The SHOSHONE

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).