The Snakes, or Shoshones, are widely scattered tribes, and some even assert that they are of the same race as the Comanches, whose separation is said to be remembered by the Snakes: it has been ascertained, in confirmation of this opinion, that they both speak the same language. The hunters report that the proper country of the Snakes is to the east of Youta Lake and north of the Snake or Lewis River; but they are found in many detached places. The largest band is located near Fort Boise on the Snake River, to the north of the Bonacks. The Snakes have horses and firearms, and derive their subsistence both from the chase and from fishing. There are other bands of them, to the north of the Bonacks, who have no horses, and live on acorns and roots, their only arms being bows and arrows. In consequence of the mode of gaining their subsistence, they are called Diggers and are looked upon with great contempt.
Wilkes further commented (p. 473) that there had been a general north-to-south tribal pressure in which the Blackfoot had occupied former Shoshone lands: "the country now in possession of the Snakes, belonged to the Bonacks, who have been driven to the Sandy Desert."
Father De Smet reported that the "Shoshonees or Root-diggers" had a population of 10,000, divided into "several parties" (De Smet, 1906, 27:163). The missionary claimed they were called Snakes because they burrowed into the earth and lived on roots, and commented (ibid.):
They would have no other food if some hunting parties did not occasionally pass beyond the mountains in pursuit of the buffalo, while a part of the tribe proceeds along the banks of the Salmon River, to make provision for the winter, at the season when the fish come up from the sea.
Albert Gallatin described the various Shoshone populations and their orbits in 1848, as follows (Hale, 1848, p. 18):
Shoshonees or Snake Indians ... bounded north by Sahaptins, west by the Waiilatpu, Lutuami, and Palaiks; extend eastwardly east of the Rocky Mountains.... The country of the Shoshonees proper is east of Snake River. The Western Shoshonees, or Wihinasht, live west of it; and between them and the Shoshonees proper, another branch of the same family, called Ponasht or Bonnaks, occupy both sides of the Snake River and the valley of its tributary, the Owyhee. The Eastern Shoshonees are at war with the Blackfeet and the Opsarokas. The most northern of these have no horses, live on acorns and roots, are called diggers, and considered by our hunters the most miserable of the Indians.
Gallatin's division is the first, to our knowledge, to apply the terms Eastern and Western Shoshone.
In Schoolcraft's Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge the Shoshone are described in terms consistent with previously published material (1860, 1:198):
The various tribes and bands of Indians of the Rocky Mountains, south of latitude 43°, who are known under this general name [Shoshonee], occupy the elevated area of the Utah basin. They embrace all the territory of the Great South Pass between the Mississippi Valley and the waters of the Columbia.... Traces of them, in this latitude, are first found in ascending the Sweetwater River of the north fork of the Platte, or Nebraska. They spread over the sources of the Green River ... on the summit south of the Great Wind river chain of mountains, and thence westward, by the Bear river valley, to and down the Snake river, or Lewis fork of the Columbia. Under the name of Yampa-tick-ara, or Root-Eaters, and Bonacks, they occupy, with the Utahs, the vast elevated basin of the Great Salt Lake, extending south and west to the borders of New Mexico and California.... They extend down the Sä-ap-tin or Snake River valley, to north of latitude 44°, but this is not the limit to which the nations speaking the Shoshonee language in its several dialects, have spread. Ethnologically, the people speaking it are one of the primary stocks of the Rocky Mountain chain.
Other general descriptions of the Shoshonean-speaking peoples of the Basin and Rocky Mountain areas are found in the literature of the period, but add little to the foregoing accounts, which give us a picture of a population sharing a common language (except the Bannock) and living in peaceful relations with one another. They were roughly divided into mounted and unmounted populations located in the eastern and western parts of the territory, respectively. While the mounted people appeared to have had some degree of political cohesion and military effectiveness, the "Diggers" are uniformly represented as politically atomistic, impoverished, and weak in the face of their enemies.