Paiute, Goshute, and Shoshone, Desert Nations

Three nations shaped the northern and western reaches of what is now Utah in ways that outsiders consistently underestimated. The Goshute, whose name likely means desert people, occupied the salt flats and scrub valleys of the western Great Basin, a landscape so spare that early Euro-American travelers judged it uninhabitable. The Goshute proved otherwise for thousands of years. They tracked seasonal food sources with extraordinary precision: pine nuts in the fall, antelope and jackrabbits driven by coordinated community hunts in the spring, insects and roots and seeds in between. What looked like poverty to travelers wearing wool coats and carrying flour sacks was in fact a finely calibrated ecology.

The Shoshone held the territory to the north and east, their range extending from the Wasatch foothills into what is now Nevada and Idaho. They shared linguistic roots with the Goshute and Paiute as speakers of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, a heritage that bound peoples across a vast swath of the interior West. The Northwestern Shoshone, whose homeland centered on the Bear River Valley, would suffer a catastrophic loss in January of eighteen sixty-three when federal troops under Colonel Patrick Connor attacked their winter camp at Bear River, in what is now southern Idaho. The Bear River Massacre killed an estimated two hundred fifty to nearly five hundred Shoshone men, women, and children, the largest mass killing of Indigenous people in American history by some tallies, yet largely absent from national memory.

The Southern Paiute occupied the Colorado Plateau and the red-rock desert of southwestern Utah. They farmed small plots along canyon-bottom streams, hunted deer and rabbits on the plateaus, and gathered agave and pinyon pine across a territory stretching into Nevada and Arizona. When Mormon settlers arrived, they found Southern Paiute communities willing to trade. That relationship soured as settlers appropriated water and farmland, and many Paiute bands were dispossessed within a generation. Federal recognition was eventually withdrawn and then restored; the Kanosh, Koosharem, Indian Peaks, and Shivwits Bands of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah had their federal recognition restored only in nineteen eighty.