Wind River Indian Reservation
The Wind River Indian Reservation, in the west-central portion of the U.S. state of Wyoming, is shared by two Native American tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho. Roughly east to west by north to south, the Indian reservation is located in the Wind River Basin, and includes portions of the Wind River Range, Owl Creek Mountains, and Absaroka Range.
The Wind River Indian Reservation is the seventh-largest American Indian reservation in the United States by area and the fifth-largest by population. The land area is approximately, and the total area is. The reservation constitutes just over one-third of Fremont County and over one-fifth of Hot Springs County.
The 2000 census reported the population of Fremont County as 40,237. According to the 2010 census, only 26,490 people now live on the reservation, with about 15,000 of the residents being non-Indians on ceded lands and the town of Riverton. Tribal headquarters are located at Fort Washakie. The Shoshone Rose Casino and the Wind River Hotel and Casino, Little Wind Casino, and 789 Smoke Shop and Casino are the only casinos in Wyoming.
Precontact history
The Shoshone has the longest precontact presence in the area. Archaeologists have found evidence that unique aspects of the Tukudika Mountain Shoshone or Sheepeater material culture such as soapstone bowls were in use in this region from the early 19th century going back 1,000 to 3,000 years or more. People descended from the Mountain Shoshone band continue to live on the Wind River Indian Reservation.The Dinwoody petroglyph style is indigenous to central Wyoming including the Wind River Basin and Bighorn Basin. Scholars believe that the Dinwoody petroglyphs most likely represent the work of ancestral Tukudika or Mountain Shoshone Sheepeaters, because some of the figures at Torrey Lake Petroglyph District and Legend Rock correspond to characters in Shoshone folklore, such as Pa waip, a water spirit woman.
Pre-reservation tribal occupation
The Wind River Indian Reservation is located at the historical boundary region between the Great Basin culture of the Shoshone and the Great Plains tribal cultures. In recent centuries, the area was used by many tribes for hunting grounds and for raiding.After 1800, the historical record notes the presence of the Shoshone, as well as the Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfeet, and Lakota in the Wind River Basin. These latter tribes came to the area due to geopolitical forces, as well as for food resources; trapper records after 1800 describe huge herds of tens of thousands of stampeding bison in the Wind River Basin, raising massive clouds of dust on the horizon.
The Shoshone largely controlled much of what is now western Wyoming in the 1700s, because they were the first of the northern tribes to secure horses from the Spanish and traders in the Southwest. The Shoshones' dominance in what is now western Wyoming declined as other tribes such as the Blackfeet acquired horses and staged counter-raids. In the 1820s, the Shoshone started to regain power by trading for firearms in the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous fur trade in the Green River Basin, just over the Wind River Range from today's Wind River Indian Reservation.
With the onset of the fur trade, Shoshones could once again project their power east from the Snake River and Green River Valley to hunt buffalo on the plains. Increasingly, they needed to hunt farther east, because the fur trade started to wipe out bison in the Green River Basin. In the 1830s and 1840s, they are recorded as raiding in the Platte River and Powder River basins, and the Laramie Plains. The Shoshone regularly used the Wind River Basin as winter range or as a route to hunting grounds in the Sweetwater, Bighorn Basin, Bighorn Mountains, or Powder River Basin.
Coming from the other direction, the post-1600s westward migration of Siouan and Algonquian-speaking peoples brought new populations onto the plains and traditional Shoshone territory of the middle Rocky Mountains. The earliest of these midwestern, Missouri River, and Great Lakes tribes to migrate to the Great Plains include the Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, though some sources say the Arapaho potentially occupied the Great Plains for 1,000 years. Most of these tribes were initially located on the Great Plains farther north and east of the Wind River area. The powerful and numerous Lakota were the last to push west in response to American expansion, bumping up against the earlier-migrating tribes, and then moving farther west into the Rocky Mountains. By the mid-1800s, all of these tribes would make incursions into the now-contested Wind River valley.
Shoshone place names include dozens in the Bighorn Basin, demonstrating a detailed knowledge of lands further east than the Wind River Basin as part of traditional Shoshone territory. Likewise, the Arapaho were familiar with the Wind River Basin, referring to the Wind River/Bighorn River as Hotee Niicie, meaning "mountain sheep river", in reference to the numerous herds of the species in the area.
By the middle 1800s, the Crow were largely dominant in the Wind River Valley and Absaroka Range, using the area as winter range, and fighting with Shoshones who came into the area. Crow Chief Arapooish mentioned the Wind River Valley as a preferred wintering ground with salt bush and cottonwood bark for horse forage in a speech recorded in the 1830s and published in Washington Irving's Adventures of Captain Bonneville. Meanwhile, Washakie and his people avoided the Crow treaty lands in the Wind River Valley in the 1850s, preferring to hunt away from the emigrant trails and the Crow in places like Henrys Fork and Yellowstone.
The Crow dominance in the Wind River Valley, though secured as official Crow territory under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, effectively ended when Chief Washakie defeated a Crow chief in one-on-one fight at Crowheart Butte, sometime in the late 1850s or early 1860s. Washakie likely opted to challenge the Crow because the emigrant trails and increasing white settlement in Utah, Idaho, and Montana made hunting in those areas harder. This left the Crow-occupied Wind River Valley as the only place Washakie could use force to secure hunting grounds from a rival tribe without significantly opposing American interests.
The Crow legacy in the Wind River persists in the name of the Middle Fork Popo Agie River, pronounced "poepoe-zhuh", which comes from the Crow word Poppootcháashe, an onomatopoeia meaning "plopping river". The Crow word for the Green River, farther west, is Chiichkase Aashe or Seedskadee Aashe, meaning "sage hen river."
The Fort Bridger Treaty Council of 1868 effectively designated the Wind River Valley as exclusive territory of the Shoshone, superseding the Crow's 1851 Fort Laramie treaty claims.
In 1872, the Shoshone agreed to sell part of the reservation to the U.S., establishing the North Fork of the Popo Agie River as a southern border.
The reservation era
Originally known as the Shoshone Indian Reservation, the Wind River Indian Reservation was established by agreement of the United States with the Eastern Shoshone Nation at the Fort Bridger Treaty Council of 1868, restricting the tribe from the formerly vast Shoshone territory of more than. A later settlement and land transaction after United States v. Shoshone Tribe of Indians gave the Arapaho legal claim to the reservation, which was renamed the Wind River Indian Reservation.Image:Washakie.jpg|thumb|right|Washakie holding a pipe
The Shoshone leader Washakie had a preference for the area, and had previously defeated the Crow in battle to hold the territory. As early as 1862, Indian Agent Luther Mann Jr. recommended creating a permanent reservation for the Shoshone. After prospectors discovered gold at South Pass in 1867, the United States Indian agent sought to limit numerous tribes from raiding mining camps by placing the Shoshone reservation in the Wind River Valley as a buffer. The United States hoped that tribes like the Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho would attack their traditional Shoshone enemies instead of the miners. However, the area was too dangerous for the Shoshone to occupy year-round, so Chief Washakie kept his people closer to Fort Bridger for several years after 1868. Washakie's son was killed in a raid by enemy tribes, and the Oglala Lakota leader Hump, a mentor of Crazy Horse, was killed fighting the Shoshone in the Wind River Basin.
Intertribal conflicts occurred several times in the 1860s and 1870s in the Wind River region. The Arapaho briefly stayed in the Wind River valley in 1870, but left after miners and Shoshones attacked and killed tribal members and Black Bear, one of their leaders, as they moved lodges. At another event, a combined force of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos surrounded and attacked Washakie's camp at Trout Creek on the reservation. The Shoshones survived the attack by digging rifle pits inside their tepees, and then mounting a counterattack. The last significant conflict occurred in June 1874, when 167 Shoshones and U.S. cavalry attacked the Arapaho at the Bates Battlefield on the head of Nowood Creek in the Bridger Mountains east of the Shoshone Indian Reservation.
Camp Augur, a military post with troops named for General Christopher C. Augur, was established at the present site of Lander on June 28, 1869. In 1870 the name of the camp was changed to Camp Brown, and in 1871, the post was moved to the current site of Fort Washakie. The name was changed to honor United States ally and Shoshone Chief Washakie in 1878. The fort continued to serve as a military post until the US abandoned it in 1909. By that time, a community had developed around the fort.
Sacagawea, a guide with the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–06, was later interred here. Her son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, who was a child on the expedition, has a memorial stone in Fort Washakie but was interred in Danner, Oregon.
A government school and hospital operated for many years east of Fort Washakie; Arapaho children were sent here to board during the school year. St. Michael's at Ethete was constructed in 1917–1920. The village of Arapahoe was originally established as a US sub-agency to distribute rations to the Arapaho. At one time it also operated a large trading post. Irrigation was constructed to support farming and ranching in the arid region. The Arapaho constructed a flour mill near Fort Washakie. Separately, under the Dawes Act, communal tribal land was allotted to individual households, which could later be sold to non-tribal members, further diminishing the tribal land base.
In 1904 the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho ceded a portion of the reservation north of the Wind River to the United States and opened to white settlement. The Riverton Reclamation Project and the city of Riverton developed on some of this land. Instead of a lump-sum payment or upfront purchase, the cession required the United States to pay the tribes for each area of land settled upon. Seeing that large parts of the ceded area were never taken up by settlers, the ceded portion of the reservation was later restored to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.