The entrepreneurial role in the captive trade was assumed by Apache bands who desired horses. They set the terms of trade, but families of captives enforced the norms that regulated it. Utes and Shoshone disciplined the Penxaye Apache in July of 1706.
The markets for horses and captives weren’t saturated. According to Hubert Bancroft, Francisco Cuervo was forced to abandon attempts to subdue the Moqui in April of 1707, because troops were needed in Santa Fé to recover horses stolen while he was in the west. No sooner were they recovered, than they disappeared again. In August, José Chacón issued orders prohibiting the sale of presidio horses, and repeated them in 1708.
The trade in captives continued. In 1712, Juan Flores Mogollón again prohibited settlers from visiting "ranches of the wild Indians for the purposes of barter and trade." Two years later, he surrendered authority. Instead of bans, he ordered captives be baptized as if they were African slaves.
The attempted transformation of captives into slaves accelerated under Félix Martínez. In 1716, he ordered an attack on Utes and their allies. Cristóbal de la Serna descended upon a peaceful encampment near Antonio mountain. Martínez sent the captives to Nueva Viscaya where they were sold. He divided the profits with his brother.
Sebastían Martín’s descendants told Ralph Twitchell in the early twentieth century, that he had been the one responsible, and that the raid had been led by two of this sons-in-laws, Juan Antonio de Padilla and Carlos Fernandéz. The latter wasn’t involved; he didn’t marry into the family until much later. However, Serna’s daughter had married Martín’s nephew, Nicolás Jacinto Martín, in 1712.
The sale of captives into slavery violated one of the unwritten rules of the captive trade. As long as captives were kept in Nuevo México, it was possible to see them, or at least hear about them. They, no doubt, were sources of information about colonial life, and maltreatment would have been known. It was even possible for captives to escape. Exile to distant lands was a death sentence.
Regulatory enforcement of Martínez’s misbehavior took awhile, but relatives of the 1716 victims raided Serna’s ranch at Embudo in 1719. They took four hoses and a captive boy. The same night they shot arrows at Diego Romero in Arroyo Hondo. He was able to flee to safety.
Something had changed. When not enough horses were available for trade, they were stolen. José López Naranjo noticed an increase in thefts around 1718. Perhaps there were, indeed, fewer horses available, perhaps there were more natives. Not only did native sons come of age, but more Shoshone may have been filtering south.
Shoshone attitudes toward the Apache, who were selling captives, hardened. Miguel de la Vega y Coca, alcalde of Taos and Picurís said they came "for the purpose of interfering with the little barter which this kingdom has with the nations which come in to ransom."
Santa Fé merchant Jean l'Archevêque added, "that for more than seven or eight years they have come to steal horses and rob herds and run away with the goods in the trade which this kingdom has with the Apaches of El Cuartelejo." He called the proposed expedition against the Utes a "just war." In fact, to him, it was a just trade war.
Diego Romero was described as a coyote by the local alcalde, Miguel Tenorio de Alba. What he was doing so far north and west of Taos pueblo isn’t known. He may have used captive labor, he may have been a middleman, he may have been an unexpected witness.
Angélico Chávez said he was the great-grandson of Francisco Cadimo, who came as a soldier with Oñate. Francisco had two daughters. One must have had an illegitimate child, Alonso Cadimo, who lived with Felipe Romero in the Río Abajo before the revolt and took his last name. Chávez identified Alonso as a criado.
Diego had some ties to La Cañada. In 1661, Felipe Romero had been associated with Bartolomé Gómez Robledo. There was another Alonso Romero, who was the son of Miguel Romero de la Cruz. The Inquisition prosecuted him for bigamy after he married Bartolomé’s niece, María. Diego’s mother later married Mateo Trujillo. He himself "acquired considerable land at Taos," according to Chávez.
The attack on Romero frightened the pueblo priest into writing the governor. Juan de la Cruz said, "all the valley of Taos is harassed by a growing number of Utes" and "it is feared that they might attack the pueblo or do some injury."
Coincidentally, the priest at Cochití pueblo, Manuel de la Peña, said a Queres had been killed by Utes. When they went searching for them, they found evidence a great many had been in the area.
Antonio Valverde called a council of war in August. Each man repeated the same words, that they came as friends, but stole their horses. Serna added, with the murders, they "have declared themselves enemies, let war be made." Those who testified after him repeated his words.
The council authorized an expedition led by the governor. On the plains they were joined by warriors from Sierra Blanca under Carlana. Whenever they met Apache families, they were told of depredations. However, they never saw more than remains of camp sites.
The alliance between the Ute and the Shoshone frayed. Around 1719, the Ute began grouping them with the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa as Komántica. Marvin Opler was told, that meant "anyone who wants to fight with me all the time." Ernest Wallace said, they narrowed the term to refer only to Comanche around 1726.
The captives for horses trade continued, with little official interference. The identities of the captives and the sellers changed. In 1732, the governor, Gervasio Cruzat y Góngora, tried to assert some Apache were under the protection of the government, and weren’t to be sold. Five years later, the next governor condoned trades that were treated as ransoms. Enrique de Olavide only asked to be notified.
Notes: Mooney believed the first document to use Cumanche was the 1719 dairy of Valverde. It referred to "naciones Yutas y Cumanches." The meetings of the council of war held a month earlier used the term "los Yndios Yutas." I am using Shoshone until 1719. I suspect most translations of earlier documents used the common term, and not the historic one, especially when some of the historic terms were confusing.
Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888, 1889.
Chacón Medina Salazar y Villaseñor, José. Order, prohibiting the sale of horses from the horse herd, 11 August 1707; order, prohibiting the taking of horses or mules from the caballada. 6 May 1708; in Twitchell, Archives.
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.
Cruz, Juan de la. Letter to the governor, Antonio Valverde Cosio, 12 August 1719; in Thomas.
Cruzat y Góngora, Gervasio. Bando, prohibiting the sale of Apache captives to the Pueblo Indians, 6 December 1732; in Twitchell, Archives.
Flores Magollón, Juan Ignacio. Order, prohibiting the settlers visiting the ranches of the wild Indians, 16 December 1712; bando, ordering the baptism of Apache captives in the same manner as Negro slaves, 26 September 1714; in Twitchell, Archives.
L'Archevêque, Jean. Opinion on proposed expedition, 19 August 1719; in Thomas.
Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, 1896.
Naranjo, José López. Opinion on proposed expedition, 19 August 1719; in Thomas.
Olavide y Michelena, Enrique. Bando, in relation to trade with the wild tribes, 7 January 1737; cited by Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 2008.
Opler, Marvin K. "The Origins of Comanche and Ute," American Anthropologist 45:155-158:1943.
Peña, Manuel de la. Letter to Antonio Valverde quoted by Thomas.
Serna, Cristobal de la. Opinion on proposed expedition, 19 August 1719; in Thomas.
Thomas, Alfred B. After Coronado, 1935.
Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. The Leading Facts of New Mexico History, volume 1, 1911; on Martínez family legend.
_____. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 2, 1914.
Ulibarrí, Juan de. Diary of expedition to El Cuartelejo, 1706; in Thomas; on Penxaye Apache.
Valverde y Cosío, Antonio. Diary of the campaign against the Ute and Comanche Indians, 1719; in Thomas.
Wallace, Ernest and E. Adamson Hoebel. The Comanches, 1986 edition.
Showing posts with label 02 Ute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 02 Ute. Show all posts
Thursday, July 09, 2015
Tuesday, July 07, 2015
Captives for Horses
Slavery is an economic transaction. It requires at least one merchant, some customers, and rules for doing business.
Españoles had relied on native and captive labor before the Pueblo Revolt of 1690. Diego de Vargas legitimized its reintroduction in 1694 when he gave 342 captive Cochití women and children to settlers and soldiers.
The business relationship between buyers and the providers of captives became asymmetric. Sellers had an unlimited supply of valuable captives, but Nuevo México had little of value to offer in return. In the east, English and French traders imported metal tools and utensils, but Spanish goods were scarce and deemed inferior.
When the French ran short of inventory, the more ingenious began fabricating desirable items. To encourage native conversions, northern Jesuits had given away brass finger-rings embossed with symbolic letters or the Mexican bleeding heart. After they became valued, the rings were taken over as trade goods by the coureurs. Judith Hauser hasn’t found references to where they were manufactured, but thinks the cruder ones used in the fur trade after 1700 must have been made in home workshops.
Charles Town merchants converted guns into currency. In 1700, a native near Mobile Bay told Charles Levasseur, an aide to Henri Tonti, "men take the women and children away and sell them to the English, each person being traded for a gun." Thomas Nairne discovered a higher exchange rate in 1708: Chickasaw and Talapoosie claimed they received "‘a Gun, ammunition, horse, hatchet, and suit of Cloathes’ for just one slave - a whole year’s worth of deerskins."
Nuevo México refused to trade weapons, partly for religious reasons, partly from memories of the Revolt. In 1696, Plains Apaches came to San Juan to sell Ute women and children. No notice was made if other Shoshone speakers were among the captives. Gerald Betty didn’t report what they took in exchange, but in July of that year de Vargas acted to stop colonists from selling arms to natives in July. In October, he gave 84 women and children to soldiers.
De Vargas unintentionally created the substitute exchange medium when he confiscated horses from the pueblos. To regain their livestock, natives raided and traded. Settlers from Taos began visiting Apache villages to trade "two or three horses for a captive boy or girl." In 1703 he prohibited such activities, but two years later his successor, Francisco Cuervo, issued a new set of bans.
The complaints to de Vargas and Cuervo didn’t come from the friars, but from the cabildo in Santa Fé. This implied they were more concerned with the potential development of a competing trade center, than with the ethics of the business. Unlike, the English and the French, Nuevo México didn’t develop a true merchant class that could have organized the trade to the benefit of all.
The closest the city had was a captive reared in the same northern trading culture as many of the coureurs. Jean l’Archevêque was born in Bayonne, France, in 1672 to a Huguenot family that had moved there when his grandfather converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1650s. Jean’s parents subsequently moved to Saint Dominique on the western side of Hispañola.
A French pirate, Jean le Vasseur, had established a Huguenot colony on Tortuga, a small island off Hispañola’s northwest coast in 1640. The Spanish ousted them, but Bertrand d’Ogeron retook control and moved onto the main island where he encouraged tobacco plantations. Saint-Dominique was just converting to sugarcane when La Salle’s flotilla of colonists landed at the port of Petit-Goâve.
At some time, l’Archevêque was apprenticed to Pierre Duhaut. Sources disagree if the merchant was already on the island, or arrived with La Salle. The boy, just shy of twelve years of age, joined the expedition. When disaster follower disaster, Duhaut murdered La Salle in 1687 by using the lad as a decoy.
After he was allowed to retire from the presidio, probably in 1714 when he joined the council of war, l’Archevêque became a merchant banker importing goods from México.
Notes:
Axtell, James. The Indians’ New South, 1997.
Betty, Gerald. Comanche Society, 2002; quotation on Taos transaction.
Cabildo de Santa Fé. Petition, complaining about sale of horses, 26 November 1703; petition, relative to bartering with the Apache, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.
Cuervo y Valdés, Francisco. Decree, relative to bartering with the Apaches, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.
De Vargas, Diego. Bando, prohibiting sale of arms, 31 May 1696; bando, prohibiting soldiers from gambling for their horses, 3 November 1703; decree, regarding sale of horses, 26 November 1703; in Twitchell.
Hauser, Judith Ann. Jesuit Rings from Fort Michimackinac and Other European Contact Sites, 1982.
Lafleur, Gérard and Lucien Abénon. "The Protestants and the Colonization of the French West Indies," in Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, 2003.
Levasseur, Charles. Voyage de M. de Sauvole, 1701, translated by Vernon J. Knight, Junior, and Sherée L. Adams in "A Voyage to the Mobile and Tomeh in 1700, with Notes on the Interior of Alabama," Ethnohistory 28:179-194:1981; quote by Axtell.
Nairne, Thomas. Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, edited by Alexander Moore, 1988; quoted by Axtell.
Páez Hurtado, Juan. Letter, relative to bartering with Apache, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.
Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 2, 1914.
Weddle, Robert S. The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle, 2001; thinks Duhaut was with La Salle.
Wikipedia. "Jean l'Archevêque;" thinks Duhaut was in Saint-Dominique.
Españoles had relied on native and captive labor before the Pueblo Revolt of 1690. Diego de Vargas legitimized its reintroduction in 1694 when he gave 342 captive Cochití women and children to settlers and soldiers.
The business relationship between buyers and the providers of captives became asymmetric. Sellers had an unlimited supply of valuable captives, but Nuevo México had little of value to offer in return. In the east, English and French traders imported metal tools and utensils, but Spanish goods were scarce and deemed inferior.
When the French ran short of inventory, the more ingenious began fabricating desirable items. To encourage native conversions, northern Jesuits had given away brass finger-rings embossed with symbolic letters or the Mexican bleeding heart. After they became valued, the rings were taken over as trade goods by the coureurs. Judith Hauser hasn’t found references to where they were manufactured, but thinks the cruder ones used in the fur trade after 1700 must have been made in home workshops.
Charles Town merchants converted guns into currency. In 1700, a native near Mobile Bay told Charles Levasseur, an aide to Henri Tonti, "men take the women and children away and sell them to the English, each person being traded for a gun." Thomas Nairne discovered a higher exchange rate in 1708: Chickasaw and Talapoosie claimed they received "‘a Gun, ammunition, horse, hatchet, and suit of Cloathes’ for just one slave - a whole year’s worth of deerskins."
Nuevo México refused to trade weapons, partly for religious reasons, partly from memories of the Revolt. In 1696, Plains Apaches came to San Juan to sell Ute women and children. No notice was made if other Shoshone speakers were among the captives. Gerald Betty didn’t report what they took in exchange, but in July of that year de Vargas acted to stop colonists from selling arms to natives in July. In October, he gave 84 women and children to soldiers.
De Vargas unintentionally created the substitute exchange medium when he confiscated horses from the pueblos. To regain their livestock, natives raided and traded. Settlers from Taos began visiting Apache villages to trade "two or three horses for a captive boy or girl." In 1703 he prohibited such activities, but two years later his successor, Francisco Cuervo, issued a new set of bans.
The complaints to de Vargas and Cuervo didn’t come from the friars, but from the cabildo in Santa Fé. This implied they were more concerned with the potential development of a competing trade center, than with the ethics of the business. Unlike, the English and the French, Nuevo México didn’t develop a true merchant class that could have organized the trade to the benefit of all.
The closest the city had was a captive reared in the same northern trading culture as many of the coureurs. Jean l’Archevêque was born in Bayonne, France, in 1672 to a Huguenot family that had moved there when his grandfather converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1650s. Jean’s parents subsequently moved to Saint Dominique on the western side of Hispañola.
A French pirate, Jean le Vasseur, had established a Huguenot colony on Tortuga, a small island off Hispañola’s northwest coast in 1640. The Spanish ousted them, but Bertrand d’Ogeron retook control and moved onto the main island where he encouraged tobacco plantations. Saint-Dominique was just converting to sugarcane when La Salle’s flotilla of colonists landed at the port of Petit-Goâve.
At some time, l’Archevêque was apprenticed to Pierre Duhaut. Sources disagree if the merchant was already on the island, or arrived with La Salle. The boy, just shy of twelve years of age, joined the expedition. When disaster follower disaster, Duhaut murdered La Salle in 1687 by using the lad as a decoy.
After he was allowed to retire from the presidio, probably in 1714 when he joined the council of war, l’Archevêque became a merchant banker importing goods from México.
Notes:
Axtell, James. The Indians’ New South, 1997.
Betty, Gerald. Comanche Society, 2002; quotation on Taos transaction.
Cabildo de Santa Fé. Petition, complaining about sale of horses, 26 November 1703; petition, relative to bartering with the Apache, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.
Cuervo y Valdés, Francisco. Decree, relative to bartering with the Apaches, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.
De Vargas, Diego. Bando, prohibiting sale of arms, 31 May 1696; bando, prohibiting soldiers from gambling for their horses, 3 November 1703; decree, regarding sale of horses, 26 November 1703; in Twitchell.
Hauser, Judith Ann. Jesuit Rings from Fort Michimackinac and Other European Contact Sites, 1982.
Lafleur, Gérard and Lucien Abénon. "The Protestants and the Colonization of the French West Indies," in Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, 2003.
Levasseur, Charles. Voyage de M. de Sauvole, 1701, translated by Vernon J. Knight, Junior, and Sherée L. Adams in "A Voyage to the Mobile and Tomeh in 1700, with Notes on the Interior of Alabama," Ethnohistory 28:179-194:1981; quote by Axtell.
Nairne, Thomas. Nairne’s Muskhogean Journals, edited by Alexander Moore, 1988; quoted by Axtell.
Páez Hurtado, Juan. Letter, relative to bartering with Apache, 1 June 1705; in Twitchell.
Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 2, 1914.
Weddle, Robert S. The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle, 2001; thinks Duhaut was with La Salle.
Wikipedia. "Jean l'Archevêque;" thinks Duhaut was in Saint-Dominique.
Thursday, July 02, 2015
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)