The Shoshone-Bannock and the Oregon Trail
Near Twin Falls, Idaho
The southern Idaho sagebrush plain you are crossing was, for thousands of years, the territory of the Shoshone people. The Eastern Shoshone, the Northern Shoshone, and the Bannock, a Paiute-speaking people who joined the Shoshone in a political confederation in the eighteenth century, occupied the Snake River Plain and the surrounding mountains and deserts in a seasonal round: fishing for salmon at the falls in spring and fall, hunting antelope and deer across the high desert in summer, gathering camas bulbs in the river valleys in autumn.
The Oregon Trail cut directly through this territory beginning in the early eighteen forties. By eighteen forty-five, an estimated three thousand emigrants per year were crossing southern Idaho. By the peak years of the early eighteen fifties, that number exceeded fifty thousand annually. The wagon trains disrupted game, cut timber, fouled water sources, and brought diseases against which the Shoshone had no immunity. The relationship between emigrants and the Shoshone ranged from cautious trade to violent confrontation, and casualties mounted on both sides through the eighteen forties and fifties.
The United States government responded to conflict on the trail by sending troops. In January of eighteen sixty-three, Colonel Patrick Connor led roughly two hundred California Volunteers north from Salt Lake City and attacked a winter encampment of Northern Shoshone led by Chief Bear Hunter on the Bear River, near present-day Preston, Idaho. At least two hundred fifty Shoshone men, women, and children were killed, the deadliest massacre of Native Americans in the history of the American West, though it received almost no attention in the eastern press at the time because the country was consumed by the Civil War.
Five years later, the Fort Bridger Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight created the Fort Hall Reservation, where the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are headquartered today. The tribes manage roughly five hundred thousand acres near Pocatello, about seventy miles east of Twin Falls. The same irrigation projects that transformed the Magic Valley had already diverted the salmon runs that sustained tribal economies for millennia. The cultural and ecological consequences of that diversion have never been formally addressed.
