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Resources of
the eastern Snake River Plain were relatively abundant by
western Plain and Great Basin standards. Early explorers interpreted the state of the Great Basin’s
native human population as one of abject poverty.
Writing from Fort Hall to Henry Schoolcraft at the
Office of Indian Affairs on April 3, 1848, Wyeth recounts,
...the
few whites in the region called the more miserable bands
Diggers, or Shoshonees [sic].
They differ from the other Snakes [the English term for
Shoshones] somewhat chiefly in language; their condition is
much poorer, having no horses and living chiefly on fish and
roots from the brooks with what small game that region affords (Schoolcraft
1851:206).
It was not until the
printing of anthropologist Julian Steward’s (1938) landmark
work, Basin-Plateau
Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups, that more detailed
ethnographic information came to light.
Except for the records of Lewis and Clark and of
anthropologist Robert Lowie (1909), interpretations of
subsistence and social activities of the region’s aboriginal
inhabitants are largely inaccurate, confusing, exaggerated, or
made in passing since most Euroamerican visitors to the Snake
River Plain during the early historic period were intent only
on reaching Oregon and the coast.
As Steward lamented,
Despite
the large number of travelers, which included many ambitious
chroniclers, records of the Indians continue to be
disappointing. The
natives between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada
Mountains were generally dismissed with the remark that they
were only miserable “Diggers” (Steward 1938:6).
However,
Steward’s ethnography includes and either corrects or
augments the observations of many early travelers, well-known
and obscure alike. His
lengthy ethnographic descriptions were obtained from some of
the last Shoshone and Bannock whose memories included
pre-reservation life. He
made significant contributions
to Basin-Plateau ethnology by paying special attention to the
intense interplay between culture and environment.
This he defined not as “environmental determinism”
which “postulates some kind of automatic and inevitable
effect of environment upon culture” but as “human ecology
or the modes of behavior by which human beings adapt themselves
to their environment” (Steward 1938:2).
Steward’s ethnographic work has not gone unchallenged,
but it is still considered the baseline for most
anthropological research in the Great Basin-Plateau region.
Most of what is known of Snake River Plain ethnology
stems from Steward’s work, but it is continually supplemented
by more recent findings of archaeology.
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