City of Rocks Historic Resources Study

The City of Rocks National Reserve occupies an area at the junction of two physiographic regions, the Great Basin and the Columbia Plateau, at the northern margin of what anthropologists call the Great Basin "culture area." The concept of culture area, as used by anthropologists for some time, is generally defined as a geographical area within which native inhabitants share similar cultural traits. Strengthening the concept of cultural relatedness within the Great Basin culture area is the fact that all but one of the extant native groups living within it speak "Numic" languages, a division of the Uto-Aztecan language family. [13]

Of course, people inhabiting the periphery of "culture areas" often display a blend of traits from adjacent areas. The Shoshone and Bannock people who occupied the upper Snake River Valley at the time of Euroamerican contact displayed a blend of cultural traits typically associated with Plains, Great Basin and Plateau cultures. "Just as the environment and resources of southern Idaho were varied and transitional to other physiographic areas, so also was the culture of the Shoshone and Bannock diverse." [14]

In September of 1776, Francisco Atanasio Dominquez and Silvestre Velez Escalante explored the region extending from Santa Fe to Utah Lake (near what is now Provo). Here they camped with the "Comanche" (Shoshone). [15] In 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition camped near Lemhi Pass with another Shoshone band. Lewis made extensive notes regarding the material culture and vocabulary of the Shoshone people that they encountered. Lewis' lack of comment on the presence of Bannock people has led to the assumption that the residential integration of Shoshone and Bannock people occurred during the later part of the 1800s.

The relationship of the Northern Shoshone and Bannock, observed by ethnographers during the first part of the 20th century, is described as follows:

The Fort Hall, or upper Snake River, Shoshone and Bannock formed into large composite bands of shifting composition and leadership. The Shoshone speakers were always the majority, but the chieftaincy was sometimes held by a Bannock. Most of the Fort Hall people formed into a single group each fall to hunt buffalo east of Bozeman, Montana, and returned to the Snake River bottomlands near Fort Hall for the winter. . . The large bands split into smaller units for spring salmon fishing below Shoshone Falls, and summer was spent digging camas roots in Camas Prairie and other favored places. Deer and elk were hunted in the mountains of southeastern Idaho and northern Utah. [16]

Because of its excellent grazing resources, pinion pine nuts, rock chucks and game animals, and vegetable roots, the upper Raft River and the City of Rocks served as a "Shoshoni seasonal village center" and summer range for the Shoshone's extensive horse herds. [17] Almo residents reported that as late as the 1970s,

The Indians [from the Fort Hall Reservation] used to come every fall gathering pine nuts. They would gather the cones all day, then dig huge pits, fill them with wood and set it on fire. Then when the coals were right, they put the sticky cones in and covered them with dirt. By morning the cones would be popped open. The squaws picked the nuts out of the cones. They would sell them for .25 a pint. . . . every year, 'til the last few years, they come and traded back and forth with people for hides and on the years that the pine nuts were good.... they come by car. Then they first come, they come in a buggy and team, wagon and team. And camp here, they'd have a camp right here, right above here for weeks at a time. . . They'd come here and buy deer hides... They trades us buckskin gloves for deer hides. See and then they make the gloves out of the deer hides. [18]

Years after their consolidation on the government reserve at Fort Hall, the Bannock-Shoshone would return for "ceremonial dances. Their camp grounds were near the Twin Sisters as there was a spring of cold running water close by." [19] Non-Indian settlers also report an "Indian legend" centered at the City of Rocks, namely that "a bath in [Bathtub Rock] before sunrise will restore youth to the aged." [20] Evidence of the city's traditional significance thus continued long after ranching enterprises had transformed the area. [21]