The principal item in the productive apparatus of the mounted Shoshone was the horse. Without sufficient horses to pursue the buffalo hunt, the Indian was relegated to "digger" status and had to remain within the Great Basin. But horses were individual, private property, and a man could locate under any leadership as long as he was mounted. His primary economic dependency was thus shifted from the larger social group to his own herd. Each man was to a large extent his own master and acted accordingly.
The loose bilaterality of the Shoshone was ideally adapted to their mode of existence. Our data show some tendency toward matrilocality, but Steward states that, in Idaho, this is true primarily of the early years of marriage, after which the couple could exercise a bilocal option (Steward, 1938, p. 214). The direction of the choice depended on such situational factors as the prestige of either mate's parents or their wealth in horses. In any event, there was no marked preferential weighting of either line. Our informants reported that the married couple often shifted back and forth for varying periods of time. Ultimately, the mounted Shoshone may be just as profitably looked on as neolocal, as were the western Shoshone, for the couple did not necessarily live with or adjacent to either mate's parents. People were quite free to join other relatives or to associate closely with unrelated persons. This, and the periodic splitting up and reamalgamation of larger groups, inhibited any development of large, solidary nuclei of bilateral kinsmen. Relationships were traced bilaterally and widely, but ties were amorphous and weak. Lacking bounded and corporate kin groups, persons were highly individuated and possessed maximum geographical mobility.
We may well conclude that, from the point of view of social structure, the mounted Shoshone were typologically much like the Great Basin people with whom they had close relations. Easily diffused items of culture, such as their material inventory, many religious beliefs, and their mode of warfare, establish their intimate historical connection with the Plains. But the higher levels of social integration found among the Shoshone are of a situational nature and are not well integrated with the fundamental facts of family life and more stable modes of grouping. It would be erroneous to conclude from this, however, that this amorphous, Basinlike social structure was nonadaptive to the Plains. That it is not at all atypical of the area is indicated by Eggan's statement (1955, pp. 518-519):
Plains Indian society, despite its lack of lineage and clan, still has a social structure. This structure is "horizontal" or generational in character and has little depth. The extended family groupings in terms of matrilocal residence or centered around a sibling group are amorphous but flexible. The bilateral or composite band organization, centered around a chief and his close relatives, may change its composition according to various circumstances—economic or political. The camp-circle encompasses the tribe, provides a disciplined organization for the communal hunt, and a center for the Sun Dance and other tribal ceremonies which symbolized the renewed unity of the tribe and the renewal of nature. The seasonal alternation between band and tribal camp-circle is related to ecological changes in the environment, and particularly to the behavior of the buffalo ...
The working hypothesis proposed earlier ... that "tribes coming into the Plains with different backgrounds and social systems," can be tentatively extended to Plains social structure as a whole, despite the variations noted. That this is in large measure an internal adjustment to the uncertain and changing conditions of Plains environment—ecological and social—rather than a result of borrowing and diffusion, is still highly probable.
The loose bilaterality seen by Eggan as a characteristic of Plains society was part of the earlier Shoshone social background. But more centralized political units and predominantly "horizontal" organizations, such as age-grade and soldier societies, were more weakly developed than among many other tribes of the northern Plains. This fact, as well as the acquisition of firearms by the northern tribes, may have been responsible for the manifest military weakness of the Shoshone and their westward retreat beyond the Rocky Mountains.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations
| AA | American Anthropologist |
| AMNH-AP | American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers. New York |
| BAE-B | Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin |
| CD | Congressional Document, Washington |
| MPUS | Report of the President of the United States. Washington |
| RCIA | Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Washington |
| RSI | Report of the Secretary of the Interior. Washington |
| RSW | Report of the Secretary of War. Washington |
| UC | University of California Publications. Berkeley and Los Angeles |
| -AAE | American Archaeology and Ethnology |
| -AR | Anthropological Records |
Alter, J. Cecil