Shoshone

Shoshone beaded moccasins, Wyoming, ca. 1900
Total population
12,300 (2000)
Regions with significant populations
United States ( Idaho, California, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming)
Languages
Shoshone, English
Religion
Native American Church, Sun Dance, traditional tribal religion, Christianity, Ghost Dance
Related ethnic groups
Bannock, Goshute, Northern Paiute, Comanche

The Shoshone or Shoshoni (/ʃoʊˈʃoʊniː/ ( listen) or /ʃəˈʃoʊniː/ ( listen)) are a Native American tribe in the United States with three large divisions: the Northern, the Western and the Eastern.

They traditionally spoke the Shoshoni language, a part of the Numic languages branch of the large Uto-Aztecan language family. The Shoshone were sometimes called the Snake Indians by early ethnic European trappers, travelers, and settlers.^[1]

The Northern Shoshone are concentrated in eastern Idaho, western Wyoming, and northeastern Utah. The Northern Shoshone would live in teepees, ride horses, and hunt buffalo.

The Eastern Shoshone tribes lived in Wyoming, northern Colorado and Montana. After 1750, warfare and pressure from the Blackfoot, Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho pushed them south and westward. Some of them moved as far south as Texas, to become the Comanche.

The Western Shoshone tribes lived in Oregon and western Idaho, and ranged from central Idaho, northwestern Utah, central Nevada. Some are also located in California. The Idaho groups of Western Shoshone were called Tukuaduka (sheep eaters), while the Nevada/Utah bands were called the Gosiute or Toi Ticutta (cattail eaters). In California the Timbisha Shoshone (also known as the Death Valley or Panamint Shoshone) have lived for centuries in the Death Valley, Saline Valley, Panamint Valley and surrounding mountains. They have a federally recognized tribal reservation and government at Furnace Creek, California. Shoshone-Paiute have continued to live in the Owens Valley. The Western Shoshone would live in roofless grass huts, hunt birds,fish and rabbits.

The most historically well-known member of the Shoshone tribe may be Sacagawea, of the Lemhi Shoshone band of Northern Shoshone. She accompanied the Corps of Discovery (Lewis and Clark Expedition) with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their exploration of the Western United States.

History[link]

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"Shoshone at Ft. Washakie, Wyoming Native American reservation. Chief Washakie (at left) extends his right arm." Some of the Shoshones are dancing as the soldiers look on, 1892.

The Shoshone arose out of various cultures of indigenous peoples who had been in the territory for thousands of years. The Shoshone language is one of the Uto-Aztecan languages spoken by numerous peoples ranging from the Great Basin to coastal Southern California in present-day United States, and down through central, western and southern Mexico; into Central America and South America.

As more European-American settlers migrated west, tensions rose with the indigenous people. There were wars throughout the second half of the 19th century. The Northern Shoshone, led by Chief Pocatello, fought during the 1860s with settlers in Idaho (where a city was named for him). As more settlers encroached on Shoshone hunting territory, the natives raided farms and ranches for food, and attacked migrants. The warfare resulted in the Bear River Massacre (1863), when US forces trapped and murdered an estimated 350–500 Northwestern Shoshone, including women and children, who were at their winter encampment. This was the highest number of deaths which the Shoshone suffered by the forces of the United States. Allied with the Bannock, to whom they were related, the Shoshone fought against the United States in the Snake War from 1864–1868. They fought US forces together in 1878 in the Bannock War. In 1876, by contrast, the Shoshone fought alongside the U.S. Army in the Battle of the Rosebud, as it was against their traditional enemies, the Lakota and Cheyenne.

Rabbit-Tail

In 1879 a band of approximately 300 Western Shoshones (known as "Sheepeaters") was involved in the Sheepeater Indian War. It was the last Indian war fought in the Pacific Northwest region of the present-day United States.

In 1911 a small group of Bannock under a leader named "Shoshone Mike" killed four ranchers in Washoe County, Nevada.^[2] The settlers formed a posse and went out after the Native Americans. They caught up with the band on February 26, 1911 and killed eight. They lost one man of the posse, Ed Hogle.^[3] The posse captured three children and a woman. The partial remains of three adult males, two adult females, two adolescent males, and three children, believed to be Shoshone Mike and his family, according to contemporary accounts, were donated by a rancher to the Smithsonian Institution for study. In 1994, the institution repatriated the remains to the Fort Hall Idaho Shoshone-Bannock Tribe.^[4]

In 2008, the Northwestern Shoshone acquired the site of the Bear River Massacre and some surrounding land. They wanted to protect the holy land and build a memorial to the massacre, the largest their nation had suffered. "In partnership with the American West Heritage Center and state leaders in Idaho and Utah, the tribe has developed public/private partnerships to advance tribal cultural preservation and economic development goals." They have become a leader in developing tribal renewable energy.^[5]

Historic population[link]

In 1845 the estimated population of Northern and Western Shoshone was 4,500, much reduced after they had suffered infectious disease epidemics and warfare. The completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 was followed by Euro-American immigrants arriving in unprecedented numbers in the territory.

In 1937 the Bureau of Indian Affairs counted 3,650 Northern Shoshone and 1,201 Western Shoshone. As of the 2000 census, there are 12,000 Shoshone.

Reservations and Native American colonies[link]

Shoshoni tipi, c. 1890

• Battle Mountain Reservation, Lander County, Nevada
• Big Pine Reservation, central Owens Valley, Inyo County, California; Owens Valley Paiute Shoshone
• Bishop Community of the Bishop Colony, northern Owens Valley, Inyo County, California;
• Death Valley Indian Community, Furnace Creek, Death Valley National Park, California; Timbisha Shoshone
• Duck Valley Indian Reservation, southern Idaho/northern Nevada, (Western) Shoshone-Paiute Tribes
• Duckwater Indian Reservation, located in Duckwater, Nevada, approximately 75 miles (121 km) from Ely.
• Elko Indian Colony, Elko County, Nevada
• Ely Shoshone Indian Reservation in Ely, Nevada, 111 acres (0.45 km²), 500 members
• Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Reservation near Fallon, Nevada, 8,200 acres (33 km²), 991 members, Western Shoshone and Paiute
• Fort Hall Indian Reservation, 544,000 acres (2,201 km²) in Idaho, Lemhi Shoshone with the Bannock Indians, a Paiute band with which they have merged
• Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, Nevada and Oregon, Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe
• Goshute Indian Reservation, 111,000 acres (449 km²) in Nevada and Utah, Western Shoshone
• Lemhi Indian Reservation (1875–1907) in Idaho, Lemhi Shoshone, removed to Fort Hall Reservation
• Lone Pine Community of the Lone Pine Reservation, lower Owens Valley, Inyo County, California; Owens Valley Paiute Shoshone
• Nevada Shoshone Indian Reservation, near Carson City, Nevada, 211 members
• Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Nevada, 1988 acres (8 km²), total 481 members of Shoshone, Paiute, and Washoe bands
• Skull Valley Indian Reservation, 18,000 acres (73 km²) in Utah, Western Shoshone
• South Fork Odgers Ranch Indian Colony, Elko County, Nevada
• Wells Indian Colony, Elko County, Nevada
• Wind River Reservation, population 2,650 Eastern Shoshone, 2,268,008 acres (9,178 km²) of reservation in Wyoming are shared with the Northern Arapaho

See also[link]

• Chief Washakie
• Battle of Kelley Creek
• Old Toby
• Bear Hunter
• Mary Dann and Carrie Dann
• Shoshone language
• United States v. Shoshone Tribe of Indians
• Western Shoshone traditional narratives

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Gould, Drusilla & Loether, Christopher (2002). An introduction to the Shoshoni language: dammen da̲igwape. University of Utah Press. ISBN 9780874807295. http://books.google.com/books?id=lJxkAAAAMAAJ. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Shoshoni

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Illustration of a caveman hunting a brown bear

A caveman or troglodyte is a stock character based upon widespread concepts of the way in which early prehistoric humans may have looked and behaved. The term caveman, sometimes used colloquially to refer to Neanderthal people, originates out of assumptions about the association between early humans and caves, most clearly demonstrated in cave painting or bench models.

Cavemen are frequently represented as living with dinosaurs in popular culture, despite the fact dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, some 65 million years before the emergence of the human species. One of the earliest portrayals of cavemen and dinosaurs together is D. W. Griffith's Brute Force, a silent film released in 1914, while more recent examples include the comic strip B.C. and the television series The Flintstones.

Basis of archetype[link]

Caveman-like Heraldic "wild men" were found in European and African iconography for hundreds of years. During the Middle Ages, these creatures were generally depicted in art and literature as bearded and covered in hair, and often wielding clubs and dwelling in caves. While wild men were always depicted as living outside of civilization, there was an ongoing debate as to whether they were human or animal^{[citation needed]}.

Cavemen are portrayed as wearing shaggy animal hides, armed with rocks or cattle bone clubs, unintelligent, and aggressive. The image of them living in caves arises from that fact that caves are where the preponderance of ritual paintings and artifacts from pre-historic cultures have been found, although this most likely reflects the degree of preservation that caves provide over the millennia rather than an indication of their typical form of shelter. Expressions such as "living in a cave" have become cultural metaphors for a modern human who displays traits of extreme ignorance or uncivilized behavior.

Stereotypes in culture[link]

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) ape-men are depicted in a fight with modern humans. Edgar Rice Burroughs adapted this idea for The Land That Time Forgot (1918). A genre of caveman movies emerged, typified by D. W. Griffith's Man's Genesis (1912); they inspired Charles Chaplin's satiric take,^[1] in His Prehistoric Past (1914) as well as Brute Force (1914), The Cave Man (1912), and later Cave Man (1934). From the descriptions, Griffith's characters can't talk, and use sticks and stones for weapons, while the hero of Cave Man is a Tarzanesque figure who fights dinosaurs.

Depictions of the Paleolithic in the media[link]

In fiction, especially as pure entertainment or satire, cavemen are sometimes depicted as living contemporaneously with dinosaurs, a situation contradicted by archaeological and paleontological evidence which shows that non-avian dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, at which time true primates had not yet appeared.

In popular culture, the comic strips B.C., Alley Oop and occasionally The Far Side and Gogs portray "cavemen" in that way. (Larson, in his The Prehistory of the Far Side, stated he once felt that he needed to confess his cartooning sins in this regard: "O Father, I Have Portrayed Primitive Man and Dinosaurs In The Same Cartoon".) The animated television series The Flintstones, a spoof on family sitcoms, portrays the Flintstones not in caves, but in 1950s–1960s ranch-style homes that suggested caves and had stone fittings.

Stereotypical cavemen are also often featured in advertising, including advertisements for Minute Maid. More recently, GEICO launched a series of television commercials and attempts at viral marketing, collectively known as the GEICO Cavemen advertising campaign, where GEICO announcers are repeatedly denounced by modern cavemen for perpetuating a stereotype of unintelligent, backward cavemen. The GEICO advertisements spawned a short-lived TV series called Cavemen.

The embedded lists in this article may contain items that are not encyclopedic. Please help out by removing such elements and incorporating appropriate items into the main body of the article. (February 2011)

Documentaries[link]

• Walking with Cavemen
• Walking with Beasts

Caveman characters[link]

• Alley Oop
• Anthro
• B.C.
• Captain Caveman
• Chuck Rock
• The Flintstones
• Gogs
• Land of the Lost (1974 TV series)
• Mightor
• Stig of the Dump
• The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw
• Tor
• Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, a Saturday Night Live sketch
• Yahoo in Gulliver's Travels
• The 2000 Year Old Man, a series of comedy skits by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner comedy skit with both caveman and ancient history jokes

Movies[link]

• Man's Genesis, 1912
• Brute Force, 1914
• His Prehistoric Past, 1914 Charlie Chaplin silent film
• Three Ages, 1923 Buster Keaton silent film
• Flying Elephants, 1928 Laurel and Hardy silent film
• One Million B.C., 1940
• Mysterious Island (half a dozen films)
• Teenage Caveman, 1958 Roger Corman film and 2002 TV series
• Eegah, 1962
• One Million Years B.C., 1966
• It's About Time (TV series 1966-67)
• When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, 1970
• Planet of Dinosaurs, 1971
• The Land That Time Forgot, 1975
• The People That Time Forgot, 1977
• The Missing Link, 1980
• Caveman, 1981
• History of the World, Part I, 1981
• Quest for Fire, 1981
• Luggage of the Gods!, 1983
• Iceman, 1984
• The Clan of the Cave Bear, 1986
• Encino Man, 1992
• The Flintstones, 1994
• Encino Woman, 1996
• Bikini Cavegirl, 2004
• The Man From Earth, 2007
• Homo Erectus, aka National Lampoon's Stoned Age, 2007
• 10,000 BC, 2008
• Year One, 2009

Novels[link]

• The Story of Ab, 1897
• The Village in the Treetops, 1901
• Quest for Fire, 1911
• The Lost World, 1912
• The Cave Girl, 1913
• The Land That Time Forgot 1918
• Dian of the Lost Land, 1935
• The Inheritors, 1955
• Dance of the Tiger, 1980
• Earth's Children series
  • The Clan of the Cave Bear, 1980
  • The Valley of Horses, 1982
  • The Mammoth Hunters, 1985
  • The Plains of Passage, 1990
  • The Shelters of Stone, 2001
  • The Land of Painted Caves, 2011
• Eden series
  • West of Eden, 1984
  • Winter in Eden, 1986
  • Return to Eden, 1989

See also[link]

• Cro-Magnon
• Human evolution
• Neanderthal
• Paleolithic
• Neanderthals in popular culture

References[link]