The driest and least habitable region in all North America is known as the Great Basin, a 4000-square mile area stretching from the Rocky Mountains through Nevada and Utah to the Sierra Nevada, and including the outer fringes of California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado. The entire region is an arid desert land; barren, rocky, with large salt flats and an extremely limited water supply. The area does include the Great Salt Lake and a number of smaller lakes without outlets – the remnants of the immense pluvial lakes of the Pleistocene. All in all, it is a most unlikely place for human existence, yet far in prehistory the ancestors of the Shoshonean Indians came to live there, and native people remained there well into historic times.
Many of the Great Basin people spent their lives in a continuous search for the meager food supplies available to them. Groups like the Southern Ute, the Paiute, and the Western Shoshone, all roamed the country in small family groups, gathering various wild plants as they became available in regular cycles throughout the year. In the process these people developed an intimate knowledge of the plant and animal life in their homeland, probably more so than any other Native Americans. They were known to have made use of nearly a hundred species of plants, from bulrushes and thistles to several of the cactus varieties of the desert. Pine nuts and seeds were among the most common foods, and roots could be unearthed with the help of digging sticks, a practice that later earned the Paiute the white man’s contemptuous name of Digger Indians.
Animals, if they could be found at all, were an undependable food source at best. Hunters might catch a rare deer or a mountain goat in the higher elevations, but these animals were few and always elusive, and with their primitive weapons the Great Basin people had to expend enormous amount of energy in such hunts and usually were not very successful anyway. As a result, they made do with such creatures as they could catch – rodents, snakes, lizards, insects. When locust appeared in swarms over the country every few years, they were collected by the Indians in enormous amounts as a welcome addition to the monotonous diet. The Great Basin Indians, in fact, may well have been the only people anywhere in the world to regret that this plague came so infrequently.
It was only during the winter months that several of these small family groups might get together in a camp of perhaps thirty or forty people, and at those times they usually attempted a few communal hunts as well. There might be rabbit drives, which usually yielded a good amount of animals, and people like the Washo in the Lake Tahoe area often assembled when the salmon were spawning. Some of the groups even went out after longhorn antelope in the nearby mountains. But despite such periodic gatherings, there was no such thing as a tribal feeling among the people; there were no leaders, no one in authority to organize more effective bands, and any family could always feel free to come and go as they pleased.
Most Indians in this area lived in crude, hastily erected shelters of brush and piled-up stones, little more than windbreaks, which were soon abandoned again by the constantly wandering people. Where local food supply showed more promise, they might build more substantial domed shelters, perhaps covered with thatch or brush or reed mats. Clothing, too, was minimal; except for a small apron of fur for women and a breechcloth for men, the Great Basin Shoshone went naked, and seldom even wore the skin moccasins of other tribes.
In the absence of even the smallest comforts of life, with few or no possessions at all, the people of the Great Basin were without a doubt the most primitive of all North American natives, and to the white man they appeared as a crude and lazy people who showed no initiative and no desire to improve their lot. At the same time, however, these same people led the most leisurely and most peaceful life of all. Since they were so totally undemanding in their daily lives, they were always able to find enough nourishment of one sort or another without having to spend too much energy and effort at it. Even if they did find themselves with an abundance of, say, rabbits, ever so often, there was little incentive to spend long hours hunting them. Since these people had no way of preserving and storing any kind of surplus for future use, it would only spoil. Once they had enough to eat, therefore, their work was done for the day.
It was for much the same reasons that warfare was all but unknown to these Indians. Military honors had no meaning at all to them, and there were no possessions, no hunting grounds to defend. Land was of value to them only when it produced food, and it was precisely at those times when they made some feeble attempts at cooperating with each other. Even if they had been inclined to raid others, their society was not complex enough to organize such efforts – there were no chiefs and there were no war leaders, since there had never been any need for such men. Besides, none of the Great Basin Indians had any weapons worthy of that name – a few had bows and arrows, perhaps some stone knives, not enough, at any rate, to impress any potential enemy. The only known instances of any serious disputes in this area were the results of one man trying to steal another’s wife.
The coming of the Europeans – and with them their weapons and their horses – brought drastic changes to at least some of these simple people. Those who lived in the driest parts of the region had no use for such new-fangled ideas; in fact, horses ate the very same plants on which the people existed. But for the people farther north, where there was more grass and even occasional bison herds, it was a different story. The Shoshone of northern Utah and Idaho, including the so-called Wind River Shoshone – the Ute and the Bannock – probably acquired horses long before they ever met a white man, perhaps as early as 1680, and before long had changed their culture and their appearance so much that they began to resemble the buffalo hunting Plains tribes. They adopted the bison-hide teepees and rawhide shields, wore feather headdresses and skin clothing, and began the custom of counting coup as war heroes. And they hunted buffalo so relentlessly that within a few generations they had all but eliminated the herds from the Great Basin. Having gotten used to and dependent on this way of life, some of the Shoshone bands then began to raid far into Montana and even into southern Alberta, where they were met by the Blackfoot tribes, already armed with guns, who drove them back across the mountains. Meanwhile, one of the Wind River Shoshone bands had split off soon after acquiring horses and had moved southward across the Rocky Mountains, and were turning into the feared predatory Comanche of Texas.
Their simple brothers of the Great Basin were to face evil times ahead as intruders, red and white, began to overrun their territory. As Western settlement got under way, the simple little family groups were unable to organize for any sort of effective defense, much less consider attacks against the intruders. As a result they were quickly defeated – first by some of the neighboring Indians, and finally by the white man’s troops. In a few isolated areas, small bands long continued their traditional ways even after fur trappers, miners, and settlers invaded their lands. But their life was incomprehensible to the whites who considered these Indians a lazy and dirty people who deserved no consideration as a culture; most were simply rounded up and restricted to reservations, usually in the same unproductive and sterile environment they had always known. Ironically, it was among these very same tribes that arose the last of the Native American resistance movements, which became known as the Ghost Dance.