Shoshone

Comanche destroyed all evidence a dead person ever existed. Women loudly mourned for a year, while relatives gave away or destroyed his or her property. They never spoke the name again, lest it revive painful memories. If he was a chief, the band changed its name.

These customs left no oral history from the late 1600s when the group was metamorphosing from Great Basin foragers into plains warriors. Their neighbors didn’t remember them, because their naming patterns provided no mnemonics.

Comanche spoke a Shoshone language, and must have been part of the groups who moved into arid areas of Nevada and Utah after the Colorado Plateau was abandoned by pueblo dwellers in the late 1200s.

In the 1930s, western Shoshone remembered lives measured by seasons of plants. In early spring, they ate new shoots, often raw. As soon as seeds began ripening on grasses, they began moving to elevations where crops could be eaten. Women gathered seeds in baskets, and either threw hot rocks into the baskets to roast them or ground them on a metate.

In summer berries became available, then later roots. They supplemented their diet with small animals and insects, rodents, lizards, snakes, grasshoppers and cicadas.

Family groups, usually with six members, moved from place to place, sometimes meeting others, sometimes alone. Come fall, they moved higher to harvest piñon nuts. Groups converged, but in mast years, there were more than enough nuts for everyone. They had two weeks to pick enough to last the winter. The ones they didn’t eat immediately, they buried where they would winter near water and firewood.

Great Basin piñon only produces good crops every two to three years, depending on oscillations in the polar front jet stream. If animals were plentiful, men organized communal hunts. They would drive rabbits into nets, clubbing enough to eat. They would drive pronghorn into brush corrals. They weren’t able to store the meat, and if they killed too many, they couldn’t hunt again for several years. Life was precarious in winter.

By 1500, some bands of Shoshone had crossed the Rocky Mountains and others were in the Green River basin. Eventually, eastern bands moved through South Pass of Wyoming onto the plains. The lives they led must have been close to those remembered a few years ago by Ute. Shoshone-speaking Ute elders remembered they always moved north along the mountains in spring and summer following the ripening seeds, roots, and insects.

In fall they moved onto the plains where men hunted deer. Women remained in the higher lands where they harvested piñon. By the nineteenth century, they kew how to dry meat and make parfleche.

When winter approached they entered New Mexico where they camped in sheltered meadows near Cimarron, Taos, or Abiquiu. There they passed on their lore. It was considered bad luck to tell tales in summer.

As winter waned, Utes moved north, still following the sun in a clockwise manner. When they reached the area of Conejos, they held their Bear Dance. They believed they were descended from bears, and were obligated to help them waken from hibernation. It was at this time, relatives of the dead destroyed property.

When Julian Steward asked about significance of a woman keening at a 1931 dance, his queries brought bland denials that spirits of the dead returned during the festival.

Like the Shoshone, the Ute held communal hunts. And, like them, they appointed leaders who organized rabbit hunts. The position wasn’t permanent. The men selected to manage pronghorn hunts were shamans who could charm animals into the snares. They had no powers beyond the hunt. Similarly, the ones who directed Bear Dances were only responsible for those eventss.

Shoshone had no large-scale gatherings like the Bear Dance. Their natural resources wouldn’t have support a large group for a week. Even the Ute, in the past, held more, smaller, shorter festivals than the few held today on reservation lands.

Neither Ute nor Shoshone developed any social structure beyond the nuclear family. Groups were bound by marriages. Their was no food sharing, but solitary relatives like grandparents, aunts, and uncles were brought into family units. Isolated adolescent boys were adopted through a second marriage to the wife of the nuclear group. Brothers and sisters of adults also were given security through polygamy and polyandry. Even then, traveling groups rarely exceeded ten members.

Few disputes before 1700 escalated into open conflict. Shoshone had no sense of exclusive territory; whoever arrived in a food area first had rights. They named areas for the food they produced. Steward thinks the current names for clans came from outsiders misunderstanding this sense of property. For the Ute and Shoshone whoever was visiting an area that grew yampa was a yampa eater; when they left, and another moved in they became the yampa eaters. The term was not a permanent appellation for a group, but a more important way to remember the geography of plants.

Families settled feuds among themselves. When attacked by outsiders, they preferred escape than fighting. The exception occurred when someone, perhaps an evil shaman, was believed to be responsible for the death of a family member. Then, revenge was condoned.

Notes: Studies of contemporary groups don’t reveal what existed in the past. They do document what evolved from what might have been common custom. Steward doesn’t think the family-based lives of the Shoshone were the foundation of future societies; instead they represented an adaption away from traditional band structure that was driven by limited food resources.

Yampa, Perideridia gairdneri, is a member of the parsley family. Wikipedia says the roots are "crunchy and mildly sweet, and resemble in texture and flavor water chestnuts."

Campbell, G. "Ute Ethnohistory and Historical Ethnography," in An Ethnological and Ethnohistorical Assessment of Ethnobotanical and Cultural Resources at the Sand Creek National Historic Site and Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, 2007.

Neilson, Ronald P. "On the Interface between Current Ecological Studies and the Paleobotany of Pinyon-juniper Woodlands," Pinyon-Juniper Conference, Proceedings, 1986. The Great Basin species is Pinus monophylla. The one that grows on the Colorado Plateau, Pinus edulis, has a good nut crop every five years. It’s affected by summer monsoons and the sub-tropical jet stream that oscillates every three to five years.

Reed, Verner Z. "Ute Bear Dance," American Anthropologist 9:237-244:1896.

Steward, Julian H. Basin-Plateau Sociopolitical Groups, 1938.

_____. "The Great Basin Shoshonean Indians: An Example of a Family Level of Sociocultural Integration," in Theory of Culture Change, 1955; source for comment in notes.

_____. "The Uintah Ute Bear Dance," American Anthropologist 34:263-273:1932.

Wallace, Ernest and E. Adamson Hoebel. The Comanches, 1986 edition.