These people were the weakest of all mountain clans. They did not possess horses. Their tools were of the crudest type; they lived in caves and nearly inaccessible niches in cliffs along the Gardner River, especially in wintertime. These more permanent camps were carefully chosen in the interest of security against other Indians. Superintendent Norris discovered one of them by accident:
In trailing a wounded bighorn I descended a rocky dangerous pathway. In rapt astonishment I found I had thus unbidden entered an ancient but recently deserted, secluded, unknown haunt of the Sheepeater aborigines of the Park.[88]
This campground was a half mile in length and four hundred feet at its widest point, with a similar depth, “and hemmed in and hidden by rugged timber-fringed basaltic cliffs....”
In summer, the Sheepeater Indians ventured further into the interior, following the game upon the higher plateaus. There they erected:
skin-covered lodges, or circular upright brush-heaps called wickiups, decaying evidences of which are abundant near Mammoth Hot Springs, the various firehole basins, the shores of Yellowstone Lake, the newly explored Hoodoo regions, and in nearly all of the sheltered glens and valleys of the Park.[89]
In 1874, the Earl of Dunraven discovered such a camp just west of Mary Mountain on the head of Nez Percé Creek.
Superintendent Norris and his associates focused their eyes particularly upon evidences of Indian occupancy. In a dozen places they observed rude but extensive pole and brush fences used for wild animal driveways.[90] An especially strategic camp was discovered near the summit of a grassy pass between Hoodoo and Miller creeks. From this skyline perch, marked by forty decaying lodges, an entire tribe could command a view of all possible approaches for many miles. Fragments of white men’s chinaware, blankets, bed clothing, and male and female wearing apparel bore mute but mournful witness of border raids and massacres. This was an Absaroka summer retreat.
However, there are few such evidences discernible today because snows are heavy and wind fallen trees profuse, while the character of Indian structures was flimsy. In fact, these Indians, on the whole, left fewer enduring signs of their dwelling places than beaver. Several log wickiups still stand in a pleasant fir grove in the triangle formed by Lava Creek and Gardner River above their point of union. These wickiups are readily accessible from the Tower Falls highway one half mile east of the Gardner River bridge.
What happened to the timid Tukuarikas? They simply vanished from the scene as the white men invaded their refuge. They left without a contest for ownership or treaty of cession. That is the way most Americans would have had all Indian tribes behave!
All mountain Indian tribes visited Yellowstone. We-Saw, Shoshoni guide for Captain W. A. Jones in 1873, said his people and also the Bannocks and Crows occasionally visited the Yellowstone River and Lake.