The Shoshone of this area took part in root gathering and festivities every summer on Camas Prairie. During the fall, deer were taken on Camas Prairie and in the country immediately south of the Snake River. Deer and elk were taken in the fall in the mountain country north of Hailey, and bighorn sheep were also pursued in the mountainous crags of this area.
In the great expanse of territory between Shoshone Falls and Bannock Creek only one small group is reported. These people were referred to as Paraguitsi, a word denoting the budding willow tree, and were said to inhabit Goose Creek and vicinity. Goose Creek is above the limit of the salmon run and only trout could be caught in its waters. Whether they fished below Shoshone Falls is uncertain. The area of the Goose Creek Mountains was entered also by people who wintered in other sections and was a frequent resort of Idaho and Nevada Shoshone in search of pine nuts.
Informants agreed that the Paraguitsi were a wild and timid people who remained isolated in the fastnesses of Goose Creek and the Goose Creek Mountains. This range provided them with deer and pine nuts, but their economy was meager and they were reported to resort to cannibalism in the winter. Other Shoshone avoided them because of this abhorrent practice.
One informant reported a category of "Mountain Dwellers," or Toyarivia. This was evidently a generic term for mountaineers as opposed to those who dwell in valleys, or Yewawgone. The Mountain Dwellers customarily spent the winter on the Snake River bottoms in the same area as the people generally called Taza agaidika. They joined in the salmon fishing at Glenn's Ferry and above, but hunted in the highlands on the Idaho-Nevada border during the fall. This division of mountain and valley people seems thus to have been occasionally used to distinguish Shoshone who hunted south of the Snake River from those who roamed to the north.
THE SHOSHONE OF THE SAWTOOTH MOUNTAINS
All informants agreed that the Sawtooth Mountains west of the Lemhi River and south of the Salmon River were inhabited by a Shoshone population designated as Tukurika (Dukarika and other variants). No Tukurika, or "Sheepeater," informants were interviewed on the Fort Hall Reservation, and we obtained only fragmentary information from Lemhi Shoshone and other Idaho Shoshone and Bannock.
Historical information on the Sheepeaters is scanty and mostly concerned with later periods. The earliest reference available comes from Ferris' journals. The Ferris party was in the Sawtooth Mountains, probably in or near Stanley Basin, in July, 1831. Ferris wrote (1940, p. 99):
Here we found a party of "Root Diggers," or Snake Indians without horses. They subsist upon the flesh of elk, deer and bighorns, and upon salmon which ascend to the fountain sources of this river, and are here taken in great numbers.... We found them extremely anxious to exchange salmon for buffalo meat, of which they are very fond, and which they never procure in this country, unless by purchase from their friends who occasionally come from the plains to trade with them.
The Stanley Basin region, it will be remembered, was a fall hunting range of the Shoshone of Boise River and was probably entered by others from Snake River. But as this was salmon season on both the Boise and Snake rivers, it is probable that Indians mentioned by Ferris were part of the more permanent population of the Sawtooths, i.e., Sheepeaters. The southern Sawtooths were no doubt utilized, like so many of our other areas, by people who customarily wintered in diverse places.
In June, 1832, John Work met "a party of Snakes consisting of three men and three women" near Meadow Creek on the Salmon River waters (Work, 1923, p. 160). Later references to the Sheepeaters indicate that they impinged upon the Shoshone of the Boise River on the west and the Lemhi on the east. Indian Agent Hough reported from the Boise River in 1868: "The Sheep Eaters have also behaved quite well; they are more isolated from the settlement, occupy a more sterile country, and are exceedingly poor" (Hough, 1869, p. 660). The Sheepeaters seem to have had their closest affiliations with the Shoshone of the Lemhi River, however, and they eventually moved to the agency founded there (Viall, 1872, p. 831; Shanks et al., 1874, p. 2).