The First Nations

Long before any treaty line was drawn or wagon road was cut across the plains, the land that is now Wyoming was home to nations who had been here for generations beyond counting. The Eastern Shoshone inhabited the river valleys and mountain passes of the western and central parts of the territory, skilled horsemen and hunters who had reorganized their entire way of life around the buffalo and the horse within living memory of their grandparents. The Crow, whom they called themselves Apsaalooke, held the Bighorn country to the north.

The Northern Cheyenne and Lakota ranged across the eastern plains, following the vast bison herds that darkened the grasslands from horizon to horizon. The Arapaho came to Wyoming's high country later, allied with the Cheyenne, sharing range and ceremony. By the mid-nineteenth century, both the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho had signed federal treaties.

The Fort Bridger Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight set aside a reservation for the Shoshone in the Wind River Valley. Four years later, in eighteen seventy-two, a second agreement refined the boundaries. What happened next is a story of successive reductions.

The federal government assigned the Northern Arapaho, traditional rivals of the Shoshone, to the same reservation in eighteen seventy-eight as a temporary measure. The temporary arrangement became permanent. Today the Wind River Indian Reservation is shared by the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho, two nations with distinct languages, ceremonies, and histories, living side by side on land reduced far below what the original treaties guaranteed.

Their communities remain. The reservation covers roughly two million acres in central Wyoming and is among the largest in the nation.