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 November, 1832, it was reported that "a village of Snakes and
Ponacks amounting to about two hundred lodges on Gordiez [Big Lost]
River" was attacked by a party of Blackfoot (ibid., pp. 185-186). The
"Snakes" drove them off, but the "Horn Chief" was killed. The Horn
Chief was reported on the Bear River in 1830 (ibid., pp. 71-73). This
group may have been the same one mentioned a month later as being in
winter camp on the Portneuf River (ibid., p. 188). Another Bannock
camp was found in December, 1832, on the Blackfoot River. Ferris wrote
(ibid., pp. 189-190):
I visited their village on the 20th and found these miserable
wretches to the number of eighty or one hundred families,
half-naked, and without lodges, except in one or two instances.
They had formed, however, little huts of sage roots, which were
yet so open and ill calculated to shield them from the extreme
cold, that I could not conceive how they were able to endure
such severe exposure.
Ferris' description does not seem typical of the Plainslike Bannock
Indians. There are two possible explanations: these Bannock had been
attacked by hostiles and had lost their possessions; or they had
recently moved westward from Oregon. The latter possibility cannot be
ruled out, for the Bannock and the Northern Paiute were in contact
during the salmon season and the Oregon people drifted over to join
their colinguists on the upper Snake River until much later in the
century.
The presence of the Horn Chief on the Big Lost River in Idaho and the
Bear River in Utah bespeaks the fact that the residents of eastern
Idaho entered the northern Utah region quite as frequently as did the
Shoshone of western Wyoming. Zenas Leonard reported meeting Bannock
Indians some four days' travel west of the Green River. Depending on
their speed, the trappers may have been in southern Idaho or some part
of northern Utah. Leonard wrote of the Bannock (1934, p. 105):
On the fourth day of our Journey we arrived at the huts of some
Bawnack Indians. These Indians appear to live very poor and in
the most forlorn condition. They generally make but one visit
to the buffaloe country during the year, where they remain
until they jerk as much meat as their females can lug home on
their backs. They then quit the mountains and return to the
plains where they subsist on fish and small game the remainder
of the year. They keep no horses and are always easy prey for
other Indians provided with guns and horses.
It would be difficult to imagine a people without horses traveling
across the Continental Divide for buffalo, and it must be assumed that
the near-by herds that then existed were used.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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