Since a work of this type relies heavily upon identification of peoples mentioned in historical sources, it would be well to review the varying nomenclature applied to the Shoshone.
Most early writers designated the Shoshonean-speaking population as "Shoshonees" or "Snake Indians." The term "Snake" was generally applied indiscriminately to the Northern Paiute of Oregon and to Bannock and Shoshone groups in southern Idaho. Frequently only the mounted people were considered true "Snakes," as in Wilkes's statement that "the proper country of the Snakes is to the east of the Youta Lake and north of the Snake or Lewis River; but they are found in many detached places" (Wilkes, 1845, 4:471). He goes on to say (p. 472) that some Snakes have no horses, but these he locates north of the Bannock.
Although de la Vérendrye's "Gens du Serpent" can only be presumed to be Shoshone, there is little doubt that the "Snake" of whom Thompson's Blackfoot informant spoke were Shoshone. Lewis and Clark were told by the Indians of the Columbia River that they lived in fear of the "Snake Indians," but this was in reference to a tribe of the Deschutes River in central Oregon (Lewis and Clark, 1904-06, 3:147). Those Indians whom they met on the Lemhi River in Idaho were, however, termed "Shoshonees." The name, "Snake," was rapidly applied to almost any Indians between South Pass and the Columbia River. In March, 1826, Peter Skene Ogden reported a "Snake" camp of two hundred on the Raft River (Ogden, 1909, 10 (4):357). These Indians were undoubtedly either Shoshone or Bannock, as their location indicates. Nathaniel Wyeth traveled in the Raft River country in August, 1832, and similarly spoke of seeing "Snakes" (Wyeth, 1899, p. 164). Without making any sharp distinctions between the Indians sighted, Wyeth, in the same region, mentioned "Diggers" (pp. 164, 167), "Pawnacks" (p. 168), and "Sohonees" (ibid.). In 1839, Farnham saw "a family of Root Digger Indians" on the Snake River, near the mouth of Raft River (Farnham, 1843, p. 74). These Indians were no doubt Shoshone, but the term was also applied to Northern Paiute, for Ogden encountered "Snakes" while on a trapping expedition in the Harney Basin of Oregon in 1826 (Ogden, 1910, 11 (2):206), as did John Work six years later (Work, 1945, p. 6). The failure to recognize the Northern Paiute as being linguistically distinct from the Shoshone continued for some time. In 1854, Indian Agent Thompson reported from the Oregon Territory that among the Indians under his jurisdiction were "Sho-sho-nies," who were divided into three major groups: the "Mountain Snakes," "Bannacks," and "Diggers" (Thompson, 1855, p. 493).
North of the present boundary of the state of Nevada, "Snake" and "Shoshone" or variations thereof were the names commonly applied to all the Indians. Frequently, "Snake" meant specifically Paiute and Bannock, or any mounted Indians, as distinguished from the footgoing "Diggers." From the fact that these terms were applied to Indians in widely separated regions and having different languages, it can only be concluded that the nomenclature designated no particular group having political, cultural, or linguistic unity.
"Snake" was but infrequently applied to the Indians south of Oregon and Idaho, where the term "Shoshone" was more widely used. The unmounted Shoshonean-speaking peoples of Utah and Nevada were also commonly referred to as "Diggers" or "Root Diggers," a name frequently given to the unmounted Shoshone of Idaho. Washington Irving referred to those Indians seen on the Humboldt River by Walker's party in 1833 as "Shoshokoes" (Irving, 1873, p. 384). Zenas Leonard, who was a member of Walker's expedition, referred to the Indians of the Humboldt River region as "Bawnack, or Shoshonies" (Leonard, 1934, p. 78), but Father De Smet spoke of all the unmounted people of the Great Basin as "Soshocos" and described their abject poverty (De Smet, 1905, 3:1032). In 1846, Edwin Bryant entered the Great Basin en route to California. Of the Shoshone he said: "The Shoshonees or Snakes occupy the country immediately west of the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains" (Bryant, 1885, p. 137). He differentiated this powerful, mounted people from the "miserable Digger Indians, calling themselves Soshonees," whom he met west of Great Salt Lake (p. 168). As he continued down the Humboldt River in Nevada, he noted: "All the Digger Indians of this valley claim to be Shoshonees" (p. 195), but despite this affirmation, he continued to refer to them as "Diggers." Similarly, two Indians met by Bryant's party near Humboldt Sink in Northern Paiute territory were called "Digger Indians" (p. 211). Howard Stansbury, who explored the Great Salt Lake region in 1849, referred, however, to the Indians west of the lake as "Shoshonees or Snake Indians" (Stansbury, 1852, p. 97).
The Western Shoshone were generally called "Diggers" by the emigrants who took part in the gold rush to California. One of them, Franklin Langworthy of Illinois, stated: "All the Indians along the Humboldt call themselves Shoshonees, but the whites call them Diggers, from the fact that they burrow under ground in the winter" (Langworthy, 1932, p. 119). Reuben Shaw, another "Forty-niner," referred to the Indians on the California road along the Humboldt as "Diggers" (Shaw, 1948, p. 123), "Root Diggers" (p. 119), and "Humboldt Indians" (p. 130). In 1854 Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith explored the route of the forty-first parallel in search of a possible railroad route and encountered Gosiute, Western Shoshone, and Northern Paiute Indians. He referred to all of them as "Diggers," and he apparently used this term generically for all the impoverished, horseless Indians between Salt Lake City and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. At Deep Creek, in Utah, he "found a band of twenty Shoshonee Indians encamped, besides women and children. They are mounted, and contrast strikingly with their Goshoot neighbors (Diggers) ..." (Beckwith, 1855, p. 25). Beckwith classed only mounted Indians as Shoshone: in Butte Valley, Nevada, the inhabitants of a "Digger wick-e-up" fled from the party, "taking us for Shoshonees" (p. 26). After leaving Western Shoshone territory he spoke of "Digger Indians, who call themselves Pah-Utah, however" (p. 34).
The name "Shoshone" became more commonly applied to the Western Shoshone after they had had increased contact with the whites. The French traveler, Jules Remy, spoke of them as "Shoshones, or Snakes" in 1855 (Remy and Brenchley, 1861, p. 123), and the British explorer, Richard Burton, distinguished the "Shoshone" from the "Gosh-Yuta" (Burton, 1861, p. 567) and the "Pa Yuta," or Northern Paiute, in 1860 (p. 591). The term "Shoshonee" was applied by Indian Agent Holeman to the Indians of Thousand Spring Valley, Nevada (Holeman, 1854, p. 443), and to those of the Humboldt River (p. 444); However, on Willow Creek, Utah, Agent Garland Hurt met a group of mounted Indians whom he called "Shoshonees, or Snakes proper, from the Green River country" (Hurt, 1856, p. 517). He distinguished these from the "Diggers" of the Humboldt River (p. 779). Thus the distinction between the mounted Shoshone and the unmounted people of the more arid regions of the Great Basin continued, despite the recognition of their unity of language. This implicit recognition may be found in the statement made by Brigham Young (1858, p. 599):
The Shoshones are not hostile to travelers, so far as they inhabit this territory, except perhaps a few called "Snake diggers," who inhabit, as before stated, along the line of travel west of the settlements.
It is possible to document almost endlessly the ways in which the labels "Shoshone," "Digger," and "Snake" were applied in turn or at the same time to Shoshone-Comanche and Mono-Bannock speakers alike. Since political or social significance has frequently been attributed to Indians' names—both those bestowed by the whites and those by which the several sectors of the Shoshone population referred to each other—we will discuss this nomenclature in the context of each section of the following report.