The
SHOSHONE
Drawings of the Lemhi Shoshone with dogs.
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Sheep Hunter
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Pulling Travois
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Lemhi Shoshone hunter with dog.
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The
Lemhi Shoshone were discovered in the mid 1800's as still using dogs for utility
work and beasts of burden...no horses were owned by these people. Each
family had upwards of 30 dogs each. The majority of the Lemhi had been
killed off by European disease and only a handful of these Shoshones' remained.
The Lemhi loved their dogs so much that when a family member died their favorite
dog was killed and buried with the individual.
In the
early 19th century the Shoshone occupied SE California, NW Utah,
SW Montana, W Wyoming, S Idaho,
and NE Nevada. The Shoshone were traditionally divided into
four groups: the Comanche of W Texas, a historically recent subdivision of the
Wind River Shoshone of Wyoming; the Northern Shoshone of Idaho and Utah, who had
horses and ranged across the Great Plains in search of buffalo; the western
Shoshone, who did not use horses and subsisted mainly on nuts and other wild
vegetation; and the Wind River Shoshone of Wyoming. Today the Shoshone live on
reservations in
California, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and
Wyoming. In 1990 there were some 9,500 Shoshone in the United States
.
See V. C.
Trenholm and M. Carley, The Shoshonis, Sentinels of the
Rockies
(1964);
E. Dorn
, The Shoshoneans
(1966); J. G. Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion (1972).