Shoshone Food

Many people in this country may no longer live on a flat Earth, but they still think in two dimensions.

The earliest settlers only recognized latitude. They knew the sugar that grew in Barbados wouldn’t do in Virginia, the tobacco that made Virginia wealthy wouldn’t survive in Boston, that Boston was more congenial to farmers than Maine or New Brunswick.

As people moved west, they gradually became aware that longitude mattered. However, it wasn’t important until they reached the 100th meridian. There they saw the beginning of what they called the great American desert, the great dry plains that only supported settlement with the aide of artesian wells.

With the acquisition of the southwest from México after the Mexican War, US citizens moved into mountainous areas and discovered the importance of altitude. In 1889, Hart Merriam went to Flagstaff to investigate vegetation by elevation in the San Francisco mountains and Grand Canyon. He defined seven life zones: Lower Sonoran, Upper Sonoran, Transition, Canadian, Hudsonian, Timberline and Arctic-Alpine.

His terms, especially Sonoran, were specific to Arizona: the Chihuahuan desert south of New Mexico is considered a different biotic sphere. The labels used by the Forest Service have evolved to identify trees or plants characteristic of an altitudinal band: chaparral and grassland, piñon-juniper woodland, ponderosa pine forest, fir-aspen forest, fir-spruce forest, arctic-alpine-timerline, and alpine tundra.

This part of New Mexico lies in the Upper Sonoran or piñon-juniper belt between 5000' and 7000'. While Merriam was thinking specifically of Colorado Piñon and Utah Juniper, here it’s Colorado Pinus edulis and single-seeded Juniperus monosperma that are common.

Merriam thought temperature was the determining factor in the southwest, that it decreased with elevation while precipitation increased. His brother-in-law, Vernon Bailey, suggested the major factor separating areas within the piñon-juniper province in New Mexico was humidity. A LANL team headed by Kevin Reid theorized it was soil moisture on the Pajarito Plateau.

Julian Steward used these vegetation categories to describe foods available to Shoshone. The highest and lowest levels provided little that was edible, although the area above the timberline did provide forage for game animals. Food plants were concentrated between 5000' and 1100'.

The spruce-fir zone provided grasses and fruits from wine gooseberry, wax currant, and mountain red elderberry.

Between 7400' and 9500' feet in the aspen-fir zone, eleven species may have provided food. In addition to four types of grass, there were shrubs like western serviceberry, black chokecherry, Fendler’s rose, and mountain red and Rocky mountain elderberries. Strawberries may also have been eaten.

The area between it and the piñon-juniper belt had eleven nutritional plants. Eight were grasses. The shrubs included Serviceberry, roses, and possibly thimbleberry.

Steward didn’t find many plants unique to the 5000' to 7000' range, except, of course, piñon. Instead, plants known from high elevations also occurred in favored locations.

More plants existed the farther bands ranged north in Idaho where camas and tobacco root grew in moist prairies.

Steward also listed the common animals eaten by the Shoshone and described how they were hunted. However, he didn’t connect them to ecological zones or seasons.

Notes:
Bailey, Vernon. Life Zones and Crop Zones of New Mexico, 1913.

Merriam, C. H. and L. Steineger. Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and the Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, 1890.

Reid, Kevin D., Bradford J. Wilcox, David D. Breshears, and Lee MacDonald. "Runoff and Erosion in a Piñon-Juniper Woodland: Influence of Vegetation Patches," Soil Science Society of America Journal 63:1869-1879:1999.

Steward, Julian H. Basin-Plateau Sociopolitical Groups, 1938. Plant names have been standardized to current usage. Latin names are:

Camas - Camassia quamash
Chokecherry, black - Prunus virginiana var. melanocarpa
Currant, wax - Ribes cereum
Elderberry, mountain red - Sambucus microbotrys
Elderberry, Rocky mountain - Sambucus racemosa var. melanocarpa
Gooseberry, wine - Ribes inerme var. inerme
Rose, Fendler’s - Rosa woodsii var. fendleri
Serviceberry, western - Amelanchier alnifolia
Thimbleberry - Rubus parvifiorus
Tobacco root - Valeriana edulis

Strawberry - Steward did not specify but the woods strawberry, Fragaria vesca grows in west central Idaho and wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana, grows at different levels in the Great Basin.