The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes'
Unresolved Claim to the Great Camas Prairie
Gregory E. Smoak, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History
Colorado State University
gsmoak@loma.colostate.edu
It has been 136 years since the United States signed the Fort Bridger treaty with its promise to a portion of the flowering prairie at the foot of the Sawtooths to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Gregory Smoak, who specializes in American Indians and the environment, explores reasons why the treaty promise remains unkept.
In July of 1868 the Fort Bridger treaty reserved a portion of south-central Idaho's Great Camas
Prairie for Shoshone-Bannock tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation. Although Shoshone-Bannocks
 |
“The blue lake of camas blossoms presents a picture never to be forgotten,” wrote pioneer Lucy M. Nelson in 1937. Photograph courtesy of Steve Bly. |
have asserted their treaty rights and continued to use the prairie, the United States has yet to establish the reservation. Today the legal and cultural claim to the Camas Prairie remains one of the great unresolved issues in Idaho law.
Food for Survival
Camassia quamash, known in the Shoshone language as p·sigoo (literally “water sego”) and commonly known as camas, is a traditional staple food of the Shoshone-Bannock people. Camas is a member of the lily family and grows best in open valleys and parklands between 5,000 and 7,000 feet in elevation. The plant’s prevalence throughout Idaho is evidenced by the many “Camas Prairies” and “Camas Creeks” which dot maps of the state. Native peoples dug up the plant’s nutritious bulbs in late spring and early summer. They were then baked, roasted, dried or eaten raw. North of the range of pinon pines, camas was the most important vegetal food gathered by the native peoples of southern Idaho. Shoshone-Bannocks also gathered numerous other wild roots, including sweet sage, onions, carrots, and bitterroot.1
The area commonly known as the Great Camas Prairie, situated in modern Camas County, holds a particularly important place in Shoshone-Bannock history and life. The Great Camas Prairie was much more than a food source for the Shoshones and Bannocks. Indeed, its importance as a gathering place and crossroads for an extensive regional trade network rivaled its value as a subsistence site during the historical period. Each year in late May and June, Shoshones and Bannocks by the thousands from across their extensive aboriginal range converged on the prairie as the distinctive blue flowers of the camas came into bloom. Visitors from far and wide, including Cayuses, Umatillas and Nez Perce, also made their way to the prairie to, in the words of one Idaho territorial governor, “trade and have a general frolic.” Some Shoshone-Bannock groups remained on the Great Camas Prairie throughout the summer, leading Fort Hall agent Henry Reed to remark that they “spend from one to three months there most agreeably.”2
Recognition and Segregation
The territorial and federal officials who made treaties with native peoples understood the importance of camas and of the Great Camas Prairie to the Shoshones and Bannocks. In fact, these peoples were so closely associated with the resource that white officials regularly referred to Shoshone and Bannock groups as “Camas,” “Kamas,” or “Kammas” Indians. (Camas was commonly spelled with a “k” in the nineteenth century.) In 1860, Frederick W. Lander, superintendent of the overland road, identified one of the major Shoshone groups in Idaho as the “Kammas Prairie” Indians.3
Five years later, Secretary of the Interior James Harlan instructed Idaho territorial governor Caleb Lyon to seek a treaty with the “Great Kammas Indians.” Recognizing the importance of camas to Shoshone-Bannock life, the secretary suggested a two- part reservation that encompassed fisheries on the Snake River as well as a “summer reservation in the vicinity of the Great Kammas Prairie.”4
Within a month Lyon visited the “Great Kammas Prairie” and held a council with the approximately 2,000 Indians he found camped there.The governor promised that if they remained on friendly terms with the overland emigrants then streaming across the Snake River plain each summer, the government would “guard their interests and protect their rights.” In his report to the secretary of the interior, however, Lyon was less than sanguine about the government’s ability to fulfill that promise. He wrote, “The Kouse and the Kammas, two edible vegetables upon which they have subsisted, the salmon in their rivers, and the game on their hills are all being destroyed by the settlements of the white man.” As a solution he proposed “an agency be located near Little Kammas Prairie for the winter and a reservation in the summer time on the banks of the Shoshonee [Snake River].”5
The “Little Kammas Prairie” is a western adjunct to the Great Camas Prairie situated within modern Elmore County, Idaho, and is now inundated by Little Camas Reservoir.6 6. Lalia Boone, Idaho Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary, 62.
Lyon’s proposal reveals a basic understanding of the complex resource base of the Shoshone-Bannock people as well as a profound confusion over their seasonal cycle. The high, cold Camas Prairie would simply not make a pleasant winter home.
David W. Ballard, who succeeded Lyon as Idaho’s governor, abandoned his predecessor’s concern for protecting aboriginal resources in favor of a consolidation policy which would place all of southern Idaho’s Indian peoples on a single reservation. He quickly focused on the Fort Hall area as the best location for that reservation. Ballard cited the area’s natural advantages, but in reality, the best camas grounds and fisheries were over one hundred miles away. What really attracted Ballard’s interest was Fort Hall’s remoteness from white population centers. Ballard had the area posted in order to warn off prospective settlers and lobbied Washington. On June 14, 1867, President Andrew Johnson created the Fort Hall Reservation by executive order. Ballard now had a place to consolidate the “Indians in middle and southern Idaho,” all that remained was getting them to go there.7
Shrinking Homeland
Over a year later, at the Fort Bridger treaty council in July 1868, the Bannock leader Taghee secured a legal right to the Great Camas Prairie as part of his people’s reservation. General Christopher C. Augur represented the federal government at the council, which also included Washakie and his Eastern Shoshones.8
Augur pushed both men to accept a single reservation located in Wyoming. Consolidation was part of a larger federal strategy, designed to reduce administrative costs and open more land for white settlement. The general told the assembled Shoshones and Bannocks that “more could be done for them” on a single reservation. Taghee refused in no uncertain terms. “We are friends with the Shoshones and like to hunt with them,” the Bannock headman told Augur, “but we want a home for ourselves.” When asked where that home would be, Taghee claimed “all the country about the Soda Springs, the Porte Neuf river, and the Big Kamas Prairie to the northwest of it.” While he also told Augur that his people ranged much farther, Taghee reasserted that for a home he wanted “the Porte-Neuf Country and the Kamas Plains.”9
Augur was “not sufficiently acquainted” with Idaho’s geography to draw the boundaries of a Bannock reservation. Indeed, it appears that he was not aware of the 1867 executive order which established the Fort Hall reservation. Instead he promised “the President will send someone to lay off one which shall include portions of the country they want.” Consequently, Article 2 of the Fort Bridger treaty detailed the boundaries of the Eastern Shoshone’s Wind River Reservation, but only described the “Bannacks” future reservation in general and ultimately controversial terms:
It is agreed that whenever the Bannacks desire a reservation to be set apart for their use, or whenever the President of the United States shall deem it advisable for them to be put upon a reservation, he shall cause a suitable one to be selected for them in their present country, which shall embrace reasonable portions of the “Port Neuf” and “Kansas Prairie” countries ...10
The obvious misspelling of “Kamas Prairie” as “Kansas Prairie” has been a source of contention and dubious claims for over a century, but in reality it is a non-issue.
A careful reading and reasonable interpretation of the treaty council notes and the treaty itself can lead to no other conclusion but that both Augur and Taghee understood that Article 2 of the Fort Bridger treaty reserved a portion of the Great Camas Prairie for the Shoshone-Bannock people. The word “kamas” appears twice in Augur’s handwritten report of the council. The general’s script exhibits a very distinctive “s.” While it is possible that a clerk could have, on cursory glance, interpreted the “m” in “kamas” as “ns,” it is just as clearly an error. The error is made more obvious by the text surrounding the words “kamas” and “Kansas” in the respective documents. On page three of his report, Augur situates the “big Kamas prairie” as lying northwest of the Portneuf river, while according to Article 2 of the treaty, the Bannock reservation is to be located in “their present country.” It makes absolutely no sense to believe that the general promised Taghee lands nearly one thousand miles from his peoples’ home and which perhaps none of them had ever seen.
Fort Hall: Combining Cultures
With the effective establishment of the Fort Hall Reservation in 1869, the question soon arose as to which of the native groups that settled there held a treaty right. Would it simply be Taghee and the Shoshone-Bannocks who were parties to the Fort Bridger treaty? Or would treaty rights also extend to the Boises, Bruneaus, and other Shoshones whom Ballard had resettled at Fort Hall beginning in the spring of 1869? The latter groups were not present at the Fort Bridger council, yet they were close friends of, and in many cases intermarried with, the Bannocks and Shoshones of Fort Hall. Fort Hall agent William H. Danilson feared these groups were “outside any treaty stipulation.” But he also believed they should be on the “same footing” as the Bannocks.11
At first, the commissioner of Indian affairs mistook the issue to be simply one of designating Fort Hall as the “Bannack Reservation” of the Fort Bridger treaty. The secretary of the interior and the President concurred and on July 30, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant issued an executive order doing just that.12
Still, Idaho officials demanded to know what treaty rights the “other Indians” at Fort Hall would possess. While there was no mention of rights for “other Indians” within the Fort Bridger treaty, Idaho superintendent of Indian affairs DeLancey Floyd-Jones argued that this was the “fair interpretation” of both the treaty and the situation at Fort Hall. The commissioner agreed and wired Boise, “President’s order designates Fort Hall as reserve under treaty of eighteen hundred and sixty eight (1868) for Bannocks ... Other Indians on the reserve will enjoy equal rights with the Bannocks.”13
Thus, all the provisions of the Fort Bridger treaty were officially extended to all the Shoshones who settled at Fort Hall, including access to the yet to be established Camas Prairie reservation.
Government Indifference
Within two years of the Fort Bridger treaty, white settlers were encroaching upon the Great Camas Prairie in substantial numbers and tensions were on the rise. Particularly distressing to the Shoshone-Bannocks were the herds of hogs driven onto the prairie to fatten on the root crop. Government officials did nothing to either curb the damage or mark off a reservation. In his annual report for 1871, Fort Hall agent Montgomery Berry alluded to “difficulties ... between certain white men who have occupied a portion of those prairies and the Indians from this reserve who were out on the annual camas-gathering expedition.” Unspecified “difficulties” were not the only sign of Shoshone-Bannock displeasure with the government’s failure to protect their rights. Tay-to-ba and A-wite-etse, two Bannock headmen and signatories of the Fort Bridger treaty, reminded their agent that the prairie was reserved for them by the Fort Bridger treaty. Berry agreed with their interpretation but also suggested that certain settlers were using the misspelling in the treaty in an attempt to deny Indian claims:
... Article 2 of the treaty of July 3, 1868, designates “portions of the Kansas Prairie countries” to be retained for the use of the Indians. There being no prairies known by that name within the limits of the land covered by the treaty, it necessarily follows that the spelling is a mere clerical error, but is of sufficient importance to give those who make it a business to encroach upon Indian lands a shadow of a claim.14
Regardless of the spelling, Berry felt the Shoshones and Bannocks were “undoubtedly right,” and suggested that the government must “take immediate measures to preserve those prairies from further occupancy and destruction by the white men.”15
No “immediate measures” were taken and in 1872 tensions erupted into violence. Taghee had died in the Fall of 1871 and by the following summer the Bannocks had split into several bands. One group, led by Pagwite or “Bannack Jim,” wintered on the plains of Montana and headed directly to the Camas Prairie in June. Along the Wood River, on the way to the camas grounds, the Bannocks encountered a small group of white herdsmen. In the altercation which resulted, one white man was killed, another wounded and some livestock taken. Agency trader Stanton G. Fisher investigated the incident. He was told by several Bannock that the killing was in revenge for the murder of a Bannock by white men in Montana. Later reports also seem to suggest that the invasion of the Great Camas Prairie aggravated the Bannocks’ anger.16
Suggested Solution
The clearest solution to the problem was to establish a reservation on the Great Camas Prairie, and Fort Hall agent Johnson High made plans to do just that. In his official report of the Wood River incident, High once again alerted the Indian bureau to the Fort Hall tribes’ understanding of the Fort Bridger treaty and their dissatisfaction with the invasion of the camas prairie. He also pointed out that traditional subsistence patterns were essential for the survival of the Indians on the underfunded and under-supplied Fort Hall reservation. He wrote,
... [Quoting the Fort Bridger Treaty, the reservation] shall embrace reasonable portions of the Port Neuf and Cammas Prairie Countries [emphasis and spelling his]. The reservation set apart for them does not embrace any part of the Cammas Prairie Country. These considerations together with the fact that the government does not appropriate sufficient money to subsist them at home, have induced the agents to grant passes annually to the Bannacks to hunt Buffalo east of the mountains, and to visit Cammas Prairie for the purpose of trading their robes for horses with the Indians who congregate there for that purpose, and to gather roots for food.17
High never made the survey trip. Two weeks later he wrote the commissioner, “My trip to the Cammas Prairie has been necessarily delayed and cannot now be performed until after ... the latter part of October.”18
By mid-November High had been replaced by Henry W. Reed who assumed charge at the agency in early January.
Confinement & Segregation
Reed never attempted to make a survey himself, but rather was swept up in plans hatched by Idaho territorial governor Thomas Bennett to negotiate a “reformation” of the Fort Bridger treaty. For Gov. Bennett, the problem of settler-Indian conflict rested with the Shoshone-Bannock’s broad off-reservation rights guaranteed under Article 4 of the Fort Bridger treaty. He wrote,
Availing themselves of the liberal and loose provisions of the treaty these Indians [Shoshones and Bannocks], early in the summer of each year, go to the Camas Prairie in full strength, and there leaving their old men and old women to dig roots, the others to the number of twelve hundred to two thousand, and including their young men and warriors, pass on into the white settlements in the valleys of the Boise, the Payette, and the Weiser, and remain there for several months, ‘hunting and fishing’ in pursuance of the terms of their treaty – there being unoccupied lands scattered through these valleys.19
Bennett’s proposed solution was,
... to confine the Indians to their reservation and to such grounds as they may need for digging roots, hunting, and fishing. And that these grounds and locations should be definitely and particularly described and then the Indians resolutely kept in these lands and their rights vigorously guarded [emphasis his].20
In March 1873, the secretary of the interior named Gov. Bennett and agent Reed to a commission chaired by Congressman J. P. C. Shanks of Indiana, with the stated aim of “collecting [the Shoshones and Bannocks] on a smaller reservation ... [and] preventing hostilities between them and the white population.”21
Agent Reed immediately suggested that a portion of the Great Camas Prairie must be reserved for the tribes. (He also pointed out the misspelling in the Fort Bridger treaty yet again.)22
Initially, the commissioner of Indian affairs understood the agent was suggesting moving the reservation to the prairie. Reed quickly corrected this assumption: he meant that there should be a second reservation on the Great Camas Prairie as specified in the Fort Bridger treaty. The agent confirmed the Shoshone-Bannocks’ reliance upon the area for both subsistence and trade as well as the legitimacy of their claim. He also alluded to his predecessor’s orders to survey a reservation on the prairie.
The Indians here, or many of them, understand that this reservation when set apart was designated to embrace a part of ‘Camas Prairie,’ & this supposition as I understand it has been admitted by the Indians Dept. as correct & last year Agent High was directed to go to ‘Camas Pr.’ & mark out the 2nd reservation. Now I learn that this ‘C.-Prairie’ is some 100 miles & more west of this through a unsettled & mostly ‘Lava’ country. That when reached, in a poor frozen undesirable region of country. The Camas root which is abundant there, serves as food for the Indians while they stop there, & the Indians from the west ‘Umatillas’ & others meet the Ft. Hall to visit, trade, & c. & spend from one to three months there most agreeably.23
The commission met with the Shoshones and Bannocks at Fort Hall in early November 1873, where ten chiefs and headmen put their marks to a proposed agreement. Bennett’s primary objective, the relinquishment of off-reservation rights, was part of the document, as were provisions for government control over reservation roads and a strict prohibition against white trespass. The commission’s official report did not include a transcript of what the Shoshone-Bannock representatives had said at the council.24
Although the conflict on the Great Camas Prairie had in part precipitated the council, neither the prairie nor the Shoshone-Bannock claims to the area were mentioned in the agreement. Ultimately, it made no difference. Congress never ratified the 1873 agreement and all of the provisions of the Fort Bridger treaty remained intact. Moreover, the issue of the Great Camas Prairie and that of off-reservation rights are not linked in the treaty. Revising Article 4 of the treaty could have no effect upon the guarantee of a Camas Prairie reservation made in Article 2.
Tensions Rising
In the years that followed, large groups of Shoshone-Bannocks continued to use the Camas Prairie each summer as they always had, and the area became the flash-point of Indian-white conflict in southern Idaho. Fort Hall agents were aware of the growing tension but knew that the Shoshones and Bannocks were adamant about their rights. The agents also faced the constant problem of feeding all of the people on the reservation. There was never enough food or funding to provide for all the Shoshones and Bannocks the federal government wanted to settle at Fort Hall. Access to traditional resource sites was critical for survival. Commenting on the shortages which faced the people on the reservation in January 1875, Agent James Wright lamented “when summer comes they can go to the Kamas Prairie, but that will afford only temporary relief.”25
In the summer of 1877, as anxiety over the Nez Perce War gripped Idaho, Gov. Mason Brayman met with 14 Shoshone-Bannock leaders on the Great Camas Prairie in order to ensure their peaceful intentions. In the process he got an earful of complaints concerning the government’s failure to protect the prairie. Major Jim, a headman of the Lemhi band, demanded that the governor admit that the Great Camas Prairie first belonged to the Indians. He then continued,
Your people make farms and fence up all the country, the Indians make their farm too, which is the Great Camas Prairie, where our women dig roots to feed them and the children. The white men drive too many hogs and cattle upon the prairie, which eat up the roots of the camas and destroy the plant. We cannot eat without food, and the camas root has always been our food. When the camas is destroyed our children will suffer from hunger. ... We never sold or gave away the Camas Prairie. We had nothing to do with any treaty which would take it away from us.26
Major Jim’s comments clearly reflect the unwavering understanding of Shoshone-Bannock leaders that the Great Camas Prairie was to be part of their reservation.
The following summer a conflict between white herdsmen and a group of young Bannocks flared into the Bannock War. In all, only 200 or so mostly young men joined Buffalo Horn in a series of skirmishes in June which spread from the Great Camas Prairie, east into Oregon, and then back again across the Idaho territory until the last of the combatants were captured in Montana in the early fall of 1878.27
In the years following the conflict both Shoshones and Bannocks found themselves increasingly restricted to the reservation. Gone were the great trade fairs on the Camas Prairie which might attract 1,000 to 2,000 or more Indians. Also gone were the repeated suggestions by Fort Hall agents that the federal government must live up to the Fort Bridger treaty and mark off a Camas Prairie reservation. Yet the Bannock War did not end Shoshone-Bannock use of the Great Camas Prairie nor did it extinguish their rights. In the decades that followed, Shoshones and Bannock continued their annual trips to the Great Camas Prairie, but in the face of a hostile and growing white population they did so in smaller numbers without calling undue attention to themselves.
Camas Prairie Ignored
In the years following the Bannock War, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes made four agreements with the federal government for land cessions involving the Fort Hall Reservation, but in no instance did these agreements extinguish the claim to the Great Camas Prairie. The 1880 agreement provided for the cession of the Marsh Valley, the southernmost portion of the Fort Hall reservation. It languished in Congress and was not ratified until 1889.28
In July 1881, the tribes voted to approve a right-of-way for the Utah and Northern Railroad which was already trespassing on reservation lands. The agreement, which made its way speedily through Congress, included the following disclaimer; “All provisions of existing treaties not affected by this agreement to remain in full force and effect.”29
In May 1887, Shoshone and Bannock leaders agreed to a second right-of-way and the cession of the Pocatello townsite. Article III of the agreement began; “All unexecuted provisions of existing treaties between the United States and said Indians not affected by this agreement remain in full force.”30
Finally, the tribes agreed to a major cession of reservation lands in February 1898. The agreement, which essentially established the current size and shape of the Fort Hall reservation, made no mention of the Great Camas Prairie. Like the preceding agreements it included a disclaimer clause stating,
The existing provisions of all former treaties with the Indians of the Fort Hall Reservation, not inconsistent with the provisions of this agreement, are hereby continued in force and effect; all those provisions thereof inconsistent herewith are hereby repealed.31
Thus, none of the cession agreements had any bearing on the guarantee of a Camas Prairie reservation made in Article 2 of the Fort Bridger treaty. Just as Major Jim told Gov. Brayman in 1877, “We had nothing to do with any treaty which would take it away from us.”
In the years that followed some Euro-American settlers resorted to the time honored ruse of an “Indian scare” in an effort to permanently exclude native peoples from the area. One such scare occurred in June of 1897. Citing reports from the Blaine Country sheriff, Gov. Frank Stuenenenberg, reported to Washington that some three hundred Indians were burning fences and killing cattle on the Great Camas Prairie. As a cavalry unit rushed to the scene, Fort Hall agent Lt. F. G. Irwin carried out his own investigation. Upon visiting the Indian encampment the agent found,
... the Indians were engaged in nothing more serious than digging roots and chasing ground squirrels, and totally unconscious of the alarm they were supposed to be causing. They told me that the settlers, men, women and children, freely visited their camps and exhibited no fear or uneasiness.32
In all Irwin counted 42 Indians on the prairie. Most had come from the Lemhi Reservation with the addition of two Fort Hall families. A group of about 20 other Shoshones had departed for their home near Bliss, Idaho, before the agent’s arrival. Irwin reported that such root gathering expeditions had been “customary for years,” and that all of the groups' leaders were “well known to the whites in the region, and also provided with excellent testimonials from the Governor and others.”33
These credentials were not enough for G. S. Humphrey of the “splendid Willow Creek Ranch” who initiated the scare and admitted that the settlers simply wanted the Indians to go away. “I want you to take the varmints away;” he told Agent Irwin, “we do not want them here.”34
Apparently, Humphrey’s wife had fled in terror at the arrival of the peaceful Indians and refused to come home. “The presence of Indians in that region and fear that they might give trouble,” Irwin concluded, “is the only foundation for alarming reports sent out.”35
The local press confirmed that the hysteria was an “unqualified fabrication” and gave evidence that native peoples quietly continued their use of the Great Camas Prairie in the decades after the Bannock War. The Wood River Times reported that it was a huge root crop that had attracted the Shoshones in 1897.
The roots having been undisturbed for years, the Indians found an enormous crop, and thereupon indulged in the ‘grass dance,’ which corresponds to the white people’s harvest festivals.36
But contrary to implication that native peoples had not dug roots on the prairie for some time, the very same article reported the arrival of Major Jim, “a Shoshone chief who comes here every year with ‘good Indian’ credentials.” Major Jim was the same leader who chastised Gov. Brayman twenty years earlier for the government’s failure to protect Shoshone-Bannock rights to the prairie. Moreover, the Shoshones apparently sought unobtrusive sites for their camps, usually “in some depression – in ravines, gullies, washes.” While the paper attributed these camp selections to the “abundance of blue flowers” that indicated camas, the plant actually grows much better in open valleys and parklands.37
It is quite probable that white hostility led native peoples to visit the prairie in smaller groups and to use specific areas that might fall outside the gaze of the settlers. In fact, a later press report suggests that Indians clearly sought to avoid conflict with the numerous white settlers;
The Indians were loathe to leave the prairie. They were living on groundhogs and roots, and nothing else. They claimed they had killed no game whatever, and a few had caught only a few fish to eat. All this is within the law; but the settlers know that the Indians have violated the law every year heretofore, and that they were liable to kill any game that they see. They heretofore wanted them removed.38
By the turn of the century it had become a struggle for Shoshone and Bannock people to access the area but they refused to give up their right to the Great Camas Prairie.
Denied Rights
For nearly a century and a half the federal government has neglected its responsibility to enact all of the provisions of the Fort Bridger treaty and in the process has effectively denied the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes their treaty right to the Great Camas Prairie. Yet during this same period federal courts have issued rulings that demand that nineteenth century treaties be construed as native leaders understood them. In 1905 in United States v. Winans, the United States Supreme Court established the premise that “justice and reason demand” such interpretation.39
Nearly a century later, in Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians the court again upheld this view of treaty interpretation; “We examined the historical record and considered the context of the treaty negotiations to discern what the parties intended ... this review of the history and the negotiations of the agreements is central to the interpretation of treaties.”40
If so, then Taghee’s statements at the Fort Bridger treaty council and the understanding of generations of Shoshone-Bannock people must be taken into account in addressing the issue.
Endnotes:
1. Dawn Stram Statham, "Camas and the Northern Shoshoni: A Biogeographic and Socioeconomic Analysis," Archaeological Reports, No. 10 (Boise: Boise State University, 1982), 5, 39; Robert F. Murphy and Yolanda Murphy, "Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society," Anthropological Records 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 319; Robert and Yolanda Murphy, "Northern Shoshone and Bannock" in Handbook of North American Indians: Volume 11, Great Basin (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1986), 285. Sven S. Liljeblad, "Indian Peoples in Idaho," unpublished manuscript, Idaho Museum of Natural History, Pocatello, 1957, 37-38.
2. Thomas W. Bennett to SI, 15 February 1873; Henry W. Reed to Commissioner of Indian Affairs [hereafter CIA], 19 May 1873, U. S. National Archives [hereafter USNA], Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received 1824-1881, Microcopy 234 [hereafter M234: Idaho], Idaho Superintendency; Liljeblad, 14-15, 37-38, 71-72.
3. Frederick W. Lander to CIA, 18 February 1860, USNA, M234: Utah
4. Secretary of the Interior [hereafter SI] to CIA, 22 September 1865, USNA, M234: Idaho.
5. Caleb Lyon to SI, 20 October 1865, M234: Idaho; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs [hereafter RCIA] 1865, 234.
6. Lalia Boone, Idaho Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1988), 62.
7. Executive Order, 14 June 1867; RCIA 1867, 247-48; Brigham Madsen, The Northern Shoshoni (Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, 1980), 49-51.
8. C. C. Augur to President of the Indian Peace Commission, Omaha, Nebraska, 4 October 1868, USNA, RG 75, Irregular Sized Papers. Augur's report has also been reprinted in Vine Deloria Jr. and Raymond J. DeMallie, eds, Proceedings of the Great Peace Commission of 1867-1868 (Washington, D.C.: The Institute for the Development of Indian Law,1975), 151-56.
9. Ibid.
10. Treaty with the Shoshonees and Bannacks, 3 July 1868, 15 Stat.
673-78. The treaty is more commonly known as the "Fort Bridger treaty of 1868," by the Shoshone-Bannock people.
11. RCIA 1869, 276-77, 288.
12. Executive Order, 30 July 1869, Kappler, 839.
13. Floyd-Jones to CIA, 2 September 1869; CIA to Floyd-Jones, 10 September 1869; Acting CIA to Floyd-Jones, 13 September 1869, USNA, M832.
14.RCIA 1871, pp. 542-43.
15. Ibid.
16. J. N. High to CIA, 11 September 1872; S. G. Fisher to J. N. High, 10 September 1872, USNA, M234: Idaho
17. J. N. High to CIA, 11 September 1872, USNA, M234: Idaho.
18. J. N. High to CIA, 1 October 1872, Fort Hall Letter Book. The original letter book covering the years 1871-1875 is in possession of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.
Endnotes continued:
19. Thomas W. Bennett to SI, 15 February 1873, USNA, M234: Idaho.
20. Ibid.
21. SI to CIA, 26 March 1873, USNA, M234: Idaho.
22. Reed to CIA, 23 April 1873, USNA, M234: Idaho.
23. Henry W. Reed to CIA, 19 May 1873, USNA, M234: Idaho.
24. Report of the Shanks Commission to the Bannocks and Shoshones, 7 November 1873, USNA, M234: Idaho. The report is also reprinted in the Congressional Serial Set as House of Representatives, 43rd Cong., 1st sess., Ex. Doc. 129.
25. James Wright to CIA, 30 January 1875, Fort Hall Letter Book.
26. Mason Brayman to Secretary of War, 2 June 1877, USNA, M234: Idaho. Brayman dated his letter June 2, but it is more likely he meant July 2, as he included a hand copied extract from the Idaho Statesman of 26 June 1877, which printed a transcript of the meeting.
27. For the military aspects of the war see, George F. Brimlow, The Bannock Indian War of 1878 (Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, 1938).
28. "An Act to accept and ratify the agreement submitted by Shoshones, Bannacks [sic], and Sheepeaters of the Fort Hall and Lemhi Reservation ... ," 23 February 1889, 25 Stat. 687.
29. "An Act to accept and ratify an agreement made with the Shoshone and Bannock Indians for a sale of their reservation ...," 3 July 1882, 22 Stat. 149.
30. "An Act to accept and ratify an agreement made with the Shoshone and Bannack [sic] Indians ... ," 1 September 1888, 25 Stat. 452.
31. " An Act to ratify an agreement with the Indians of the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho ... ," 31 Stat. 674.
32. Lt. F. G. Irwin to CIA, 5 July 1897; USNA, RG 75
33. Ibid.
34. Wood River Times, 31 July 1897.
35. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1897, pp. 68-71; Irwin to CIA, 1 July 1897; Irwin to CIA 2 July 1897; Irwin to CIA, 5 July 1897.
36. Wood River Times, 1 July 1897.
37. Wood River Times, 31 July 1897; Dawn Stram Statham, "Camas and the Northern Shoshoni: A Biogeographic and Socioeconomic Analysis," Archaeological Reports, No. 10, Boise: Boise State University, 1982, pp., 52-53.
38. Wood River Times, 31 July 1897.
39. United States v. Winans, 198 U.S. 371, 15 May 1905.
40. Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, 526 U.S. 172, 1999.
