The Lemhi Shoshone Exile: Sacajawea's People, Expelled from Her Homeland

The Lemhi Shoshone occupied the Lemhi River valley and the Salmon River drainage of central Idaho for centuries before any American passed through. They are the people Sacajawea was born into. They are the people whose chief, Cameahwait, was her brother, and whose horses made the Lewis and Clark expedition possible. In the summer of eighteen oh five, the Corps of Discovery crossed Lemhi Pass and met them here, at the Continental Divide, and the encounter shaped everything that followed.

An executive order in eighteen seventy-five established the Lemhi Reservation near Salmon, Idaho, on the Lemhi Shoshone's own traditional territory. It was not what they had asked for, but it was at least the land they knew.

In nineteen oh seven, the federal government dissolved that reservation and ordered the entire Lemhi Shoshone community to relocate to the Fort Hall Reservation two hundred miles south, near Blackfoot, Idaho. The lands at Fort Hall were Shoshone-Bannock territory, not Lemhi territory. The move severed the Lemhi from the Salmon River, from Lemhi Pass, from the landscapes their ancestors had occupied for a very long time.

Two years before the forced removal, in nineteen oh five, roughly two hundred Lemhi Shoshone had ridden to Washington to protest the closure of their reservation. They met with federal officials. The decision held.

No reservation land remains in Lemhi County today. The valley Sacajawea was born in belongs to ranchers and recreational land owners. The pass where her brother gave the Corps horses that saved the expedition is a hiking trail. The Lemhi Shoshone are enrolled today at Fort Hall as members of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Their original homeland carries their name and almost nothing else.