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69 4 Chapter The Bear River and the Threads of Western American History Many of the great themes of western American history were stitched together on the banks of the Bear River. Native Americans and Anglos antagonized each other, and those abrasions erupted into some of a tense nation’s most horrific, soul-searching moments. European mercantilism and colonialism squared off against an emerging, entrepreneurial spirit some were beginning to call “American.” Financiers salivated over untold natural resources and sought to bring them to burgeoning cities in the East. Developers promoted western expansion and the benefits of land and climate in pamphlets that were sometimes quaint and other times flat-out wrong. Settlers and vagabonds never ceased dreaming of a second chance. Native Americans The first inhabitants of the Bear River Basin began appearing 12,000 to 15,000 years ago as the last Ice Age ebbed and the western climate warmed. Those Desert Archaic or Western Archaic cultures , largely nomadic tribes that exploited seasonal environments around Great Salt Lake and the Great Basin, lived in wickiups of interlaced brush and sticks in the summer and larger underground pits with roofs of logs and organic material in winter, often with multiple families. One theory suggests that these groups evolved into the later Fremont culture. Steven Simms, an archaeologist at Utah State University, looked at the Fremont culture when his research team did a reconnaissance of the Bear River marshes around Great Salt Lake in 1990. They determined that the area had been occupied for thousands of years, although most sites they found were approximately fifteen hundred years old. The older settlement areas have been buried under at least one meter of sedimentation from the river as it braided from side to side in its delta. During the Fremont and Late Prehistoric period that extended from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, the Fremont peoples used the lower Bear River and associated wetlands as farming bases, as well as a staging area for typical hunter-gatherer activities . Great Salt Lake provided them with waterfowl, fish, small and large mammals, and numerous plants. Equally importantly, 70 Bear River the marshes offered access to uplands for shelter and more food. During the periods when Great Salt Lake rose, the marshes next to the lake became full of brackish water, limiting the food supply. Then the Fremont moved to the wetlands along the Bear River and its tributaries and springs to exploit those environmental niches. There are two schools of thought about how the Bear River wetlands affected Fremont lifestyles. Wetlands could have increased diversity in ways that the Fremont organized themselves. Some could have opted out of agriculture altogether, focusing instead on hunting and gathering around the wetlands. Or the wetlands could have supplemented individual agricultural practices , increasing the variety and abundance of food. Each of these options would have led to different combinations affecting mobility and group size. During the fourteenth century, the Fremont culture gave way to modern Indian tribes, the ones who populated the Bear River Basin once histories were written. While the Utes ranged north to Utah Lake and the southern shores of Great Salt Lake, the largest tribes in the basin were the Shoshones and then the Bannocks. Both belong to the Shoshonean linguistic branch of the Uto-Aztecan family and were primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers. The problem is that Anglos just entering the region wrote many of the contemporary descriptions of Indian tribes, and they knew little about the sophisticated lifestyles of different Indian populations . They tended to lump all Indians together, not recognizing historical alliances or enmities, or they named them according to what they saw them eat on one occasion, not realizing that Indian foodstuffs changed with the seasons. For instance, early Anglo journals refer to Indians called “the Snakes.” For some diarists, that meant Indians who lived in the Snake River drainage. For others, it meant any Indian they encountered between South Pass and the Columbia River. The designation of the Snakes came from the French term gens du serpent or les serpentes from the sign language for these people. Generally, however , the term referred to the Shoshones. Anglos tried to make a crisp distinction, too, between the Shoshones and Bannocks, who often traveled together and intermarried . They described the Shoshones as friendly to whites and the Bannocks unfriendly and warlike, when in fact the cultural traditions of the Bannocks were similar to the Shoshones. The Shoshones, Bannocks, and their linguistic relatives to the...

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