All the Indians living northwest of Salt Lake visit the grounds in the spring and summer, putting up their winter supply of camas, and after the root season is over, resort to the falls and other points on the Snake to put up fish.
In October, 1863, after the mounted people had left the fishing sites, Colonel Maury reported on the population along the Snake River (ibid., p. 224):
They live a family in a place, on either side of the river for a distance of thirty or forty miles; have no arms and a very small number of Indian ponies; not an average of one to each family.... There are from 80 to 100 of this party, all Shoshones, and, aware of the treaties made at Salt Lake, scattered along the river from the great falls to the mouth of this stream [the Bruneau River], a distance of 100 miles.
A party of 20 Indians was attacked by the military on the Bruneau River and there were signs in the upper part of the valley of a large force. Maury commented: "All the roaming Indians of the country visit the Bruneau River more or less." Further evidence of the mobility of the population is given in the report of attacks in the vicinity of Salmon Falls Creek by Indians from the Owyhee River under a medicine man named Ebigon (ibid., p. 388).
With the cessation of hostilities, most of the Shoshone and Bannock of Idaho were rapidly rounded up by the military and a few years later were settled at Fort Hall. Governor Lyon reported visiting the "great Kammas Prairie tribe of Indians" in 1865 (Lyon, 1867, p. 418), and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cooley described the latter's territory as the "area around Fort Hall and the northern part of Utah" (Cooley, 1866, p. 198). Evidently the Indians who congregated annually at Camas Prairie were mistaken as a single tribe, and there is little further reference to such a group.
While it is almost impossible to identify Indians in the southwest Idaho region, west of the Bruneau River, Ballard's 1866 report of a mixed Paiute and Shoshone population probably represents the real situation (1867, p. 190).
The southwest portion of Idaho, including the Owyhee country and the regions of the Malheur, are infested with a roving band of hostile Pi-utes and outlawed Shoshones, numbering, from the best information, some 300 warriors.
The reports of Indian Agents already cited in the section on the Boise River region indicate that the Bruneau River population was Shoshone. Their numbers are given as 400 in 1866 (ibid.) and 300 in 1868, after they had been brought to the Boise River (C. F. Powell, 1869, p. 661).
The frequent mention of a band of Bruneau Shoshone in the later reports of the Indian agents is somewhat misleading. Information from contemporary informants indicates that there was no distinct and separate population of the Bruneau River, as opposed to near-by stretches of the Snake River. Furthermore, the fisheries of the Bruneau River were often used by mounted Indians from the Fort Hall prairies.
There were no boundaries, as such, in southwest Idaho. Stewart's Tagotoka band of Northern Paiute is represented as occupying most of southwestern Idaho (Stewart, 1939, map 1, facing p. 127), while Blythe's equivalent "Tagu Eaters" are placed in the Owyhee River Valley (Blythe, 1938, p. 404). Blythe notes that east of this population there were "no pure Paiute bands." Steward's map places the limit between the Paiute and the Shoshone about equidistant between the Owyhee and Bruneau Rivers (Steward, 1938, fig. 1, facing p. ix). There was no hard and fast line between Shoshone and Paiute, and the high country south of Snake River was usually entered only in the summer when hunting parties of either linguistic group wandered through southwest Idaho. Further information the pattern of occupation of the Snake River and southwestern Idaho is given in the following ethnographic material.