The Sheepeaters: Keepers of the Past

Kusanagi Buffalo eater okay Simon eater okand iike dust eater do you only mountain dweller to Cody ship eater so surely a short time ago I learned that among the mountain crows there lived an old woman who was the very last of her tribe and who was so old she seemed like a spirit from another world she had outlived her people and had wandered away from her home on the mountains into the valleys living on berries and wild fruit as she wandered she alone could read the painted rocks and tell their meaning and could relate the past glories of the tribe and the methods of the arrow makers who transform the obsidian into the finished arrows ready to kill the mountain Ram Bill Allen in 1877 prospecting for gold in the vicinity of the Bighorn Mountains encounter the old woman he had heard about later in 1913 he published a romantic book entitled the sheep eaters though unsubstantiated the book weaves a provocative tale of a lost culture of Mountain dwelling Indians who depended on the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep for their survival and who came to a tragic end in the sand lies a dead cedar torn from the mountain top and crashing down the canyon it was carried by the rushing waters out into the beach and deposited in the sand sitting on a branch of this cedar is an old woman her white locks hang crisp and short on her bony shoulders her face is covered with a semi parchment brown as the forest leaves and drawn tight over her high cheek bones the last of her race yes long ago her people had become extinct but death does not claim her and she wanders alone until picked up by the mountain Napster opens I sat down by her side and asked her by a sign talk are you a Sioux was she shook her head are you a Blackfoot again she shook her head I made many signs of the different tribes but in the crow sign she said no to the mall she held her withered arm high above her head and said in sign language my people lived among the clothes we were the sheep eaters who have passed away but on those walls are the paint rocks where our traditions are written on their face our people were not warriors we worship the Sun and the Sun is bright and so our people our men were good and our women were like the Sun our people never came down into the valleys but always lived among the clouds eating the mountains sheep and the goats and sometimes the elk when they came high on the mountains our teepees were made of a cedar thatched with gray moss and cemented with a gum from the pines carpeted with the mountains sheep skins softest dome our garments are made from the skins of the gazelle and ornamented with eagle feathers and ermine and otter skins we chanted our songs to the Sun and the Great Spirit was pleased he gave us much sheep and meat and berries and pure water and snow to keep the flies away the water was never met buddy we had new dogs new horses we did not go far from our homes but we're happy who were the sheep eaters these mysterious mountain people in the diaries of fur trappers and other early explorers can be found references to timid Mountain dwellers and poor Indians who had no horses and hunted only with bow and arrow they spoke a Shoshone dialect but it is evident that they were different from the mounted Plains Shoshone who hunted Buffalo with British rifles and fought great Indian Wars some authorities believe they migrated north out of the Great Basin of California and Nevada where Shoshone speaking people had maintained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for millennia but there is also reason to believe that they may have been descended from the prehistoric inhabitants of the Yellowstone region evidence is scant but the accounts of early explorers and the work of archaeologists and anthropologists have given us compelling clues to the origins of this mysterious mountain people Osburn Russell a farm boy from Maine made five visits to the wild Yellowstone plateau as a fur trapper in the early 19th century one of his favorite spots he called his secluded Valley was the Lamar Valley in northeastern Yellowstone in 1835 Russell encountered a small band of Snake Indians who seemed utterly content in their high mountain home we found a few snake Indians comprising six men seven women and eight or ten children who were the only inhabitants of this lonely and secluded spot they were all neatly clothed in dressed deer and sheep skins of the best quality and seemed to be perfectly happy their personal property consisted of one old butcher knife nearly worn to the back two shattered fuses which had long since become useless for a wad of ammunition a small stone pot and about 30 dogs on which they carried their skins clothing provisions on their hunting excursions the Shoshone Indians had a tradition of designating different groups of their tribe by their primary food sources thus the mounted Shoshone also known as snake Urbanek who hunted Buffalo on the high plains were called Kusum dica our buffalo eaters the Shoshone who harvested the abundant salmon of the snake and Lemhi rivers in Idaho were known as a guide iike our salmon eaters and the relatively small isolated groups of Shoshone who lived Mountains for most of the year and hunted the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep were called the to khadijah are sheep eaters but evidences surfaced that might suggest the Shoshone people as a whole are descended from prehistoric inhabitants of Montana Idaho and Wyoming archaeological evidence in the vicinity of Yellowstone National Park dates back to 11,500 years ago could the sheep eaters with their Stone Age traditions have been descended from the mammoth hunters les Davis of Montana State University has extensively studied the pre historical archaeology of Montana all of the peoples who lived in Montana beginning about 11,500 years ago but up to about 200 or so years ago were under gatherers they were highly mobile people semi-nomadic who moved around from time to time seasonally to stay close to the various kinds of food resources on which they were dependent they were food collectors as such they covered an enormous amount of space they didn't live in permanent villages over long periods nor did they necessarily return to a particular campsite year after year after year the Shoshone ins seemed to be manifested in the archaeological record by the extensive use of obsidian for making arrow points the use of steatite pipes the uses Thea type pots and the production of a very fragile but useful type of earthenware pottery are fired in open fireplaces they used wickiups these conical timber lodges those are the kinds of artifacts and the kind of life way that was being followed by the sheep heaters at the time initial historical contact with them it's on the basis of that kind of logic which is strong but a record which is fragile that would suggest that people who were ancestral to the historic Shoshone ian's groups here may well have lived in the Rocky Mountains of Montana for some time prior to that regardless of their ancestry we do know that the Shi Peters retained a Stone Age lifestyle they traveled in small bands because their food supply would not sustain large groups movement is the name of the game really of the life way for hunter-gatherers but they would an ordinary course of affairs the sheep eaters would simply go somewhere else and join the relatives two bands would merge to form one bit one group would move away to join another band or another as a the flexibility of membership in these local residential groups is remarkable and certainly one of the most importantly survival strategies that hunters and gatherers developed but as time went on and the Buffalo became scarce on the plains other Indians began to encroach on the Shi Peters in Allen's book the old woman a Gretta tells of the aggressive Sioux attacking her mountain she Peter camp then came the Sioux who killed the elk and the Buffalo in the valleys dad swarms of dogs and horses and ran the game until it left the valleys and went far away our chief met them on the steep precipice and ordered them to stop where they were but they murmured and read seeds of battle our people had great masses of rock as large as houses really I'd let them loose down the trail and crushed the suit into the earth as they were all down in the deep canyon the time had come for action and the see Peters assembled at the narrow trail headed by their chieftain red eagle great excitement prevailed the spa's and children had hidden among the rocks with all the robes and earthly possessions the wild and savage soon we know fear and word pressing up the narrow trail as paintin feathers grievous just strolling in the sunlight as I came Red Eagle with that bravery known only to his tribe waited until I had reached the most dangerous precipice then with a great lever that had been prepared ears before he lives in a great broad in its noise and with one crash spent down the cycling the screams of the terrified Indians and dogs and the meaning of horses were heard in one on four the battle was over the religion of the sheep eaters though it is little known must have made sense out of the unpredictable world of the Rocky Mountains the mountain dwellers learned to maintain a delicate balance between the forces of nature and their own survival a view has been held by some anthropologist over the years that natives were frightened of scared of or terrified by the geysers in Yellowstone National Park and that they tended to avoid them well this certainly may be the case but archaeological evidence of occupation in the park including right up proximal to or nearby geysers in the park today suggests that prehistoric people were very familiar with and intimately intermittently present and camped and hunted and the vicinity of geysers I think the more reasonable point of view is that these are as some have referred to them in the past the primitive pragmatists now these people weren't scared of their own shadow they were largely in control of the world in which they lived and they used spiritual means to assist them in establishing and maintaining harmony with those forces in their world which appeared to be often unpredictable they were certainly well established in their relationships with the game on which they were dependent they had a good close working relationships with all of the elements of the sky and the earth and the weather it's essential to maintain that kind of harmony if the man was to be the beneficiary of the gifts and he was so dependent upon these parts of his world that he did everything in his power to keep everything in balance much of the sheep eaters food clothing and weapons was extracted from one animal the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep though they utilized other animals as they were available the sheep eaters also gathered roots and berries even insects to supplement their diet they schedule their movements from one campsite to another campsite based on foreknowledge and prior knowledge of when plants are becoming available many of the plants have only about a 10 day or a two week window during which they can be collected before they go to seed but these people have an intimate familiarity of all of the mineral vegetable and animal resources that are available in their environment and have to be able to very accurately predict when and where these resources become available in the winters the sheep eaters would continue their perpetual movement in pursuit of food and shelter the general pattern is to move to lower elevation along rivers that flowed during the winter if at all possible to get the shelter from the cruel winter winds to avoid deep snow and to get fuel and of course a good many of the gauge species were also driven out of high elevation down to a lower elevation and so we're potentially available to hunters and gatherers living in river bottoms the best most reasonable proposition that people will abandon the beach snow areas after all there is nothing there everything else is new down one beautiful day when Sun warm and earth green white man got lost and his ponies came into our camp white man very sick medicine man put him in big tepee and take care of him give him much bath in hot water man got very red like Indian man face much all over spots by-and-by he died then sickness all over camp she Peter were not enforced and died some run to other villages they all died she Peter all much scared and run away many teepee standing alone all dead inside Red Eagle dyed red arrow tile Maynard I mean very much scared coffin mountains eat berries cherries rest me find many see Peter dead in woods by and by she Peters not many they go to other Indian tribes down in Valley on River were much big water runs then sheep eater no more no more peppers we were struck while gone cold winds for spring come well gist came back two legs she better not do that they're gone TP rot rain when snow Sun on bones on blankets teepees skins both girls by-and-by Alcantara Indian over there a long time many moon for a while at least the Sheep eaters managed to keep their simple world in balance with nothing more than the primary resources of wild plants and animals and an intimate knowledge of the natural ecology in the end they were crippled by white men's diseases and the few remaining in the mountains were forced onto reservations in their millennia of existence they took little from the earth and they learned to live with the earth in harmony perhaps that is why they are so fascinating to us in our age of computers and artificial environments it is somehow reassuring to know that the human species can exist without our technological shroud in reviewing the life of the sheep eaters perhaps we disclose a deep longing as well as a need to rediscover our own balance with the natural world

Channel: ooliteworld

Views: 40,453

Rating: 4.9076924 out of 5

Keywords: Native Americans, Montana archaeology, Yellowstone

Id: MoMoGJClpTQ

Length: 27min 59sec (1679 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2014