The women were rather fairer in color, and much fairer in form or feature, with easier and more graceful carriage than the women of other tribes. The men were tall, large, upright in bearing, generally of open countenance and intelligent expression. Of all the Indians in Idaho the Nez Percé had the highest degree of intelligence, and probably of social morality also. To take it however, required activity, cunning, courage, and hence developed a tall, stalwart, erect, active race of men lithe and springy as a panther which animal, indeed, many of the Cayuse and Nez Percé would remind the observant traveler of by the quick stealthiness of their movement, the restless, penetrating glance of their eye that caught every quivering motion of leaf or feature the sensitiveness of their ear, that missed no snap of twig, or tread of foot and their ever-tensioned sinews ready for the spring of attack or the speed of the flight. The game, such as elk, deer, antelope, bear, buffalo, mountain sheep and goats, ranged both plain and mountain furnishing the chief food of the tribes that inhabited this region. The mountains were covered with open and scattering forests of pine, with occasional groves of fir and tamarack, almost without undergrowth, through and over which the horseman could ride almost unhindered in any direction. Hence these tribes were equestrian, rather than semi-aquatic like the tribes of the lower rivers and sea inlets. It furnished abundance of grass for grazing, and its vast distances of hill and plain required their use for locomotion. The climate was dry and the natural vegetable productions were minimized it was almost a desert. Hence these aborigines were short of stature heavy and broad and fat of body indolent and sluggish in movement without alertness or perception of mind indolent and inactive in all their habits sleeping away nearly all but the little time that was requisite for them to throw their barbed harpoon into the shining side of the salmon that swam on the shoals and sands of the rivers and bays along which they thus droned away their meaningless life, and the few additional moments required to boil or roast it sufficient to gratify their uncultured appetite.Įast of the Cascade Mountains the country was a high, rolling, mountain prairie, averaging from one to six thousand feet above the tides of the ocean.
It was a region of large, deep rivers of numerous bays and inlets from the ocean extending far inland, all filled with fish of the finest and richest quality, easily taken, and hence inviting to a life of effortless indolence and ease.
West of the Cascade Mountains the climate was soft, moist and its indigenous productions were those that a rich soil would send forth in such a climate. The other was, that there was no form or semblance of civilization of any character among them they were as entirely savage and barbarous as the tribes of “darkest Africa.” For this first fact the marked difference in the climate, productions and consequent modes of living necessary for them, furnishes a reason, if not the reason. When these people were first brought under the study of civilized men two facts distinctly marked them: One was that the tribes east of the Cascade mountains had very different mental and physical qualities from those residing west of that range. All these, of course, have a value as literature, and occupy an interesting place in romantic story, but their history is not great. Incidental notices of various tribes have been given to the world by other explorers and travelers, but very much that has been written concerning them was not the ascertaining of patient and continued personal investigation, nor yet the impressions of any extended personal contact, but the chance and hasty gatherings of unreliable traditions, or, what was even less to be depended on than this, the exaggerated recitals of some wild, camp-fire stories. Any real information at all reliable concerning them began with the publication of the journal of the exploring expedition of Lewis and Clarke in 18. Traditions concerning them are too confused, contradictory and uncertain to satisfy any who desire reliable history.
#Was the shoshone tribe warlike or peaceful skin
With-out a written language of any kind, unless it was the use of the rudest and most barbarous symbols, they have passed away and left no recorded history without architecture, except that which exhausts its genius in the construction of a skin wigwam or a bark lodge, they have died and left no monuments. Some notice of the original inhabitants of Idaho is due the reader of this book, even though that notice must necessarily be short and its data largely traditional.
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