People of the Wind River: The Eastern Shoshones, 1825-1900 (review)

As part of its effort to make peace with the so-called "hostile" Indian tribes of the Missouri, Arkansas, and Platte Rivers and to preserve peace with tribes to the west, through which the Union Pacific Railroad planned to construct its tracks, the U.S. Indian Peace Commission in July of 1868 met with Bannock and Eastern Shoshone Indians at Fort Bridger in Wyoming Territory. The treaty that was signed at that hopeful moment established the Wind River Reservation, which the Shoshones were to have exclusive use of. Although there were numerous stipulations attached to the treaty—the Indians received certain rights and privileges, for example, but were expected to become farmers and educate their children in return—the officials who wrote it anticipated that the process of establishing the reservation would be neat and orderly and the Shoshones would embrace their new home with minimal adjustment. As Henry Stamm points out, however, this sublimely optimistic assumption could not have been further off the mark. Indeed, "the complex amalgam of peoples, cultures, and economies of the Wind River community insured a far different outcome, one in which the various peoples spoke their own stories" (51). The narrative of this complex amalgam and the struggle of the Shoshones to preserve their culture in the midst of it is told with precision and insight in Stamm's People of the Wind River.

In some respects the story of how the Eastern Shoshones adapted to the vast social, political, and economic changes of the late-nineteenth-century West is a familiar one. Drawing on the excellent tribal studies of Melissa Meyer, Richard White, Loretta Fowler, Catherine Price, Thomas Kavanaugh, and David Rich Lewis, for example, Stamm makes a case for the multicultural nature of the Wind River community, traces the impact of environmental disruption and market forces on the Natives' subsistence economy, and explores the transformation of Shoshone headmen, Washakie in particular, into cultural brokers and mediators attempting to placate federal officials while still serving the needs of their people. These developments locate the experience of the Eastern Shoshones within a broader, and much needed, historical context. But the real value of the study is its concentration on the peopling of the Wind River. Indeed, as Stamm argues, what sets the experience of the Shoshones apart from other tribes of the Plains is that the reservation created in the 1868 Fort Bridger treaty imposed federal structure and bureaucracy on what was already a distinctive community in which Indians and whites interacted on a variety of levels with mutual goodwill, even though their worldviews were radically different.

Stamm traces this interaction from 1825, when the first permanent white settlers arrived in the region, to 1900, when the death of Chief Washakie served as a symbolic end of the Shoshones' traditional way of life and their subsequent descent into poverty, starvation, and second-class citizenship. Within this period, however, particular attention is paid to the seventeen years between 1868, when the Wind River Reservation was created, and 1885, the year of the final buffalo hunt and the disintegration of the Indians' influence within the larger community. Stamm argues convincingly that during this brief span of time the Shoshones maintained their greatest bargaining power among both local whites and the string of inept, often corrupt federal agents who presided over the reservation. We learn of their remarkable ability to nurture amicable relations with a wide variety of whites, including Mormons, trappers, miners, traders, and settlers, many of whom resided in towns located illegally within the boundaries of the reservation (an apparent oversight by the officials who negotiated the Fort Bridger treaty). Ironically, it was the bureaucratic bungling and corruption of the reservation agents and their employees that allowed the Shoshones to maintain their buffalo-hunting culture for...