Introduction In anticipation of the bicentennial celebration of the expedition of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, the U.S. Mint issued a $1 coin in 1999 bearing the image of Sacajawea, the Lemhi-Shoshone Indian woman who accompanied the expedition and contributed to its successful journey to the Pacific Ocean and back. While the coin has been heralded as a sign of long-overdue recognition of the contributions of American Indians by the government, it has also been widely criticized.

For some, the image of Sacajawea on the coin validates the conquest of the American West. Sacajawea, they argue, is celebrated because she complied with the goals of white America," not because she was an Indian woman. Others suggest that Sacajawea's contributions to the expedition have been magnified by myth, and that her role in the journey does not merit the acclaim she has received. Still others point to the , irony of an American Indian on currency that will be spent dis. proportionately by non-Indians. Or to the irony of the juxtaposition of the image of Sacajawea, who  some claim was essentially a slave, and the word "liberty” that appears above it.

While Sacajawea, the most famous Indian woman in American history, is celebrated, most Americans have never even heard of her people, the Lemhi Shoshones. After the Sacajawea coin was unveiled, some Lemhis joined the chorus of criticism, but for reasons all their own. When Glenna Goodacre, the artist who designed the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington DC, was commissioned to create the Sacajawea dollar, she went to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, where many of the Lemhi Shoshones now reside, in search of a model, as well as some cultural context for her work. However rather than finding a teenaged Lemhi to model for the coin, Goodacre selected twenty,three-year old Shoshone-Bannock woman from a different tribe or band. The Lemhis voiced their disapproval over the physical appearance of the woman on the coin, whom they said did not resemble them, and over the depiction of Sacajawea carrying her baby in blanket instead of on a cradleboard, as a Lemhi would have. The U.S. Mints decision to use the Hidatsa spelling, Sacagawea, rather than the Shoshone, Sacajawea, was a further disappointment.

The Lemhi Shoshone, then, were slighted even when the federal government endeavored with the best of intentions to celebrate one of their contributions to American history. Moreover, the timing of the matter only added insult to injury, because the Lemhis at the time were four years into the long and arduous process of petitioning the government for federal recognition—a politically prickly process that has become even more daunting for petitioners since recognition has increasingly become associated with Indian casinos in the wake of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988.

But while the apparent slight of the Lemhis can be dismissed as an accident born of good intentions, it also illustrates larger aspects of their experiences and difficulties with the government during the course of the twentieth century.

 The issue of Indian identity, as William Hagan has noted, “has been a problem for individuals, tribes, and government administrators since the birth of this nation.” Who is Indian, who decides, and how? These questions are particularly perplexing when they involve tribes or groups not officially recognized by the federal government. In fact, it was only with the promulgation of Title 25 Part 83 of the Code of Federal Regulations in 1978 that the government established standards for answering them. The history of the Lemhi Shoshones in the twentieth century, then, points to the difficulties surrounding issues of Indian identity, at both the group and individual level, as well as the shortcomings of the criteria established for tribes or groups seeking federal recognition.

Prior to 1907, the Lemhi Shoshones were recognized as a political entity by the federal government, and they engaged in treaty making as such. Thereafter, however, the Lemhis' identity as a distinct group was obscured by a combination of federal Indian policy, Bureau of Indian Affairs lam, decisions concerning the Lemhi, and decades of the fact that Sacajawea did not remain among the Lemhi Shoshones "means that Sacagawea had come to feel more like a Hidatsa than a Shoshone. And like the coin issued by the U.S. Mint, the article uses the Mandan-Hidatsa spelling, Sacagawea, rather than the Shoshone.

Taken together, federal Indian policy, accounts of the Lemhis generated by historians, articles like then one in National Geographic, and the gaffe with the Sacajawea coin collectively contribute to what can only be termed cultural theft, dispossessing the Lemhi Shoshones of aspects of their ancestry, cultural heritage, and identity. What follows is an attempt to write the Lemhi Shoshone, back into the history of the twentieth century by focusing in particular on their enduring ties to their homeland in the Salmon River country.

It is also in part a response to the exhortations of the "New Western" historians to provide a more inclusive history of the West incorporating heretofore unheard voices; to consider the West as a place and to try to understand the interplay between humans and their environment in that place; and especially to move beyond the Turnerian paradigm, which precludes a significance for the West and its frontiers in American history after the late nineteenth century.

Paradoxically, the erosion of outsiders' perception of Lemhi distinctiveness over the course of the twentieth century has coincided with the Lemhis ongoing effort to assert their cultural identity. The tie to the Salmon River country has been central to Lemhi identity, and they have been continually returning to the °River of No Return," as the Salmon River is known, both literally and figuratively. Immediately after removal  a group of Lemhis left their new home at Fort Hall and returned to establish a permanent community in the town of Salmon, Idaho. The Lemhi "Indian Village" in Salmon relocated from time to time, but it persisted as a fixture in town through most of the century. Many of the Lemhis who were removed to Fort Flail also continued to return to the Salmon River country annually to visit, hunt and fish in traditional areas, and tend the graves of their ancestors.

The Salmon River country, moreover, preoccupied the Lemhis who remained at Fort Hall politically as they sought to gain restitution for the seizure of their lands and the subsequent liquidation of their reservation. In addition, they have struggled to retain use of treaty rights to hunt and fish in areas to which they have been accustomed since time immemorial, and ultimately, to once again secure a legitimate land base in their ancestral homeland.

Scholars have relied on several factors to measure American Indian identity, "Native American identity is minimally premised, both endogenously and exogenously," Fogelson argues, "on three prerequisites: blood and descent, land, and community.” Anthropologist Greg Campbell in his work on the Lemhi Shoshone, relied on several indicators of social identity: "A historical continuity in social heritage, whether factual or imaginary, that is acknowledged by the group members and by members of neighboring groups; a genealogical continuity, usually rooted in kinship and ideologies; political continuity: an association with a specific ‘place’; and shared cultural traditions. This study draws on all these factors but emphasizes land in particular: the Lemhi tie to their homeland in the Salmon River country is the common thread that ties the following chapters together.

Land is central to Lemhi identity, and American Indian identity in general, for a host of reasons "Native American identity was connected to the land, as a site of origination in narratives of ethnogenesis, as a home area where life was lived, and as a final resting place of mortal remains." Fogelson explains."Later, Native Americans came to accept Euro-American conceptions of land as a commodity that could be alienated through sale during treaty negotiations and be s source of recompensation through decisions of the Indian Claims Commission,” he continues. “Land lost through conquest or purchase continued to have sentimental value for those who once inhabited the area and their descendants.”

While the heart of this study focuses on the twentieth-century Lemhi Shoshone experiences, these experiences cannot be understood when divorced from their broader historic context. Chapters 1 and 2 seek to provide that context. The first chapter introduces the Salmon River country and relates the scholarly debates that have emerged over the timing and nature of the earliest peopling of the area. The arguments of archeologists and anthropologists and linguists are juxtaposed here with Lemhi Shoshone oral tradition, which maintains that the Lemhis were created in the Salmon River country rather than migrating there from some other place. Little wonder, then, that the Lemhi Shoshones’ ties to their homeland have remained so strong.

Chapter 2 spans the nineteenth century, which for the Lemhis began with the arrival of the Corps of Discovery in 1805 and ended in their removal to Fort Hall in 1907. The arrival of Lewis and Clark can be viewed as the inauguration of non-Indian settlement in the Salmon River country, a process that ultimately resulted in the Lemhis’ exile to Fort Hall.

Both chapters draw heavily on the work of anthropologist Greg Campbell, who argues that the nineteenth century saw the culmination of a long process of "ethnogenesis" that created the tribal nation historically known as the Lemhi Shoshone. While the term has been in use for some decades, scholarly literature on ethnogenesis is still emerging. Ethnogenesis, as defined by Campbell, refers to the way that “societies emerge and recreate themselves in history through a series of transformative episodes, during which people, cultures and languages of diverse origins join to create new, hybrid and original ethnic constructions.'' In American Indian Ethnic Renewal 1996, Joan Nagel defined ethnogenesis as “the process whereby new ethnic identities, communities and cultures are built or rebuilt out of historical social and symbolic systems.” Campbell's work focuses primarily on the nineteenth century. He argues that the Indian peoples living in the Salmon River country began to coalesce into the distinct group known as the Lemhi Shoshones long before the nineteenth century, but this process concluded within the context of, and partly as a result of, increasing non-Indian settlement of the area. But Nagel’s use of the term with reference to the resurgence of lndian identity and communities since the 1960s is also useful in understanding the Lemhi Shoshones’ experience throughout the twentieth century. Just as the changes that the Lemhis faced during the nineteenth century helped to forge a distinct sense of identity, so too did the challenges they confronted during the twentieth century reaffirm their cultural ties.

The focus of the next three chapters shifts to Fort Hall, though the Salmon River country remained very much at the forefront of the concerns of the Lemhis there. Chapter 3 relates how the Lemhis organized politically soon after arriving at Fort Hall to pursue unpaid annuity monies offered in compensation for removal. They doggedly pursued their claim through a variety of avenues over the course of the next fifty years, forcing the BIA to grapple with the persistence of Lemhi identity. By 1939 officials had compiled a census of Lemhis and their descendants eligible to receive payment. Slowly, individual per capita shares were distributed. But when it came time to dispense the surplus of the fund, the Lemhis were confronted with Shoshone-Bannock designs on it.

In the end, the BIA ruled that the Lemhi held exclusive rights to the monies. At the same time it refused to allow the Lemhis to exercise those rights because it determined that "it is impossible to make a distribution to the lemhi Indians because they, as such, are not presently identifiable on the Fort Hall Reservation from other Indians located thereon."" The BIAs refusal to recognize the Lemhis despite the 1939 census, however, only strengthened their identity and created confusion about their status at Fort Hall that carried over into the Lemhis’ Indian Claims Commission (ICC) case that followed, the subject of chapters 4 and 5.

As the controversy over the Lemhi annuity claim began to wind down, one of even greater magnitude began to take shape, as a multilayered Shoshone land claim began to wind its way through the legal proceedings of the ICC.

Chapter 4 recounts the first stage of these proceedings, which played out against the backdrop of the government's shift in Indian policy to one of termination, or withdrawal of federal oversight. The Shoshone claim was one of several cases before the ICC that became a forum for the now-famous debates between anthropologist Julian Steward and his former student Omer Stewart. These debates over Great Basin sociopolitical organization, first introduced in chapter 1, continued beyond the proceedings of the commission into the academic realm.

The ICC indicated that it found Omer Steven's arguments more convincing when it delivered a 1962 ruling awarding four Indian groups the right to claim compensation the wrongful seizure of their lands. The Lemhis were one of these groups, and the claim for their aboriginal territory, the focus of chapter 5, eventually molted in a $4.5 million settlement offer. When it became evident that their homeland and millions of dollars were on the line, many Lemhis organized to oppose the ICC award offer, but their efforts were in vain. Ultimately, all tribal members at Fort Hall held stake in all claims as result of the way the ICC act was worded, a fact that remained unclear to many tribal members until it was too late. Nonetheless, when Fort Hall tribal members voted to accept the settlement award for the Lemhi claim, a number of the Lemhi minority sought unsuccessfully to intervene to reverse the decision and gain control over it. In the end, the Lemhis’ minority status at Fort Hall cost them control over monies offered in restitution for their homeland, and as before, the Lemhis would find the federal government unsympathetic to their objections because it failed to distinguish the Lemhis from other Indians at Fort Hall.

Political organization associated with the Salmon River country helped to reinforce Lemhi identity at Fort Hall, but more tangible ties to their homeland also sustained that memory. Despite removal in 1907, a community of Lemhis clung fiercely to the landscape of the town of Salmon, Idaho, Lemhi presence in Salmon, the subject of chapter 6, fluctuated in size as Lemhis from Fort Hall came for stays of varying duration to visit, tend to ancestral grave sites and hunt and fish.

Salmon fishing in particular remained important for Lemhis after removal, whether they were from Salmon or Fort Hall. As anadromous fish runs declined during the course of the second half of the twentieth century, however, Indian treaty rights met with increasing opposition from state officials angling enthusiasts and others. Chapter 7 explores the controversy that emerged over Indian salmon harvesting, with a particular emphasis on the Lemhi Shoshones' struggle to retain access to their traditional fishing grounds. Their efforts culminated in Stare of Idaho vs. Tinno, a 1972 Idaho Supreme Court case involving a Lemhi, Gerald Tinno, who was indicted for violating fishing regulations, though in the end the court upheld his exercise of tribal treaty rights.

The final chapter brings the story of the Lemhi Shoshones and the Salmon River country up to the present by focusing on the contemporary Lemhi campaign for land restoration and recognition. The Lewis and Clark bicentennial provides an auspicious occasion for realizing such goals, even though the odds against the Lemhis seem great.

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How the Sacagawea / Sacajawea's descendants - the Agaidikas (Salmon
Eaters), and the Tukudikas (Sheep Eaters) became known as the "Lemhi"-Shoshone Tribe

Mormon missionaries who came to the Salmon River Valley in 1855 were the first non-Indians to establish a sustained relationship with the Salmon River Indian people. Approximately twenty-seven Mormon men left the Salt Lake Valley on May 18, 1855. The party reached Fort Lemhi on May 27, and they selected a permanent site for their mission on June 15, 1855. The mission, named Fort Lemhi, was located approximately two miles north of present-day Tendoy, Idaho.

The word "Lemhi" was associated with King Limhi who was one of the kings cited in the Book of Mormon. In Mormon scripture, King Limhi organized an expedition that lasted twenty- two days--the same duration it required the Mormon missionaries to reach the Salmon River Country. Lemhi Ventures County

Consequently, they named their mission after King Limhi, and, in time, Limhi became Lemhi. The Mormon mission enjoyed some success, especially after the Lemhi leader, Snag, became a convert to Mormonism, and his acceptance of Mormon doctrine sparked as many as 100 baptisms among the Sacagawea / Sacajawea's people the Lemhi-Shoshone people. (WSU Prof. O. Svingen)
Lewis Clark Shoshone Tendoy & Salmon Idaho

A-WITE-ETSE his + mark signer of the Fort Bridger Treaty

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Sacajawea Sacagawea photos

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