What Type of Crafts or Art Did the Shoshone Make

Recent discoveries show ancient peoples lived in the mountains of what's at present northwest Wyoming, probably in significant numbers. Some or many of these people were most likely ancestors of today's Shoshone.

While sources generally concur that the subculture of mountain-abode Shoshone came to be called Sheepeaters, scholars adopt Mountain Shoshone as the more accurate term. Past the mid-1800s, they were regarded as largely separate from the horse-owning, buffalo-hunting bands that roamed much of what are at present southwestern and primal Wyoming and came to be known as the Eastern Shoshone.

The Mountain Shoshone hunted bighorn sheep in the mountains, along with deer, elk and many smaller mammals. They also ate fish and insects. In his book on the Mountain Shoshone, amateur archaeologist and historian Tory Taylor of Dubois, Wyo., cites ethnologist J. H. Steward, who wrote in 1943 that Shoshones gathered, stale and stored crickets, cicadas and grasshoppers.

The Mountain Shoshone also gathered a big variety of plants for food or medicine. Taylor, taking every bit his guide the current presence of alpine plants in the northern Current of air River Range, suggests they probably ate mount sorrel, spring dazzler, marsh marigolds, wild strawberry greens, wild chives and 14 varieties of berries, along with cattails, burdock, dandelion roots and greens plus more than 50 other native plants.

They crafted ladles from sheep horns and congenital conical log dwellings, usually chosen wickiups—some of which still stand—and were pedestrians who probably used dogs for hunting and packing.

In prehistoric times, there may accept been many Mount Shoshone, every bit evidenced past dense assemblages of projectile points and other tools found high in the Absaroka Range of northwest Wyoming. Above 10,000 feet peak in the Wind River Mountains, the discovery of whole villages—including the remains of wickiups—shows that living in the mountains, probably in summertime, was common amid prehistoric people.

Shoshone-associated artifacts establish at these villages include teshoas—knives used by Shoshonean women—soapstone vessels and chert, quartzite and obsidian projectile points of the desert tri-notch, cottonwood triangular and rose-spring style. About 10 or twelve years ago, in a mount meadow almost timberline in the Wind River Mountains, one member of a team that included Tory Taylor found a rare soapstone carving among many other Shoshone artifacts almost a major source of soapstone. Archaeologists have likewise plant items ofttimes associated with other tribes as well as the Shoshone, including metates and manos—mortar-and-pestle stone tools—used for grinding food.

Some sources suggest that because the Mountain Shoshone had few or no horses, they were impoverished compared to their equestrian relatives. It's non clear whether the supposedly "low-caste" Sheepeaters, as they came to be known, were actually poor and ragged, and thus disdained by whites and Indians alike. This may only accept been a cultural distortion.

Poverty may non accept been why most Mountain Shoshone lacked horses. In rough country, horses are less versatile pack animals than dogs, and also weren't necessarily an advantage in an environment where game animals were grazing just over the adjacent ridge, rather than miles away across the plains.

Mountain Shoshone crafts

The Mountain Shoshone tailored article of clothing from sheepskin and other animate being skins. Historian David Dominick reports that they were said to exist expert tanners and furriers, trading their sought-after sheepskin robes for buffalo robes and other Plains Indian products.

Working soapstone was another important Shoshone craft. Archaeologists accept found bowl fragments and occasional intact bowls in shapes resembling flowerpots, circular casserole dishes and smaller vessels the approximate size of a teacup. Pipes, sometimes decorated with engravings, are either tube-shaped, onion shaped—in profile resembling a small vase—or elbow-shaped. Simply a few beads have been discovered, ranging from pea-size to quarter-size.

Mountain Shoshone also manufactured bows from the horns of mount sheep, sometimes from a single large horn, more than often from two. White explorers, including Capt. Meriwether Lewis, described these bows in detail in their journals, with close attending to their construction and ornamentation.

The bows patently were powerful and deadly. Tory Taylor recently made a sheep horn bow with assistance from Tom Lucas, a white Current of air River Reservation native and craftsman of museum-quality replicas. When Taylor tested his new bow, he reported, "[i]t performed sweetly."

Sheep horn bow manufacture is uncommon because few Shoshone or whites know how to make them, and also because suitable horns are rare. However, residents of the Current of air River Reservation practice a variety of other traditional crafts, including beadwork, hand-tanning leather from game animals, making drums and wooden bows. At present, few non-natives are learning these skills, mayhap because in that location is no procedure in identify to facilitate this.

An evolving proper noun

Anthropologists now suggest that band names of a variety of Shoshone groups—"Sheepeater" is only one case—began as transitory labels denoting economic action and locale, and only later became fastened, sometimes inaccurately or even pejoratively, to specific groups.

During the starting time half of the 20th century, ethnologists and linguists noted that Shoshone used a variety of food-names to refer to each other. Sheepeater, Tukudekain the Shoshone linguistic communication, was 1 of a half-dozen or more such terms. These names referred to the wide array of animals and plants that different people might hunt or assemble at once or another. Food-names may also have applied to the residents of regions where certain plants or animals predominated.

Historian David Dominick reported that in the late 1950s Sven Liljeblad, a linguist at Idaho State College, interviewed Northern Shoshone at the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho almost these food names. An interviewee identified equally W. Chiliad., age 65, told Liljeblad, "Merely whatever they [other Shoshone] ate at that time is what I called them. We could even telephone call them 'coffee-drinkers.'" Dominick mentions five food-names in add-on to Tukudeka.

Thus, by what may accept been common do, an extended family harvesting seeds became known equally "seed eaters" to other Shoshone who saw what they were doing. A group who hunted rabbits was chosen "rabbit eaters." When a group moved to a unlike expanse, the name changed. For example, if they moved to an area where pine nuts were abundant, they became known as "pine-nut eaters." This is probably the genesis of the name "Sheepeater," which described what nigh any Shoshone might have been doing, or possibly, where they lived.

Vagueness and confusion about who the Sheepeaters were and are seems to stalk from relatively few, just powerful misinterpretations combined with differing observations that took agree early in the history of white inroad and continued through time. For example, Dominick cites the conflicting reports of fur trader Capt. Benjamin Bonneville and mountain homo Osborne Russell, both from 1835. Bonneville plant Shoshone in the Air current River Mountains and described them every bit "a kind of hermit race, scanty in number [and] … miserably poor." By contrast, Russell saw "a few [Shoshone] Indians" in Yellowstone Park, "all neatly clothed in dressed deer and sheepskins of the best quality and seemed to be perfectly contented and happy."

The food characterization slowly became a grouping label that eventually stuck. Early white trappers and explorers, and after military men and Indian agents, gained the impression that the Sheepeaters were a distinct sub-tribe of mount-dwelling Shoshone whose predominant nutrient source was mountain sheep. White men who saw groups of Shoshone in the mountains referred to them every bit Sheepeaters, no matter what game fauna was near plentiful in the area.

Starting in the mid-1800s, Sheepeater guides were engaged by parties of white explorers in the areas in and effectually what became Yellowstone National Park. Capt. William A. Jones refers to Sheepeaters several times in his study of a reconnaissance expedition to northwest Wyoming in 1873. This suggests that the idea of a subgroup, chosen Sheepeaters, had already begun to coalesce around before misinterpretations of the name.

Anthropologist Susan Hughes proposes that the label continued to evolve along with changes in tribal structure brought on by the presence of whites. Before the reservation era began in the 1860s, the most organized political unit of measurement among the nomadic hunting and gathering Shoshone was the winter village. Such villages generally contained no more than than 15 families.

Alliances formed among these villages, and during warmer seasons larger groups gathered for hunting or social functions, Hughes notes. Leadership and group structure were informal and transitory until Indians of all nations, the Shoshone included, gathered and traveled together to provide better protection from groups of whites. Indians who negotiated with U.Due south. government officials about treaties and other matters were usually tribal leaders. Hughes suggests that organized bands with formal, permanent leadership appear to have been a late development and in part, a white man'south construct.

Adding to the confusion, some Sheepeaters—the Northern Shoshone—hunted on the west side of the Tetons in present Idaho, while others—some of whom became known every bit Eastern Shoshone—lived further east—sometimes in the Green River Valley and sometimes in the Wind River Valley in present Wyoming. Northern Shoshone groups concluded up on the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho; the Eastern Shoshone, on the Air current River Reservation in Wyoming. To some extent, these may have been divide groups from before times, although all Shoshone people were and are related, regardless of the diversity of their ancestors' hunting and gathering locales.

When Shoshone bands first came to the Eastern Shoshone Reservation, they generally lived in separate areas, elder John Washakie says now, and that blueprint connected for some time. Distinctions "became more blurred" as people moved into modern housing, he said. Currently, the Shoshone who at present identify themselves as Sheepeaters trace their lineage to one ancestor or another who was a Sheepeater, such every bit Togwotee, the well-known guide, for whom Togwotee Pass is named.

Conclusion

There's no doubt that ancient peoples lived in the mountains of northwest Wyoming and on the western side of the Tetons, probably in significant numbers. Drive lines, hunters' blinds—either pits dug in the footing or rock structures—and remnants of corrals at the human foot of short cliffs all point to the herding and slaughter of mountain sheep. Information technology's besides certain that Shoshone nutrient-names began as transitory labels cogent economic activity and locale and evolved into something more than like the identity of a definite group.

Resources

Main Sources

• Taylor, Tory. Phone interviews with author, April 23, 24, 2018.
• Washakie, John. Interview with WyoHistory.org Editor Tom Rea, May 7, 2018.

Secondary Sources

• Adams, Richard. "Archæology with Altitude: Late Prehistoric Settlement and Subsistence in the Northern Wind River Range, Wyoming." Ph.D. diss., University of Wyoming, 2010.
• Accessed Jan. 31, 2018, at www.proquest.com. Database at the University of Wyoming Coe Library. Available to kinesthesia, staff and currently enrolled students.
• DePastino, Blake. "Wyoming Wildfire Reveals 'Massive' Shoshone Campsite, Thousands of Artifacts." Western Digs. Accessed April 21, 2018, at http://westerndigs.org/wyoming-wildfire-reveals-massive-pre-contact-shoshone-campsite-thousands-of-artifacts/.
• Dominick, David. "The Sheepeaters." Register of Wyoming 36, no. 2 (Oct 1964): 131-168. Accessed Feb. twenty, 2018, at world wide web.archive.org/details/annalsofwyom36121964wyom. The article includes the Sven Liljeblad interview with W. Thousand. at the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho.
• Hughes, Susan Southward. "The Sheepeater Myth of Northwestern Wyoming." Plains Anthropologist 45, no. 17 (February 2000): 63-83.
• Hultkrantz, Ake. "The Shoshones in the Rocky Mountain Area." Annals of Wyoming 33, no. 1 (April 1961): xix-41. Accessed March 9, 2018, at www.annal.org/details/annalsofwyom33121961wyom.
• Jones, William A. "Report on the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming Made in the Summer of 1873." Washington: Authorities Printing Function, 1874. Accessed April 23, 2018, at
• https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa&cc=moa&view=text&rgn=principal&idno=AGH6142.
• Loendorf, Lawrence L. and Nancy Medaris Stone. Mount Spirit: The Sheep Eater Indians of Yellowstone. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 2006.
• Stirn, Matthew. "Modeling site location patterns amongst tardily-prehistoric villages in the Air current River Range, Wyoming." Journal of Archaeological Science 41 (2014): 523-532. Accessed Jan. 26, 2018, at
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262068198_Modeling_site_location_patterns_amongst_late-prehistoric_villages_in_the_Wind_River_Range_Wyoming.
• Taylor, Tory. On the Trail of the Mountain Shoshone Sheep Eaters: A High Altitude Archaeological and Anthropological Odyssey. San Bernardino, Calif.: Wind River Publishing, 2017.
• Todd, Lawrence. "A Record of Overwhelming Complexity: High Elevation Archaeology in Northwestern Wyoming." Plains Anthropologist (Memoir 43), vol. 60, 2015, no. 236: 67-86.
• Todd, Lawrence, Rachel Reckin, Emily Brush, Robert Kelly, and William Dooley. "An Alpine Archaeological Landscape in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Wyoming." Society for American Archaeology 82 Annual Coming together, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Accessed March nineteen, 2018, at http://world wide web.grsle.org/Conferences/Todd_etAl_SAA_2017.pdf.
• Todd, Lawrence, Emily Castor, and Kyle Wright. "Forty Days in the Wilderness: 2015 Park Canton Historic Preservation Commission Archaeological Inventory and Assessment on the Shoshone National Wood, Wyoming." Jan 2015, Plains Anthropological Conference, Iowa Metropolis. Accessed March 19, 2018, at http://www.grsle.org/Fieldwork/ToddEtAlPlains_2015.pdf.
• Todd, Lawrence, Rachel Reckin, Emily Castor, and William Dooley. "Migration Corridors, Ice Patches, and Loftier Summit Landscapes." Accessed March 19, 2018, at http://www.grsle.org/Conferences/Todd_et_al_2016_Elk&Ice.pdf.

Illustrations

• All photos are by Tory Taylor. Used with permission and cheers.

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Source: https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/mountain-shoshone#:~:text=Mountain%20Shoshone%20crafts&text=Historian%20David%20Dominick%20reports%20that,was%20another%20important%20Shoshone%20craft.

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