The Yellowstone National Park: Historical and Descriptive. Hiram Martin Chittenden

      CHAPTER II.

      INDIAN OCCUPANCY OF THE UPPER YELLOWSTONE.

      It is a singular fact in the history of the Yellowstone National Park that no knowledge of that country seems to have been derived from the Indians. The explanation ordinarily advanced is that the Indians had a superstitious fear of the geyser regions and always avoided them. How far this theory is supported by the results of modern research is an interesting inquiry.

      Three great families of Indians, the Siouan, the Algonquian, and the Shoshonean, originally occupied the country around the sources of the Yellowstone. Of these three families the following tribes are alone of interest in this connection: The Crows (Absaroka) of the Siouan family; the Blackfeet (Siksika) of the Algonquian family; and the Bannocks (Panai’hti), the Eastern Shoshones, and the Sheepeaters (Tukuarika) of the Shoshonean family.

      The home of the Crows was in the Valley of the Yellowstone below the mountains where they have dwelt since the white man’s earliest knowledge of them. Their territory extended to the mountains which bound the Yellowstone Park on the north and east; but they never occupied or claimed any of the country beyond. Their well-known tribal characteristics were an insatiable love of horse-stealing and a wandering and predatory habit which caused them to roam over all the West from the Black Hills to the Bitter Root Mountains and from the British Possessions to the Spanish Provinces. They were generally, although by no means always, friendly to the whites, but enemies of the neighboring Blackfeet and Shoshones. Physically, they were a stalwart, handsome race, fine horsemen and daring hunters. They were every-where encountered by the trapper and prospector who generally feared them more on account of their thievish habits than for reasons of personal safety.

      The Blackfeet dwelt in the country drained by the headwaters of the Missouri. Their territory was roughly defined by the Crow territory on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west. Its southern limit was the range of mountains along the present north-west border of the Park and it extended thence to the British line. The distinguishing historic trait of these Indians was their settled hostility to their neighbors whether white or Indian. They were a tribe of perpetual fighters, justly characterized as the Ishmaelites of their race. From the day in 1806, when Captain Lewis slew one of their number, down to their final subjection by the advancing power of the whites, they never buried the hatchet. They were the terror of the trapper and miner, and hundreds of the pioneers perished at their hands. Like the Crows they were a well-developed race, good horsemen and great rovers, but, in fight, given to subterfuge and stratagem rather than to open boldness of action.

      In marked contrast with these warlike and wandering tribes were those of the great Shoshonean family who occupied the country around the southern, eastern, and western borders of the Park, including also that of the Park itself. The Shoshones as a family were an inferior race. They seem to have been the victims of some great misfortune which had driven them to precarious methods of subsistence and had made them the prey of their powerful and merciless neighbors. The names “Fish-eaters,” “Root-diggers,” and other opprobrious epithets, indicate the contempt in which they were commonly held. For the most part they had no horses, and obtained a livelihood only by the most abject means. Some of the tribes, however, rose above this degraded condition, owned horses, hunted buffalo, and met their enemies in open conflict. Such were the Bannocks and the Eastern Shoshones—tribes closely connected with the history of the Park, one occupying the country to the south-west near the Teton Mountains, and the other that to the south-east in the valley of Wind River. The Shoshones were generally friendly to the whites, and for this reason they figure less prominently in the books of early adventure than do the Crows and Blackfeet whose acts of “sanguinary violence” were a staple article for the Indian romancer.

      It was an humble branch of the Shoshonean family which alone is known to have permanently occupied what is now the Yellowstone Park. They were called Tukuarika, or, more commonly, Sheepeaters. They were found in the Park country at the time of its discovery and had doubtless long been there. These hermits of the mountains, whom the French trappers called “les dignes de pitié,” have engaged the sympathy or contempt of explorers since our earliest knowledge of them. Utterly unfit for warlike contention, they seem to have sought immunity from their dangerous neighbors by dwelling among the inaccessible fastnesses of the mountains. They were destitute of even savage comforts. Their food, as their name indicates, was principally the flesh of the mountain sheep. Their clothing was composed of skins. They had no horses and were armed only with bows and arrows. They captured game by driving it into brush inclosures. Their rigorous existence left its mark on their physical nature. They were feeble in mind, diminutive in stature, and are always described as a “timid, harmless race.” They may have been longer resident in this region than is commonly supposed, for there was a tradition among them, apparently connected with some remote period of geological disturbance, that most of their race were once destroyed by a terrible convulsion of nature.

      Opp. page 11.

      Click on image to view larger size.

Such were the Indian tribes who formerly dwelt within or near the country now embraced in the Yellowstone National Park. That the Sheepeaters actually occupied this country, and that wandering bands from other tribes occasionally visited it, there is abundant and conclusive proof. Indian trails, [F] though generally indistinct, were every-where found by the early explorers, mostly on lines since occupied by the tourist routes. One of these followed the Yellowstone Valley entirely across the Park from north to south. It divided at Yellowstone Lake, the principal branch following the east shore, crossing Two-Ocean-Pass, and intersecting a great trail which connected the Snake and Wind River Valleys. The other branch passed along the west shore of the lake and over the divide to the valleys of Snake River and Jackson Lake. This trail was intersected by an important one in the vicinity of Conant Creek leading from the Upper Snake Valley to that of Henry Fork. Other intersecting trails connected the Yellowstone River trail with the Madison and Firehole Basins on the west and with the Bighorn Valley on the east.

[F] See historical chart, opposite.

      The most important Indian trail in the Park, however, was that known as the Great Bannock Trail. It extended from Henry Lake across the Gallatin Range to Mammoth Hot Springs, where it was joined by another coming up the valley of the Gardiner. Thence it led across the Black-tail Deer plateau to the ford above Tower Falls; and thence up the Lamar Valley, forking at Soda Butte, and reaching the Bighorn Valley by way of Clark’s Fork and the Stinkingwater River. This trail was certainly a very ancient and much-traveled one. It had become a deep furrow in the grassy slopes, and it is still distinctly visible in places, though

---

Скачать книгу