Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society

by Robert F. Murphy; Yolanda Murphy

In the following year, Head summarized the distribution of mixed groups of Shoshone and Bannock in the region (1868, p. 176).

They inhabit, during about six months in each year, the valleys of the Ogden, Weber, and Bear rivers, in this territory. A considerable portion of their numbers remain there also during the whole year, while others accompany the Eastern Shoshone to the Wind River valley to hunt buffalo. They claim as their country also a portion of southern Idaho, and often visit that region, but game being there scarce and the country mostly barren, their favorite haunts are as before stated.

According to Steward, Pocatello's band was an innovation in Bannock Creek (1938, p. 217):

Apparently there were several independent villages in this district in aboriginal days, but when the people acquired many horses and the white man entered the country they began to consolidate under Pocatello, whose authority was extended over people at Goose Creek to the west and probably at Grouse Creek [Utah].

Actual war parties were led by Pocatello and numbered only ten to twenty men, according to one informant. Hostile activities were conducted especially on the Oregon Trail, which ran through southern Idaho, and his band was responsible also for the attack at Massacre Rocks (near the Snake River) and for various raids in northern Utah.

When not on the warpath, the Bannock Creek Shoshone followed a more prosaic round of native subsistence activities. Information on the winter quarters of the Bannock Creek people is uncertain. There were some winter camps on Bannock Creek, and one informant reported that Pocatello also wintered on the Portneuf River between Pocatello and McCammon. Others said that Pocatello wintered at times on the Bear River near the Utah-Idaho line.

Pocatello was not the only chief among the Bannock Creek people. Two others were named Pete and Tom Pocatello, although their relation to Pocatello himself was doubtful. These chiefs had their own followers, who were nonetheless known as Hukandika by informants. Tom Pocatello remained in the general area of Malade City, Idaho, and Washakie, Utah, and wintered on the Bear River.

When they were not engaged in or threatened by hostilities, the Bannock Creek Shoshone split into small camp groups much as they did in pre-white days. At least part of the band went to Glenn's Ferry on the Snake River in the springtime, where they remained throughout the salmon run. Similarly, many went—probably as individual families and camp groups—to Camas Prairie for summer root digging. Others might travel into the Bear River and Bear Lake country, while still others journeyed to Nevada to visit or to be present for the September pine-nut harvests. Those who were mounted even traveled into Wyoming and visited and hunted buffalo with the Eastern Shoshone.

With the previously mentioned Paraguitsi, the Bannock Creek people were the only Idaho Shoshone who depended upon the pine nut for an important part of their winter's provisions. These nuts could be obtained in the Goose Creek and Grouse Creek Mountains in late September. One informant reported that, if the harvest failed, many people went into the mountains west of Wendover and Ibapah, Utah, for the gathering there. A family could gather sufficient pine nuts in the fall, it was claimed, to last it until March.

The general round of migrations of the Bannock Creek people brought them into contact with the Shoshone of Nevada and with the small and scattered Shoshone groups of northern Utah, from whom they are almost indistinguishable. Buffalo hunting and common use of the Bear River region resulted in considerable interaction with the Eastern Shoshone, who also made use of this area in pre-reservation times. There was extensive intermarriage between the Eastern Shoshone and those of Bannock Creek and northern Utah, and one informant reports that their dialects were much alike. This affinity between the two groups finds further documentation in the belief of one of Steward's informants that the Bannock Creek people must have come from Wyoming (Steward, 1938, p. 217).