Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and SocietyMurphy, Robert F. (Robert Francis)
History
Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society
Murphy, Robert F. (Robert Francis)
Bannock Indians; Shoshoni Indians
The journal of John Work in June, 1832, mentioned (Work, 1923, pp.
165-167) "Snake" Indians on the Payette River, immediately below the
mouth of Big Willow Creek; on Little Willow Creek; on the Weiser
River; and on the east bank of the Snake River, between the mouths of
the Payette and the Weiser. Work used the term Snake in a broad sense
and we cannot identify this population as Shoshone with certainty. The
Indians had horses, and may thus have been a buffalo-hunting group
that had traveled west for salmon. Nathaniel Wyeth entered one of the
western Idaho valleys in October of the same year and observed
"extensive camps of Indians about one month old. Here they find salmon
in a creek running through it and dig the Kamas root but not an Indian
was here at this time" (Wyeth, 1899, p. 172). Wyeth was on the Boise
River in August, 1834, and encountered "a small village of Snakes."
His party proceeded on to the Snake River where they found "a few
lodges of very impudent Pawnacks" (p. 229). "Bannock" Indians were
also encountered on the Boise River in 1833 by Bonneville's party
(Irving, 1837, 2:38) and in the following year his journals noted that
"formidable bands of the Banneck Indians were lying on the Boisee and
Payette Rivers" (p. 194). The Bannock, or the Indians so termed by our
sources, evidently lived near the confluence of these streams with the
Snake River, for John Townsend, a young naturalist who joined Wyeth's
party, reported several groups of about twenty Indians fishing in the
Boise River each of which identified itself as Shoshone (Townsend,
1905, pp. 206-207). Farther down the Boise River the party "came to a
village consisting of thirty willow lodges of the Pawnees (Bannocks)"
(p. 210). The Shoshone and the Mono-Bannock speakers did not maintain
complete separateness, however, for Townsend wrote (1905, p. 266) that
the party met some ten lodges of "Snakes and Bannecks" on the west
side of the Snake River, near Burnt River.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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