Intermountain Histories

Sheep Eaters (Mountain Shoshones) in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

2025-04-19T02:12:32+00:00

The Sheep Eaters (also known as Mountain Shoshones, Tukudika, or Snake Indians), resided in Yellowstone National Park, the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, and parts of central Idaho, until the reservation era.

Much of the history of the Sheep Eaters emanates from archeological and ethnographic research. Many scholars believe their origins are in the Great Basin, though that continues to be debated. Trappers like Osborne Russell were among the first Euro-Americans to leave written accounts about the Sheep Eaters. Russell noted that a group of about 22 Sheep Eaters he met were “neatly clothed in dressed deer and Sheep skins of the best quality and seemed to be perfectly contented and happy … [They had] about 30 dogs on which they carried their skins, clothing, provisions etc on their hunting excursions. They were well armed with bows and arrows pointed with obsidian…” Early descriptions provide useful information, but they also often encouraged stereotypes. For example, Philetus Norris, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park in 1877, described the Sheep Eaters as “vanished” and “hermits." The Sheep Eaters domesticated dogs they used to carry packs and pull travois. Their name came from their main source of food, Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, which the dogs may have assisted in hunting. Pots and pipes carved from steatite represent another distinguishing characteristic of Sheep Eater culture. The Sheep Eaters participated in the Rocky Mountain fur trade from the 1820s through the 1850s. During the 1870s, the Lemhi Valley Agency was created to oversee the removal of the Sheep Eaters, Bannocks, and Shoshones to Lemhi Valley in central Idaho. In 1880, they began to be relocated to Fort Hall, but some Sheep Eaters remained in Yellowstone, eventually joining the Eastern Shoshones on the Wind River Reservation. Idaho censuses continued to list Sheep Eaters as a distinct group through the early part of the twentieth century. It is important to note that the Sheep Eaters did not “vanish” or go extinct as Norris and others described. Today, some of the Sheep Eater descendants live on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho. In 2023, the town of Jackson, Wyoming issued a land acknowledgement concerning the Sheep Eaters:

We recognize that the land we are gathering on is the ancestral homeland of the Mountain Shoshone People who stewarded it for thousands of years and that many other tribes also lived upon and cared for this area … With gratitude, we honor Indigenous peoples, past and present. We also acknowledge the sovereignty of the Native nations closest to Jackson whose land was taken through broken treaties that resulted in the creation of the Wind River and Fort Hall Indian Reservations. We recognize this acknowledgement is simply a first step. The Town of Jackson is committed to continued and informed action to connect with Indigenous people.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

Washakie Township: The Mormon Alternative to Fort Hall

2018-06-08T03:24:07+00:00

Ninety miles south of Fort Hall, the Washakie Township represented an alternative to reservation life. Following the conversion of over 100 Shoshones to Mormonism, Washakie was founded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1880. Here, the Northwestern Band of Shoshone made their home as ranchers and farmers until the 1960s. Today, Washakie is a ghost town owned by an energy company.

They were among the only survivors: Chief Sagwitch and his Northwestern Band of Shoshone were destitute and hopeless after three quarters of their tribe were murdered in the 1863 Bear River Massacre. One decade later, Sagwitch made peace with the occupiers of his homeland by joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Through the help of the LDS church, the Shoshone began a homestead community away from Fort Hall where they felt they would be free to practice their new religion.
For the next eighty years, hundreds of Shoshone made their homes in Washakie. At its pinnacle in the 1920s, more than 300 worked there as farmers and ranchers. At first, they relied on subsistence agriculture, which they supplemented with deer meat. As their land base grew, the Northwestern Band began selling excess crops of wheat and potatoes to the LDS Church. Additionally, they raised purebred cattle and sheep, which they sold at premium prices in the local market.
After 1900, very few of the Northwestern Band of Shoshone returned to Fort Hall except for larger intertribal Shoshone gatherings, especially basketball games. At Washakie, they were allowed to speak Shoshone and perform traditional ceremonies—which the US government wanted to eliminate. The local grade school—established and maintained by the LDS Church—taught the students to speak, read, and write English but did not discourage the exploration of Shoshone culture. After elementary school, most students attended nearby high schools and a remarkably high percentage also attended college.
By World War II, Washakie was a relatively successful agricultural experiment, but the inhabitants still lived without electricity in small shacks and tents. Seeking better economic opportunities, many found employment at the nearby Hill Airforce Base. Drawn away by the allure of steady pay and higher education, few young people stayed in Washakie, and its population dwindled until the land was sold in the 1970s.
For more (including 6 images) view the original article

Ranching and Success on Fort Hall: The Indian Stockmen’s Association

2018-06-08T03:06:17+00:00

During the 1910s, conflict and failure demarcated the relationship between the Shoshone-Bannock of Fort Hall and the federal government. To protest the government’s discriminatory policies and lack of economic opportunity, the successful Indian Stockmen’s Association was founded in 1920.

From the creation of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation until the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the reservation was controlled by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Without clearly understanding the cultural and physical needs of the Shoshone-Bannock, the BIA and on-site agents often made decisions that conflicted with local values and harmed the general welfare. For example, horses symbolized power, mobility, and strength to the Shoshone-Bannocks, who required at least ten steers as payment for just one horse. To the government, the horses were just obstacles in the way of progress. The final straw was in September 1920, when government agents quietly rounded up 1,200 horses and sold them for less than $6 apiece—to be turned into chicken feed.
Meanwhile, individual ranchers were successfully circumventing the reservation bureaucracy by communally sharing allotment lands for cattle grazing. In 1917, Thomas LeSieur, a Cherokee married to a Shoshone woman, sold his cattle for $8.45 a head, the highest price for range beef cattle in Idaho that year. Others on the reservation had also realized the economic potential cattle provided, especially Ralph Dixey and Pat Tyhee, both Shoshones. Dixey stated in 1917, “This is a cattle country; my people here are stock raisers.” Land-use policies under previous Indian agents gave preference to non-Native ranchers with the pretext that their herds were more profitable. Outraged by discriminatory policies, the loss of their horses, and the general poverty of the reservation, Dixey and Tyhee joined with other Shoshone-Bannock ranchers to form the Fort Hall Indian Stockmen’s Association (ISA) in 1921. The organization’s objectives were to protect the reservation range land, to raise better cattle and horses, to make the herds self-sustaining, to build a sales yard at Fort Hall, and to foment cooperation with white neighbors.
By the end of 1921, the ISA had about 5,000 head of cattle on the reservation. Local newspapers and ranchers were amazed by the quality of the herds. The ISA became so successful that the herdsmen built stock yards and feeders to expand the scope of their operation. Buyers came from as far away as Los Angeles to look at the cattle, but the ISA was insistent that the cattle first be sold locally. Partially, this goal would help offset costs, but it was also a useful tool to build bridges between Shoshone-Bannock ranchers and their non-Native neighbors. The cattle operation turned out to be a popular and very profitable experiment for many decades afterward and was subsequently copied by several other Native American groups in the west.
The Indian Cattlemen’s Association continued to be a powerful player in tribal economics and politics throughout the twentieth century, but today the ISA has been superseded by Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Enterprises.
For more (including 3 images) view the original article

The Indian New Deal and the Shoshone-Bannock Constitution

2018-06-08T02:45:06+00:00

The Great Depression brought hard times to the Intermountain West but also provided an opportunity for Native Americans to change the existing state of affairs. An “Indian New Deal” brought the Shoshone-Bannock together and gave the opportunity for the establishment of an intertribal constitution on Fort Hall.

Two thousand miles away from the rich farmland and pastures of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, the future of America’s native peoples was decided by politicians and sociologists in Washington, D.C. The new Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, John Collier, hoped to implement policies that would strengthen tribal cultures rather than destroy them. While President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress passed laws as part of the “New Deal,” Collier hoped for an “Indian New Deal” that would reverse the assault on Indian lands, rejuvenate tribal governments, preserve native languages, and revive tribal customs. For the Shoshone-Bannock, these new policies meant a fundamental transformation of their whole reservation system.
Although Fort Hall may have been one of the more prosperous reservations in the United States, too many of its residents lived in or near poverty. Tribal leader John Ballard lamented, “The things that [the government has] promised me in the past have not been fulfilled . . . [We] have been placed in a condition that is poor.” To combat economic deprivation and provide Native Americans with more input into local decisions, John Collier spearheaded the effort to pass the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). John Ballard agreed with Collier’s plan, as did eight of the other nine representatives from Fort Hall who met with government agents. Tribal leader Tom Cosgrove agreed, telling other Native Americans, “If we accept this bill we are going to help our Indians.” Although Congress passed the IRA in June 1934, each tribe had to also separately approve the bill before adhering to its policies. When it came time for the Shoshone-Bannock to vote, 375 voted yes and only 31 voted no.
The next great task for the Shoshone-Bannock was the implementation of the IRA. To do so, they needed to create a constitution that would satisfy Shoshone, Bannocks, ranchers, farmers, the federal government, the state government, and other factions on the reservation. On April 30, 1936, they finally succeeded in ratifying a constitution everyone could support. Although small disagreements continued to flare up after its ratification, the 1936 constitution held fast until today. Among other things, the constitution established laws for the reservation, set requirements for tribal membership, and established a reservation government called the Fort Hall Business Council. This marked a new chapter for the history of Fort Hall.
For more (including 3 images) view the original article

The Division of Fort Hall: Allotment and Land Loss

2018-06-08T01:30:07+00:00

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Americans believed that the best way to help Native Americans was through forced assimilation. Laws and social activists worked to inhibit traditional culture and practices. Allotment was one such attempt to split Shoshone-Bannock land holdings and fracture their culture.

After the Native Americans were forced onto reservations, the U.S. Congress was concerned that most tribes had not discontinued collective living. In response, the Dawes Act was passed in 1887 to “allot” reservation lands to individual owners. This meant that the reservations would be divided among the tribe members so that necessity would require them to adopt agriculture. Each reservation was thus partitioned, including Fort Hall.
In 1868, Fort Hall was comprised of 1.8 million acres for approximately 4,500 residents. Between 1888 and 1902, the Shoshone-Bannock were pressured to cede away nearly a third of the reservation to the growing town of Pocatello. With the remaining land, each tribe member would receive a certain share. Married couples received 160 acres, single adults 80 acres, and children 40 acres. All of the “excess” was sold by the government. Before any of this could happen, the Shoshone-Bannock requested that all properties have access to irrigation. The first of the irrigation projects was completed in 1911. Between 1911 and 1913, half a million acres were allotted to Shoshone-Bannock tribe members. The remaining 600,000 acres were subsequently sold to non-Natives for a fraction of their worth.
Land allotment was divisive in its implementation, but the controversy surrounding the policy has not disappeared in the intervening century. For some, division of tribal lands into individual allotments was an unmitigated economic disaster. Thrown into the turbulence of crop prices and agriculture, many either went hungry or had to sell their land. For another segment of the population, allotment proved an opportunity to successfully experiment with ranching and farming. Local newspapers tended to exaggerate the truth with regards to both the successes and failures of allotment, so it is difficult to reach a historical consensus.
Today, 97 percent of Fort Hall is under the control of the tribe or individual Shoshone-Bannock owners. These lands are farmed individually or rented out to local farmers.
For more (including 4 images) view the original article