Band, Not-Band, Or Ethnie - Who Were the White Knife People (Tosawihi) - - Resolution of a 'Mereological' Dilemma

Band, Not-Band, or Ethnie: Who Were the White Knife People (Tosawihi)? Resolution of a “Mereological” Dilemma

Richard O. Clemmer, University of Denver

Abstract. The “White Knife” (Tosawihi) Shoshone present a classic case of the “rhetoric of classification.” They epitomize the long-standing and never-resolved debate over whether or not band organization existed in the aboriginal Great Basin. Referencing eyewitness accounts, letters of Indian agents, and diaries of emigrants, explorers, trappers, and other travelers and setting them against the received ethno-graphic images of the Shoshone, particularly the image of family-scale organization presented by Julian Steward, tests the validity of those images. I propose rethinking the neo-evolutionary category “band” in terms of ethnie. Rethinking “bandness” in terms of ethnie promises more fruitful results from analyzing domestic-scale soci-eties such as hunter-gatherer-fishers.

Thornton’s Dilemma and Julian Steward’s Ethnography

I will begin this discussion with what I shall call “Thornton’s Dilemma.” Robert Thornton (1988: 285) asserts that the fundamental problem of ethnography is how to use writing to bring the “everyday” into relation with “history” and “environment.” If that is so, and there is, according to Thor-ton, some difficulty about doing so, then there should be even more difficulty about doing so for the ethnohistorian. Julian Steward, who is described as “foundational . . . canonized within the discipline” (Pinkoski 2008: 181), did this admirably in his 1938 monograph Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Socio-political Groups: his running narrative, area by area, of subsistence activities and daily life brings the everyday into relation with the environmental con-ditions of those areas. Unfortunately, he forgot about history: the narrative might refer to the 1850s in one area, while in other areas it could not pos-sibly refer to a time earlier than 1880 because of the ages of Steward’s infor-

Ethnohistory 56:3 (Summer 2009) dOI 10.1215/00141801-2009-002Copyright 2009 by American Society for Ethnohistory

396 Richard O. Clemmer

mants for that particular area. Therefore, just exactly how “aboriginal” the “sociopolitical groups” were certainly must be questioned. One of those groups is what another anthropologist, Jack Harris (1940), who was doing reconstructive ethnography at almost the same time as Steward, named the “White Knife” Shoshone. Harris based his PhD dis-sertation on the putative distinctive existence of this group. Steward, in contrast, maintained that they were not a distinct group and were indistin-guishable socially from other Western Shoshone (1938). Therefore, it seems that the “White Knife” (Tosawihi) Shoshone present a classic case of what Thornton calls the “rhetoric of classification”: they are popped out of the more general Western Shoshone identity in Harris’s text, and submerged into it in Steward’s. I am not concerned here with social philosophy or with “moral under-standing,” “theoretical understanding,” or “scientific understanding” (Thornton 1988: 290, 291) per se. Nor am I concerned with rhetoric or writing as such, and I take neither the position that ethnography exists only to the extent that someone writes it down (Rabinow 1986) nor the posi-tion that ethnography embeds “essential fiction” (Thornton 1988: 289). I do not agree with Thornton (1988: 292) that “ethnography cannot be repli-cated as a test of its validity or truth . . . because it is always in the process of achieving an understanding.” Precisely the opposite: the validity of an ethnographic image can be tested, not by actually replicating the historical circumstances to which it pertains, but by referencing eyewitness accounts from those historical circumstances and setting them against the received ethnographic image(s). This is what I intend to do with the ethnographic images of the White Knives. I am concerned with the basis for classification itself, and to this extent, Thornton’s identification of the dilemma of “social wholes” is useful. “Social wholes,” says Thornton (1988: 288), “can not be directly experi-enced by a single human observer.” Rather, social life that extends beyond what can be experienced must be ethnographically imagined. This point is even more salient for ethnohistorians: In ethnohistory, nothing is experi-enced. Everything must be “imagined.” Therefore, I find Thornton’s point that “classification as itself” is “a kind of trope” and that “social wholes” are indeed “problematic . . . for the entire ethnographic project” instructive (1988: 286–87). At issue here is whether the White Knives existed as a whole, and if they did so, how they did so within, or in relation to, the Western Shoshone as a whole. Thornton borrows an erudite term from social philosopher David-Hillel Ruben (1983), “the mereological relation,” to characterize the “persons, groups, institutions, symbols” and their combinations that may

Resolution of a “Mereological” Dilemma 397

be conceptualized as the parts that make up the whole or the constituents of the identified group. Ruben’s purpose was to argue that the idea of an entity being solely the sum of its parts was misconceived. His examples of entities range from clubs and associations to nations and culturally defined groups (Ruben: 219, 226). Ruben (220) asserts that being a “part” is not the same as being a member of, or belonging to, a social group. In other words, adding up all the individuals of a group as if the group were the sum of its parts is a procedure that is wrong-headed and results in a concept that is misconceived (223). Moreover, it is evident that a “group continues to exist in spite of a death or birth of a member” (226). Although somewhat distorting much of Ruben’s purpose, Thornton (1988: 293) brings Ruben’s concerns into a discussion of ethnography by noting that the chief aim of ethnography is “to convince the reader of the existence of an initially unper-ceived coherence, a surprising meaningfulness.” This is what Steward (1938, 1939) tried to do: to convince the reader that linguistic-historic groups labeled Ute, Paiute, Gosiute, Western Sho-shone, Northern Shoshone, Sheepeater (“Lemhi”) Shoshone, and Ban-nock actually constituted eighteen sociopolitical groups, bounded and separated from each other, or in some cases merged together as “ethno-graphic images,” by environmental conditions. One of these groups was not the “White Knife” Shoshone. Harris (1938, 1940) defied the ethnographic image presented by Steward because he broke out the White Knives as a dis-tinct and separate image. In this sense, then “each ethnography differently and separately . . . takes the form of an assertion that if the whole (society, culture, conscience collectif, etc.) exists, then the evidence presented must constitute it” (Thornton 1988: 293). This, then, is what is at issue: the evidence that constitutes, on the one hand, the classificatory trope of “Western Shoshone,” and on the other, that of “White Knife Shoshone.” Thornton (1988: 295) calls this the process by which rhetoric becomes perceived as social structure. This point is a little overstated. The process is more than one of simply writing a classificatory trope. Rather, it is the process by which stories and observations of persons, events, symbols, institutions, groups, and their combinations do or do not emerge into one unarguable whole image in spite of the ethnographer’s fatal attraction to one particular classificatory trope (e.g., family level of organi-zation) as opposed to another (e.g., band). The position I am taking, then, is that bringing the everyday into relation with history and environment is indeed a challenge, especially when dealing with ethnographic or ethno-historical reconstruction. But at the same time, attempting to free ethno-graphic data from classificatory tropes is more than merely a matter of rhe-torical manipulation. Rather, doing so rests on bypassing the art and style of


discourse, examining all the pertinent data, and penetrating to the influence of the conceptual tropes themselves. One of these powerful classificatory tropes is “band” and by default, “not-band.”

The White Knife People: Band? Not-Band?

The Tosawihi (White Knives) are part of a larger group identifiable cul-turally and linguistically as Shoshone. Anthropologists categorize them as either Western, Northern, or Eastern, not only on the basis of geographical location but also on the basis of shared cultural characteristics (Crum 1994: 43). The Western Shoshone were historically Uto-Aztekan speakers, linguis-tically related to Utes and Paiutes, who made their living by gathering, for-aging, hunting, fishing, and here and there a little farming. Western Sho-shones (Newe) from north-central Nevada and southern Idaho appear to epitomize the long-standing and never-resolved debate over whether or not band organization really existed in much of the aboriginal Great Basin (see Fowler 1966; Stewart 1966, 1980; J. Steward 1968, 1970; Service 1962). On the one hand, they were sufficiently identifiable that Jack Harris could title his study of acculturation in 1940, “The White Knife Shoshoni of Nevada,” forever enshrining them as a reified sociocultural entity, the Shoshone com-ponent of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation. Yet Julian Steward (1938: 162, 238; 1939; 1955: 119–20) denied that any group of Western Shoshones, including the Tosawihi, could have been a band. Steward (1955: 115) denied that even the winter villages had any “supra-familial form of social integration,” a situation that is hard to imagine for groups of families that had to share the same location for up to four months at a time. Steward asserted that the “fragmenting effect” of the ecological resources and the consequent “family level” of social organization “makes the Shoshoneans typologically unique in cultural evolution” (120). Although in the last couple of decades Steward’s assumption that Western Shoshone cultural ecology was “socially fragmenting” and that the Newe were barely eking out a living has undergone some critical scrutiny (Thomas 1983; Clemmer 1987; Kerns 1999; Arkush 1999; Crum 1999), the issue of “bandness” (and therefore “not-bandness”) among the Northern Paiutes and Western Shoshones was earlier not only contested between Harris and Steward, but also hotly debated by Omer Stewart (1939, 1966, 1980) and Elman Service (1962). Virginia Kerns (2003) has specifically asserted that Steward was overly swayed by what may be euphemistically called the “spirit of the times” and his own personal orientation to assert the existence of a theoretical “patrilineal band” as a cross-cultural category of social and political organization in the absence of sufficient supporting


empirical data. Therefore, to the extent that Steward could not apply crite-ria of “bandness” to a particular group, then that group did not have it. To be fair, it must be noted that Steward himself responded in comments on papers delivered at a retrospective review of the band concept organized by David Damas of Canada’s then National Museum of Man in 1968 that the “band” concept might not be supportable and that sociopolitical organi-zational categories had to be generated on the basis of empirical data, not theoretical concepts. In the larger scheme of human existence, it would not seem to mat-ter very much whether the Tosawihi were or were not a band. But in fact, labeling them as a band or determining that they were not a band has important implications for the neo-evolutionary model, a model that is still a commonly used paradigm for presenting discussions of anthropology in textbooks (e.g., Keesing and Strathern 1998; Haviland 1999; Schultz and Lavenda 2001;1 Scupin 2003).2 Solving the conundrum of the Tosa-wihi “whole” forces some rethinking of neo-evolutionary sociopolitical typologies, if nothing else. Neo-evolutionary sociopolitical typologies were temporarily eschewed at the time Harris and Steward were writing due to the influence of Franz Boas and his students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, but they rose to prominence once again in the 1940s. They rested on the assumption that human groups were supposed to have either band, tribe, chiefdom, state, or nation-state levels of sociopolitical organization. Steward presented the Western Shoshone as unique in having none of the above. Theoretically, on the band level, solidarity is maintained through kinship ties, economic interdependence based on reciprocity, and iden-tifiable leadership. Each band is politically independent. Social relations are essentially egalitarian and whether the band is patrilocal, bilateral, or “composite,” changing band affiliation is possible and relatively easy to do (Schultz and Lavenda 2001: 279–81; J. Steward 1936, 1938: 258–60). Because the Tosawihi had technology and subsistence identical to that of other Western Shoshones, Steward (1938: 162) insisted the Tosawihi had a “family level of socio-cultural integration.” Western Shoshones and neigh-boring Northern Paiutes ostensibly had “no economic, recreational, reli-gious, social, or political co-operation that would require collective action and lead to suprafamilial forms of integration” (J. Steward 1955: 116). To a large extent, resolving the question of just who the Tosawihi were rests on methodological procedures. First I will review discussions of the White Knives as presented by Harris and Steward and the argument about bands in the Great Basin between Steward and Omer Stewart (and by extension, Elman Service). Next, I will review eyewitness accounts of people reported as “White Knives.” Then, I will propose an alternative con-


ceptualization to this neo-evolutionary category. Finally, I will return to the “mereological dilemma” raised by Thornton. I will use an insightful rhetori-cal nugget by David-Hillel Ruben that Thornton introduces to illustrate, by analogy, the dilemma that he conceptualizes. Thornton does not actually explain how Ruben’s insight might be used to resolve his dilemma by apply-ing it to other ethnographic data and thus leaves the reader dangling in her-meneutical nowhere. The Tosawihi can indeed be used to illustrate how this insight can clear up Thornton’s dilemma and also reconcile the apparently mutually irreconcilable images presented by Steward and by Harris. I want to make it clear that this discussion does not propose that bands never existed. Rather, I am proposing that (1) the distinction between the “family level” of social organization and the “band” level, if it really exists, is not very important; (2) much of what Steward (1955: 116) called the “con-fusion” about Shoshone and Paiute “food named groups” (see below) and “bandness,” which he blamed on the inaccuracy of eyewitness accounts, actually derives from Steward’s heavy reliance on neo-evolutionary classi-ficatory tropes; and (3) now that the technological and ecological parame-ters of small-scale societies, whether bands, not-bands, or horticultural villages, are better known, a more flexible and usable conceptualization of cultural organization and sociopolitical leadership, not burdened by a neo-evolutionary typology, is needed. This conceptualization should yield a cross-cultural, comparative framework equally as “causal” (M. Harris 1968: 666) as the neo-evolutionary typologies, or even more to the point, that in fact does factor in the “creative” (667) dimensions of using environ-mental resources. I shall make these points by re-examining the enigma of the Tosawihi.

Steward’s Tosawihi and Harris’s White Knives; Stewart’s Bands and Steward’s Not-Bands

White KnivesThe Tosawihi (“white” + “knife” or “sharp thing for shooting”), named because of their use of white chert from a quarry near present-day Battle Mountain, are part of the entity calling themselves “Newe,” “Nuwa,” “Numa,” or a variation on one of those terms depending upon dialect. Stew-ard (1938: 162, 248) dismissed the identity of the “much publicized Tosawi or White Knife people of the Battle Mountain region” as having had “no organization.” People who “wintered on the Humboldt River above Battle Mountain, called Tosawi because they procured white flint for knives in the mountains to the north” were not a band, insisted Steward. He called it a “fiction that all the Shoshoni in a large area around Battle Mountain had


comprised a band by this name. Because Tosawi did not designate a defi-nitely bounded linguistic, political, cultural or even geographical division,” he asserted, “no two writers have agreed on its use.” In contrast, Jack Harris (1940: 39) was quite explicit about who the Tosawihi were, noting that “the term was restricted at one time to those camps in the immediate vicinity of Tuscarora and Battle Mountain where white flint for knives and other artifacts is found,” although he acknowl-edged that the group had a “shifting membership of Indians who were also known by a number of other names depending upon their temporary loca-tion or their principal food supply.” Harris (1938) initially implied that the Tosawihi had had a band organization, specifically citing harvest festivals (Gwini), especially the fall pine-nut festival, as integrative mechanisms that produced band-like solidarity. Steward (1939) responded and specifically countered Harris. Steward denied that the Gwini had any integrative func-tions. Harris (1940) did not dispute Steward’s interpretations and followed Steward’s lead in his second and final discussion of the Tosawihi.3 Despite their differences in interpreting who the Tosawihi were, Har-ris’s and Steward’s ethnographic data converge on several points. Interview-

Figure 1. Snake, Humboldt, and Quinn rivers and tributary streams in Western Shoshone County with Duck Valley Reservation. Source: Map by Sarah Lowry


ing at Duck Valley in 1937, Harris (1940: 39) noted that “before the advent of the Whites, the Tosawihi Shoshone ranged the northeastern section of the state of Nevada. In the summer, the camps foraged for food as far north as the Snake River and some few went south to Austin and Eureka.” One resident of Duck Valley told him that in those times the area on the Snake River between its confluence with the Owyhee and a small tributary4 was regularly inhabited each summer by the same man and his family. They set traps and nets in the river to catch fish as well as gathered seeds and hunted. This information is consistent with Steward’s data (1938: 167–68). Steward, interviewing in 1936, found that people (he did not label them Tosawihi) took salmon trout, Salmo gairdneri, with nets in the shallow tributaries of the Snake River. In the first salmon run, in March or April, people “went up small streams,” such as the Owyhee River, Blue Creek, and the Jarbidge and Bruneau Rivers “for the purpose of procuring roots and berries as well as of taking these salmon. Also, mugadu, described as a sucker, and ondiawox, a boney fish with a wide mouth and yellow stomach, were sometimes taken in the Owyhee River.” If the salmon catch were good, “people from both the Snake River and the Humboldt River wintered on the South Fork of the Owyhee River, called Sohohunub (soho, cottonwood + hunub, creek), for although it was cold there was much timber. Fish could be taken through the ice” (168). There was also a fall run of salmon, or perhaps salmon trout, taken with hooks. The best fishing was at Salmon Falls (167, 168). Obviously Harris and Steward are talking about the same people with the same sub-sistence strategy and settlement pattern. The only difference between their summary discussions is that Steward does not designate them as “Tosawihi” or “White Knife” and Harris does. In the 1890s, Liberty Millet, who ran a commercial fishery at Glenn’s Ferry on the Snake River, reported Chinook as most abundant in early August and early September. However, they began spawning in October (F. Steward 1975). Spawning wore them out and Millet told ichthyologist Barton Evermann (1896: 262) in 1894 that the Chinook got “ripe” about October 1–15; “then they are not so good.” These were called taza agai (summer salmon) in Shoshone, but were also known as “dog salmon” and in small streams such as Blue Creek and the upper Owyhee were prob-ably caught as wo:vi agai (“board” or “log” salmon). “Ripe” must be inter-preted as old, emaciated, and close to death. “Not so good” probably means the flesh was not firm and damaged by sores; most likely they had to be eaten immediately and therefore would be problematic for potential dry-ing. However, large numbers of them would ensure that enough good ones could be taken to warrant staying on the Snake. This is probably the mean-ing of Steward’s cryptic comment that “sometimes, if the salmon catch were


good, people from both the Snake River and the Humboldt River wintered on the South Fork of the Owyhee River” (J. Steward 1938: 168). Robert Murphy and Yolanda Murphy also did extensive interviewing at Duck Valley among the Tosawihi (although they assiduously avoided using that term). The “Shoshone of the middle Snake River,” said Murphy and Murphy (1960: 321, 322, 325),

relied heavily on the salmon runs for food and fished during spring, summer, and fall. One fish weir, maintained on the Bruneau River, was frequently visited by Fort Hall Bannock, with whom the catch was shared. Glenn’s Ferry was one of the better fishing sites; the waters between the three islands in the Snake River at this point were shal-low enough for weirs to be used. . . . Immediately above Hagerman (Salmon Falls), on the Snake River, the Indians caught salmon by spear-ing. . . . Basketry traps were used in small creeks. . . . The Shoshone of the middle Snake River resemble the Nevada Shoshone in social, political, and economic characteristics more than does any other part of the Idaho population, and Steward lists them with the Western Sho-shone for this reason.

In the 1970s, the Murphys wrote the chapter on “Northern Shoshone and Bannock” for volume 11 of the Handbook of North American Indians published by the Smithsonian Institution. A map accompanying their article, showing “seasonal movement and acquired food resources” in the nineteenth century, shows Western Shoshones, not Northern Shoshones, moving seasonally from the upper Bruneau River drainage to the “Sho-shone Falls” (Salmon Falls) at Hagerman for salmon (Murphy and Murphy 1986: 286). It is clear that Murphy and Murphy are talking about the same people that Harris designated as White Knife. Living on the Snake River, they would have been known as Agaiduka (salmon eaters),5 but when they went south into Nevada they “were then called Tubaduka” (pine-nut eaters) (J. Steward 1938: 172). The stands of nut-pine closest to the Snake River are more than 150 miles to the south, in the foothills of the Ruby Mountains and of the Shoshone Range; the Tosawihi quarry area is midway between the two areas. Although Tosawihi maintained their self-designation and identity after moving to the Duck Valley Reservation in 1877, and continued to do so through the late twentieth century, with the identity even strengthening within the context of recent political activities (Clemmer 1990, 2004), they ceased using the white flint when they began to obtain firearms and horses in the late 1840s and 1850s (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs [ARCIA] 1857).


Bands, Not-BandsOmer Stewart’s (1939, 1941) work on culture element distributions led him to postulate sociopolitical bands with defined territories for the Northern Paiute and to specifically challenge Steward’s assertion that Paiutes in the area did not have bands (Stewart 1966, 1978, 1980). Elman Service used Stewart’s work as well as his own interpretation of John Wesley Powell and G. W. Ingalls’s (1873) eyewitness account to also challenge Steward con-cerning the Western Shoshone. He noted that Powell and Ingalls described the Shoshone of Central Nevada as divided into thirty-one “tribes,” each with a distinct, named territory, before being reduced to the “demoralized state” in which Powell and Ingalls found them as a result of white intrusion. Powell and Ingalls estimated the aboriginal population at 1,945. Dividing that figure by the thirty-one tribes yields a figure of sixty-three persons per group, which Service (1962: 98) asserted is “a fairly standard band size elsewhere in the world.” Based on comparative logic and this ethnohis-torical source, Service suggests that the thirty-one “tribes”6 were actually discrete bands with distinct territories. “It is difficult to see,” railed arch-neo-evolutionist Service, “why a man so famous for scientific rectitude and painstaking attention to detail as was Powell7 should have reported ‘small tribes’ named for their territories had they not once existed, and, we may ask, how could the Indians have (otherwise) described them?” (98). Don Fowler examined the Steward-Service controversy more extensively than any other scholar and concluded (D. Fowler 1966: 71) that “the documen-tation presented by Service to support his position regarding the existence of ‘patrilocal’ bands in the Great Basin cannot be wholly accepted,” but that “the existence of such groups remains a possibility to be investigated.”

Eyewitness Accounts: Indian Agents and Emigrants

Eyewitness accounts need to be revisited. If these accounts are really at odds with the reconstructed ethnographies, then the contradictions should be glaringly apparent and should, as Steward recommended, be largely dis-missed. If, on the other hand, these accounts are reconcilable with the data in the reconstructed ethnographies, then there is some reason to question the dismissal of the Tosawihi as a nonentity. These accounts are (1) reports and letters of Indian agents and (2) diaries of emigrants, explorers, trap-pers, and other travelers who came through the Snake and Humboldt river areas on the Oregon and California trails. Emigrants’ accounts do not mention the Tosawihi by name, but they do describe Shoshones on the Snake River in midsummer, which is just where the Tosawihi should have been according to both Harris’s and Stew-


ard’s accounts. On July 26, 1849, William Watson (1985: 30–31) encoun-tered plenty of “Root Digger Indians” and “ponies.” At “the great Oregon Falls” (Salmon Falls) he noted “hundreds of Indians fishing; they had fish to swap. They looked hearty and robust; very fond of loud laughter, and very friendly. They had some very fine ponies, but they were hard to be got; they will swap them for American horses.” P. V. Crawford (1924: 149) in 1851 at [Upper] Salmon Falls “found Indians, ready to trade salmon for anything . . . but shirts were their greatest want” and reported some horses stolen. On August 8, nooning on the river bank, they “found plenty of Indi-ans, who were full both of trade and theft.” Eight miles downstream they “traded with Indians for salmon, which are very plentiful in the stream along here.” Emigrant Esther Belle Hanna found a thriving trade going on in 1852 where “the Indians catch (salmon) and trade them to the emigrants for old shirts, cooking utensils, fish-hooks, powder or anything they can get. . . . We got a very fine one weighing about 21 pounds for an old shirt belonging to one of our young men” (Hanna 1852: 23). Another emigrant, camped on Salmon Falls and near starvation, noted in his diary that there was “a ferry . . . Indians are very numerous along here. When they want to beg or swap anything, they meet you with a ‘how do you do.’ They subsist prin-cipally on fish of which there is an abundance—salmon and other kind. Ferriage $5 cross river. July 19: Our camp was crowded last night and this morning with Indian fishmongers. They generally prefer exchanging their fish for ammunition, but when this cannot be got, they will take any kind of old wearing apparel, old tin ware etc.” (Handsaker 1853: 23–24). Seasonal transhumance is a subsistence strategy that is definitely docu-mented for the Tosawihi. The attractive subsistence activity in the Snake River basin was fishing, and with the intrusion of the emigrants, fishing became even more attractive for trading purposes. By the late 1850s, knap-pable flint was becoming a less valuable resource than “imported” resources such as horses, guns, and ammunition. Salmon were a valuable resource for subsistence and for trade. Although Shoshones in some areas of central and northern Nevada were still eating horses rather than riding them in the 1850s (Layton 1978), horses had become more readily available by 1856; more people had them and the White Knifes finally got some, probably from the Nez Perce, who frequently came south to the Salmon Falls area from their home territory in the Walowa Valley on the upper Snake. Three tanned deer hides purchased a horse; a colt could be had for a half bushel of camas or other edible roots (yomba) (J. Steward 1938: 45). Shoshones were at peace with the Nez Perce and sometimes made “long excursions across the Rocky Mountains to the buffalo country of the high plains” even if they


were not mounted (201). They may well have traded the white flint, or tools made from the white flint, but more likely they traded powder, shot, fish hooks, and rifles for the horses, and then headed to the Humboldt for more trading with the emigrants. There is good evidence that it was a combination of the prospect of obtaining fish, an important resource obtained through-out the summer year after year, and also the possibility of trading fish for technological items, clothes, and horses; occasionally stealing horses; and then retrading fattened horses to other emigrants that continued to bring Tosawihi to the Snake River and then back to the Humboldt. Indian agents over a period of about twenty years (ARCIA 1852, 1857, 1858; Powell and Ingalls 1873) pinpointed Tosawihi geographical location, leadership, and economic activities, calling them, rightly or wrongly, a “band.” U.S. Indian agent J. H. Holeman (ARCIA 1852) was the first Indian Office employee to use the term “White Knives,” applying it to people living along the Humboldt River and Goose Creek. Agent Garland Hurt encoun-tered White Knives at Stony Point, on the Humboldt River near present-day Valmy, in 1856. They told him they lived “north and had come over to trade with the emigrants. They were well supplied with guns and horses and seem anxious to trade for ammunition.” He said they “derive their name from a beautiful flint found in the mountains of that region, and formerly used by them as a substitute for knives in dressing their food.” Agent Hurt met other White Knives, “about fifty . . . on the evening of the 15th August” at Gravelly Ford, farther west on the Humboldt (ARCIA 1857). The White Knives were reported to be in between the Bannocks to the west and West-ern Shoshones to the east in 1856 (OIA 1856, 1858). This location would put them roughly in the Tosawihi quarry area. Intrepid world traveler Richard Burton, veteran of the Indian army and famous for sneaking into Mecca on the Hajj disguised as a Pathan, encoun-tered people he called “Tusawichya or White Knives, a band of Shoshones under an independent chief” as he traveled by stage through the southern end of Diamond Valley, thirty miles west of Ruby Valley (Burton 1862:584). Agent Warren Wasson (ARCIA 1862b:364) in his report indicated the mobility and distinct identity of the “White Knife people” in warning Nevada Territorial Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs James Nye that “the danger of interruption by Indians to the mail and telegraph lines apprehended during the coming Spring is from a band of the Sho sho nees called ‘White knives’ occupying the country between the Upper Hum-boldt and the present mail road.” Wasson (ARCIA 1862b:363) also noted “that about one-half of the Indians belonging in Ruby Valley had left for the ‘White Knife’ country in


the Upper Humboldt on account of the late difficulties consequent upon the death of their chief ‘Sho-kub’” (also Sho-kup, Tsu-kup, Cho-kup, Sok*p, or Sho-cup-ut-see—see J. Steward 1938: 156). In 1863, when looking for leaders to sign his treaties, Treaty Commissioner Duane Doty described the Western Shoshones as being “represented by the two principal Bands—the Tosowitch (White Knife) and Unkoah’s” (OIA 1863). One of the leaders who ultimately signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley was Buck. The treaty com-missioners and Indian agents regarded Buck the treaty signer as leader of the people known at the time as White Knives, White Knife people, Tosowes, To-sow witches, or Tosawi in Ruby Valley (ARCIA 1862a; Nevada Territo-rial Records 1862; ARCIA 1864; OIA 1884), that is, the Tosawihi who had not departed. The officers at Fort Ruby appointed Buck “chief” in 1862, and he continued to be leader of the Ruby Valley Indians until 1873 (OIA 1867; OIA 1873a).8 Eventually both the White Knives led by Buck and other White Knives who had left Ruby Valley for White Knife country ended up at the Duck Valley Reservation in 1877. Thus it is obvious that for fifteen or sixteen years, two groups of Tosa-wihi were separated from each other and were spatially discontinuous, but did not stop being Tosawihi. In one of his examples, Ruben (1983: 222) notes that even though the French may be spatially discontinuous from one another because some parts of France are actually uninhabited, that dis-continuity does not mean that in those spaces where there are no French France does not exist as a society. Rather, “to speak of French society rather than France is either a way of speaking about a specific social structure, as defined by a set of relations, or a way of talking about the groups of indi-viduals who are related by those relations” (225). In the same way, the Tosa-wihi existed over and above and independent of where people were living who would say, “I am Tosawihi.”

Captain Sam’s Tosawihi Want a Reservation That Is on the Owyhee and Is Not Fort HallH. G. Parker, superintendent of Indian affairs for Nevada, appointed Levi Gheen “local agent” and farmer to the Western Shoshone on April 1, 1869 (OIA 1869a, 1869b). Gheen worked out of Hamilton, in south-central Nevada. Throughout the 1870s, Gheen distributed clothing, farming imple-ments, seeds, and ammunition for hunting to Shoshones in the area, many of whom had been attracted to the towns that sprang up after the mining boom of 1869. Occasionally Gheen traveled out of the area at the behest of his superiors. In 1870, Gheen was directed to make a census of Indi-ans in central Nevada (OIA 1870c). On May 16, 1870, Gheen spoke with “Shoshone Sam” in Elko, 150 miles to the northeast. Sam told Gheen “he


would like a reservation and thinks the most of his Indians would go and work he also says that his boys are greatly in favor of a Reservation [sic]” (OIA 1870b). Sam recommended a “place . . . about seventy or eighty miles northeast of this place [Elko] where they (the Indians) say there is plenty of game and fish and a good farming country as near as they can judge with plenty of timber (in the mountains) water and grass” (OIA 1875a). This was the land that ultimately became the Duck Valley Reservation. Sam does not show up on Levi Gheen’s census of 1870, which he made in July. Since Sam was in Elko in May 1870, but does not show up on the census that Gheen conducted two months later, it is logical to assume that Sam and his band had migrated to the place with plenty of game and fish, that is, to Duck Val-ley and the Snake’s tributaries, to take advantage of seasonal opportunities to hunt and fish. Gheen never used the term “Tosawihi” in any of his reports. But it is obvious that “Captain Sam’s Band of Shoshones” were Tosawihi. “Captain Sam’s Band Shoshones” is listed on Gheen’s next census, which he made in 1873 (OIA 1873b). The band is listed as migratory, and living in “Elko and along the line of Rail Road.” Under “Remarks” on the census form, Gheen says, “Peaceable work for whites along the line of Rail Road. Some do con-siderable hunting and fishing cultivate no lands to speak of some very poor and need assistance [sic].” Powell and Ingalls listed “Sam” as “captain” of a “band” in the vicinity of Halleck, Elko, and Battle Mountain (Powell and Ingalls 1873). Ingalls took Levi Gheen along on a trip to the Indian settle-ments along the Humboldt in November 1873 and held a meeting with more than five hundred of them where he suggested that they should move to Fort Hall (OIA 1873a). Sam refused. Sam countered with a recommendation that a reservation be established at Duck Valley (OIA 1875b). On the basis of “Captain” Sam’s insistence, Gheen urged his superiors to take steps to set aside Duck Valley as a reservation (ARCIA 1877). Sam was known as “Big Capt. Pi-a tai-gwum-ni” at Duck Valley by 1880. Julian Steward (1938: 164) knew who Sam was, noting that he remained a prominent leader there until well into the early years of the twentieth century. Steward had access to Indian agents’ reports and referenced some of them. The fact that he chose not to connect Sam to the Tosawihi may reflect his reluctance to acknowl-edge the Tosawihi as an entity.

Buck’s Tosawihi at Carlin FarmsMeanwhile, agents reported Buck and his group as living at Carlin Farms, just south of the Tosawihi Quarry area. They had probably moved there as early as 1873. The Carlin Farms Reserve of between seven hundred and one thousand acres was established for Newe living around Battle Mountain,


Carlin, and Elko (OIA 1879b; Reno Evening Gazette 1879). The local agent began settling Shoshones on Carlin Farms between 1873 and 1875 (Palmer et al. 1879), although there is some evidence that Shoshones initiated the farming settlement on their own. By 1879, approximately three hundred Western Shoshones were living on the Farms and had three hundred acres under cultivation in grain, potatoes, and vegetables. But pressure from two local entrepreneurs forced the Carlin Farms Shoshones to abandon their “remarkable progress.” One of the entrepreneurs claimed that the agent had unlawfully ejected him from reservation lands after he and his partner had filed a claim on it in 1875 (OIA 1878; Reno Evening Gazette 1879). Despite a petition of protest signed by sixteen “Captains and Leading Men of these Western Shoshonee Indians in council” including “captains” George, Buck, and others (OIA 1879a), Western Shoshones living at Carlin Farms were moved to the Duck Valley Reservation, which Levi Gheen had established at Sam’s insistence in 1877. Newe west of the quarry area who had intermarried with Paiutes in Paradise Valley and along the Quinn River, and who may have moved there due to military-political events of the 1860s, were invited by Sam to move to the Duck Valley Reservation (OIA 1880b, 1884). They may have been Tosawihi. Thus, due to an ironic succession of administrative actions, the two different groups of Tosawihi, and perhaps descendents of kin-related Tosawihi from Paradise Valley, were reunited. In subsequent years, Newe following the leadership of Tutuwa in the Reese River Valley-Austin area began moving north and came to constitute the dominant kin groups at Battle Mountain and in-between there and the Tosawihi Quarry. Their descendents continue to prevail at the Battle Mountain Indian Colony (Clemmer 1974, 1990).

Toward Explanation

Several inferences can be made from the Indian agents’ reports between 1852 and 1877. First, the Tosawihi obviously had been a real enough socio-political entity to merit consistent mention between 1852 and 1862. Second, by 1861 they had split into two distinct groups with two distinct leaders. One of these leaders was Buck, who may well have pursued a political tactic developed by his predecessor, Sho-kup. This tactic seems to have been based on an alliance with the homesteaders who were coming into Newe territory and a subsistence strategy based in farming, first on Huntington Creek, a southern tributary of the Humboldt River, and then at Carlin Farms, along Maggie Creek, a northern tributary. Third, the Tosawihi who did not favor this subsistence strategy continued transhumancy, going between the pine-


nut–gathering areas in the northern Ruby Valley or in the Reese River Val-ley just south of the Humboldt River and fishing areas by the Snake River and its tributaries to the north. Fourth, by 1873 this transhumant group was led by Sam. Sam’s political tactic also favored an alliance, but with agent Gheen rather than with homesteaders, and was calculated to per-suade Gheen to establish a reservation close to fishing resources. Finally, an inevitable conclusion is that if the Tosawihi had two different leaders and consisted of two different groups with two very different subsistence strategies, they clearly could not constitute a single band. Moreover, if they so easily split into two groups in 1860, they could not have had very much in the way of band solidarity, even granting “fluidity of membership” to band-level societies. Utilizing Stewart’s data and conclusions, as well as those of Julian Stew-ard and the theoretical arguments of Service, Catherine S. Fowler suggests that the opposing viewpoints could be reconciled. Fowler has achieved some reconciliation of Steward’s “no-band” position and Stewart’s assertion of “bands-with-territories” for the Northern Paiute. On the basis of Willard Park’s field notes, Fowler (1982; see also 1990) concluded that among the Northern Paiute, camp groups consisting of up to ten coresident families occupied discrete “home districts” and were given, or perhaps asserted, food-name designations. These groups played key roles in defining rights to resources. Although individuals moved freely between home districts, they were expected to “check in” with local residents before gathering food. Access to food was never denied, but birthplace and kinship would always tie an individual to his or her home district. Thus, the home district pro-vided a lasting regional identity to individuals raised there, and an indi-vidual would always be tied to his or her home district. One of Fowler’s consultants, who had served as an interpreter for both Julian Steward and Willard Park in the 1930s, put it this way: “It all depends on where you were raised. Later some people might have you as part of their group but some will always think of you as an outsider” (C. S. Fowler 1982: 125). This testimony gives a picture of people with a strong sense of territo-riality and supra-family solidarity, despite Steward’s (1955: 116) insistence to the contrary, and despite their not being a “band.” Being acknowledged as having membership in a food-named group must have been the same as being acknowledged as having membership in a flint-named group. Just like the Northern Paiute in Park’s ethnographic notes, the Tosawihi did not have to have bandness to have either “groupness,” “namedness,” or territories where they were at home with subsistence resources. Tosawihi seasonal transhumance and the mechanisms for fissioning when necessary promoted successful adaptation and mitigated against


overtaxing resources in any particular area. Tosawihi customs enabled them to take advantage of very different kinds of resources, in latitudes 150–200 miles distant from one another, in distinctly different ecosystems. Seasonal transhumance in response to availability of fish constituted the key to Tosa-wihi success in the contact era as well as aboriginally. Sam was a leader who clearly knew the resource base of the upper Owyhee and Bruneau drainages and that of the Snake River and its tributaries and was able to secure a reser-vation within one of the Tosawihi use areas. Tosawihis’ ability to “socially fragment” into two different groups, one that settled and farmed, first on Huntington Creek, the southern Fork of the Humboldt (ARCIA 1857), and in Ruby Valley and then later on the Humboldt at Carlin Farms, and one that moved, catching fish and hunting game and moving between the Reese River Valley and the Middle Snake River-Duck Valley area, also came in handy. It seems just as empirically valid to regard the cultural adaptations to ecological resource availability as socially enabling, rather than socially fragmenting. When what eventually became Sam’s Tosawihi group split from Buck’s group in 1860, the mechanisms used to do so were probably choices that people made to stay with mother’s relatives or with father’s relatives. But the people who departed had to not only have a place to go, but also knowl-edge of what their subsistence and economic alternatives would be there. The Tosawihi had, in fact, developed a degree of solidarity not on the basis of “bandness” but rather on the basis of a complex kinship system that operated in tandem with careful resource use based on encyclopedic shared knowledge of a very large area stretching from the Owyhee River in what is now southern Oregon through the Snake and Bruneau River drainages west of Glenn’s Ferry in Idaho south to Ruby Valley to the southeast and Reese River and the White Mountains to the southwest. Does not the fact that Sam was able to maintain his group, consistently lobby for “his” reser-vation, and oppose the temporary but powerful agents Powell and Ingalls in their efforts to move Western Shoshones to Fort Hall reflect an attachment to the Duck Valley-Middle Snake River9–Upper Owyhee area and a certain degree of “territoriality”?

Conclusions: Rethinking “Bandness”

The Tosawihi: An “Ethnie”?If the Tosawihi were not a band, yet are still an identifiable entity, then what were they? I suggest the term ethnie best describes what they were. An ethnie is a collectivity of people possessing symbolic, cognitive, and norma-tive elements, as well as behavioral practices, that bind them together as a


population over generations and distinguish them from other populations. It is self-identified and is identified by others as having a particular pattern of cultural characteristics, a sense of historical commonality, a particular territory, and either a unilineal social organization or a “cluster of over-lapping, egocentric, concentric kin circles” (Van den Berghe 1981: 22–23; Smith 1986: 22–31). An ethnie does not necessarily have any political orga-nization, initially, that binds it together. Sociologist Anthony Smith derives the origins of the term from the Greek ethnos. The French term settles on one characteristic that is diagnostic: the existence of a solidarity, a oneness, that transcends the diversity of its individual components so that the ethnie seems to have an identity, a life, a destiny, a quality of its very own. It takes on the concreteness of a social fact. Smith (1986: 22–41) identifies the following dimensions common to any particular ethnie and important in its formation: a collective name, a common myth of descent, a shared history, a distinctive shared solidarity, sedentarization and nostalgia, organized religion, and warfare. Here Smith muddies the definitional waters a little bit. It is obvious that an ethnie must have a collective name and some sense of solidarity, but “organized” reli-gion is a matter of researchers’ perceptions and judgments and it is diffi-cult to see why warfare would be a necessary component. Obviously, ethnie is connected with “ethnicity” and “culture” (Clark 2008, following Hall 1997), but is not the same thing as either of these. An ethnie is an actual group of people: a sociologically defined group with a historically defined continuity, a culturally defined way of doing things, and a geographically defined locational orientation. With a bit of modification of the definition, I do not see why the Tosawihi cannot be called an ethnie. Steward’s failing was that he did not connect the dots. He did not see, or perhaps did not want to acknowledge, that the people he reported as moving seasonally between the pine-nut–gathering areas south of the Humboldt and the fish-catching areas on the Snake and its tributaries were the Tosawihi. Burdened by the necessity to see groups as either bands or nothing, Steward could not see that they were something else: an identity that became known to non-Indians because the Tosawihi used the emigrant trails and the Office of Indian Affairs’s agent system to work the emigrants’ needs and take advantage of agents’ eagerness to find “peaceable” Indians over which they could exercise jurisdiction. Astute political leadership does not necessarily imply or depend upon band organization. Western Shoshone leaders were either good communal task organizers, such as “rabbit bosses” or “antelope bosses”;10 raconteurs of myths, legends, folklore, and tradi-tions at festivals; or shamans (Steward 1938: 246–47; Clemmer 1996). Tosa-wihi was not a mere label of convenience or confusion. They were, in fact, a


real social entity, despite having diverse political leadership and despite not being a band. Yet it was more than just not connecting the dots that led Steward to unfounded assumptions and confusion. It was trying to fit the Tosawihi into a neo-evolutionary typology that required them to be either a band or a not-band, and if a not-band, then nothing except an amorphous collection of families. Steward (1938: 163) vaguely suggested that Powell and Ingalls’s “chiefs” that they identified for the Shoshones around Battle Mountain—in other words, the Tosawihi—were “men who were elevated to rank during the Indian wars.” But we must ask, what Indian wars? Steward (1955: 113) later called the bands they led “predatory bands” that arose after 1845 and then dissolved “by 1870 or soon thereafter when the United States Army defeated them,” but never explained why “bandness” would have been associated with “predatoriness” or exactly who the “predatory bands” were. In fact, although the “raiders” (113) that the U.S. Army pursued and fought were most likely Gosiute Shoshone, and although rumors abounded for years about the “White Knives” being responsible for “depredations” along the emigrant road and particularly some at Gravelly Ford in 1861, the army took revenge primarily on a small group of Northwestern Sho-shone camped along Bear River on the Idaho-Utah border in 1861–62 (Madsen 1985: 178–94, 199), not in 1870 or thereafter. Tosawihi leaders mainly seem to have been effective in getting reservations established, not as military leaders. The point here is that the Tosawihi did not conform to Steward’s branding of bands as military organizations. They were neither a band nor an amorphous collection of families. The mechanisms for White Knife people themselves, as well as for others, to keep track of their identity were such customs as postnuptial residence rules and kin terminology and knowledge of resources in specific areas. Ecological and political factors worked in conjunction with cultural and psychological factors in the for-mation of what might have looked like “bands” to contemporary observers such as the Indian agents and Powell and Ingalls and resulted in Steward dismissing the reports of the existence of the Tosawihi because it did not readily fit his schema. Is it appropriate or proper to force anthropology’s or history’s socio-political terminology on colonized peoples? Rethinking “bandness” in terms of ethnie promises much more fruitful results for analyzing what Bodley (2000: 19) has called “domestic scale societies” generally, whether they are mobile or sedentary, hunter-gatherer-fishers or horticulturalists, and whether the analysis refers to aboriginal or contact situations. Ethnie presents an alter-native conceptualization and terminology that accounts for how the Tosa-wihi coalesced into a single sociocultural entity that got them designated


as the “White Knife Shoshoni of Nevada” in the anthropological literature, then split into two or three different groups, and then came back together again. Ethnie should not be automatically and necessarily expected to have a band, tribal, chiefdom, or national level political organization, or any par-ticular political organizational form for that matter, that unites it. There may well be more than one ethnie that share the same culture, and by the same token, there may be several different ethnies subsumed under one political organization. Political leadership can be analyzed and defined as a separate variable in relation to ethnie. Leadership, use of ecological resources, and accommodation of new economic and demographic circumstances should not be assessed in terms of changes within a rigid sociopolitical typology, but rather, should be analyzed in terms of the interaction between univer-sal human cultural responses to social and biological circumstances and the localized conditions within which those responses occur. If the band level of political organization has to be qualified by modifiers such as “patrilocal” or “patrilineal,” “bilateral,” “composite,” and “predatory,” and is a catch-all category that is applied to the Kalahari !Kung, the Owens Valley Paiute, and the highly mobile and militarily effective Plains groups such as the Coman-che, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, what is gained by designating all these groups as “band level societies”? The Tosawihi case is not meant to “disprove” the validity of the concept of “bandness,” the “family level of sociocultural inte-gration,” or the fact that sociocultural evolution has occurred. Rather, the Tosawihi case suggests that with the concept of ethnie, we would not need to resort to such awkward and self-defeating concepts such as “the lack of bands,” “tribes without rulers,” or ecological adaptations that are suppos-edly socially fragmenting rather than socially enabling.

The Tosawihi Ethnie and Thornton’s DilemmaWe can now return to “Thornton’s dilemma.” Rather than being a rigidly bounded “band” or being nonexistent, the figment of rhetorical imagina-tion, the Tosawihi ethnie almost perfectly replicates the situation hypotheti-cally conceptualized by Ruben (1983: 237) and quoted at length by Thorn-ton. However, instead of supporting Thornton’s insistence that “rhetorical wholes are not social entities” but rather “are cognitive constructs that are relative to the scale and scope of the observer’s view,” Ruben’s analogy argues for a particular named group being a very real entity occupying a particular space that can, in fact, be really observed. It is not the existence of the group that must be questioned; rather, it is the imagined label such as “band” that must be questioned. Thus, a spatially locatable entity, the Tosawihi, at a particular time and in a particular space, or in several spaces at a particular time, “in fact do have one set of structural relations that hold between them and not another” (237). To illustrate this final point, I


offer the following transposition of Ruben’s “bus stop” analogy (238), with which he ends his discussion, into a hypothetical ethnographic observation based on the data I have presented above.

If the queue waiting for the 38 bus [fishers with harpoons waiting for salmon to jump at Salmon Falls on the Snake River] forms itself into local branch 38 of the bus-users association [“salmon eaters” of the Basin-Plateau subsistence resource users’ kin-and-marriage links], the individuals in the queue . . . are the members, not the parts, of the local branch of the bus users’ association [subsistence resources users’ kin-and-marriage links]. Each of the individuals in the queue [living on the Snake River] is a material entity and so is the queue [the subsistence resource-using group] that they make up. No material entity can com-pletely occupy the same total spatial position occupied by the queue [the subsistence resource-using group] at the same time unless it is just identical with the queue. On the other hand, the local association of bus-users [salmon-eaters] is a social entity, and if it did have parts, per-haps committees [extended families], they would also be social enti-ties. . . . The same individuals might form themselves into any number of analogous associations they care to create [such as the about-to-depart-for-Reese-River-to-become-pine-nut-eaters-in-October].

Thus does an ethnie remain an ethnie, even though it may be, in particular historical periods, spatially discontinuous in terms of where its members are, and it can change spatial positions without necessarily being either a band or a not-band.

Notes

1 Schultz and Lavenda (2001: 279–81) note that the neo-evolutionary schema has generated some degree of stereotyping and prejudice about groups such as the Western Shoshone who are slotted into the lower rungs of the schema.

2 For several earlier generations of anthropology students, this was even more the case. Scarcely a single textbook published between 1968 and 1987 did not use the Western Shoshone as a pristine, aboriginal exemplar of hunter-gatherer-foragers. See, for example, Barnouw 1971 (34–35), Clifton 1968 (483–89), Ham-mond 1978 (107, 135, 278–81), Haviland 1974 (332), Murphy 1986 (121–26), Pelto and Pelto 1976 (196, 246–47), Schusky 1987 (116–17), and Taylor 1974 (41, 347).

3 Harris’s career as an anthropologist was derailed when he was fired because of his critical investigation of colonial abuses while he worked for the United Nations and then when he was less than cooperative with the U.S. Senate’s witch-hunting during the 1950s (Price 2004: 156–61).

4 Bull Run Creek 5 Not all of the Agaiduka were Tosawihi. Some were Bruneau Shoshone who were


semisedentary, moving within a much smaller range between the confluence of the Bruneau and Snake rivers and the “Camas Prairie” north of the Snake (see Plew 1990).

6 Powell and Ingalls’s table actually lists thirty-three “tribes” (Fowler and Fowler 1971: 185).

7 John Wesley Powell made the earliest geological descriptions of the Grand Canyon, founded the Bureau of American Ethnology, served as director of both the bureau and the U.S. Geological Survey in the late nineteenth century, and was a dedicated sociocultural evolutionist.

8 Timuk and Mose, who had also signed the 1863 treaty, and who were not Tosa-wihi, emerged along with Tosaweentsoap (also To-sho-win-tso-go) as leaders in Ruby Valley (J. Steward 1938: 149).

9 Although a reservation was briefly contemplated at Salmon Falls, the area was coveted by non-Indians and Northern Shoshones on the Upper Snake River above the falls, as well as some Northwestern Shoshone from southern Idaho-northern Utah, and a few Bruneau Shoshone and Bannocks were therefore forcibly located to the Fort Hall Reservation in 1869.

10 Julian Steward (1938: 34) called them “antelope shamans.”

References

ARCIA (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs)1852 J. H. Holeman to Commissioner of Indian Affairs (CIA) Pp. 149–55.

Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.1857 Hurt to Young. #98, September, 1856. Pp. 778–83. Executive Docu-

ments. Senate of the United States, Third Session, Thirty-Fourth Con-gress, 1856–57. Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, Printer.

1858 Forney to CIA. Pp. 209–13. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

1862a Hatch to Doty. #39. Pp. 349–54. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

1862b Wasson to Nye, 28 January 1861. Pp. 362–64. Washington, DC: Gov-ernment Printing Office.

1864 Lockhart to Nye. #48, 29 August 1864. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

1874 John Wesley Powell and George W. Ingalls, “Report on the Conditions of the . . . . Western Shoshones of Nevada.” Pp. 41–46. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

1877 Gheen to CIA, 24 August 1877. Pp. 151–53. Washington, DC: Govern-ment Printing Office.

Arkush, Brooke S.1999 Numic Pronghorn Exploitation: A Reassessment of Stewardian-Derived

Models of Big-Game Hunting in the Great Basin. In Julian Steward and the Great Basin: The Making of an Anthropologist. Richard O. Clemmer, L. Daniel Myers, and Mary Elizabeth Rudden, eds. Pp. 35–52. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Barnouw, Victor1971 An Introduction to Anthropology. Vol. 2, Ethnology. Homewood, IL: The

Dorsey Press.


Bodley, John2000 Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System. 3rd ed.

Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing.Burton, Richard

1862 The City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California. 2nd ed. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts.

Clark, Bonnie J.2008 Ethnicity. In Encyclopedia of Archaeology. Deborah M. Pearsall, ed. Pp.

1155–57. New York: Academic Press.Clemmer, Richard O.

1974 Field notes in author’s possession.1987 The Tail of the Elephant: Indians in Emigrant Diaries from the Humboldt

Trail, 1841–1863. Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 30(4): 269–90.1990 From Ethnie to Ethnicity: Conditions Affecting Tosawihi (“White

Knife”) Shoshone Culture and Identity in the Reservation Era. Report. Carson City: Department of Anthropology, Nevada State Museum.

1996 Ideology and Identity: Western Shoshoni “Cannibal Myth” as Ethno-National Narrative. Journal of Anthropological Research 52: 207–23.

2004 “The Legal Effect of the Judgment”: Indian Land Claims, Ecological Anthropology, Social Impact Assessment, and the Public Domain. Human Organization 63(3): 334–45.

Clifton, James1968 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.

Crawford, P. V.1924 Journal of a Trip across the Plains, 1851. Quarterly of the Oregon Histori-

cal Society 25 (June): 136–59.Crum, Steven J.

1994 The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

1999 Julian Steward’s Vision of the Great Basin: A Critique and Response. In Julian Steward and the Great Basin: The Making of an Anthropologist. Richard O. Clemmer, L. Daniel Myers, and Mary Elizabeth Rudden, eds. Pp. 117–27. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Evermann, Barton W.1896 A Preliminary Report upon Salmon Investigation in Idaho in 1894. Bul-

letin of the U.S. Fish Commission 15: 253–84.Fowler, Catherine S.

1982 Food-Named Groups among the Northern Paiute in North America’s Great Basin: An Ecological Interpretation. In Resource Managers: North American and Australian Hunter-Gatherers. Nancy M. Williams and Eugene S. Hahn, eds. Pp. 113–29. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Selected Symposium No. 67. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Fowler, Catherine S., ed.1990 Willard Z. Park’s Ethnographic Notes on the Northern Paiute of Western

Nevada, 1933–1944. Anthropological Papers No. 114. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Fowler, Don D.1966 Great Basin Social Organization. In The Current Status of Anthropologi-

cal Research in the Great Basin: 1964. Warren d’Azevedo et al., eds. Pp.


57–74. Technical Report Series S-H, Social Sciences and Humanities Publications No. 1. Reno, NV: Desert Research Institute.

Fowler, Don D., and Catherine S. Fowler, eds.1971 Anthropology of the Numa: John Wesley Powell’s Manuscripts on the Numic

Peoples of Western North America, 1868–1880. Smithsonian Contribu-tions to Anthropology No. 14. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu-tion Press.

Hall, Jonathan M.1997 Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Hammond, Peter

1978 Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology. New York: Macmillan.

Handsaker, Samuel1853 Journal of an Overland Trip to Oregon via South Pass, Fort Bridger,

Salt Lake City, Fort Boise, Grande Ronde, the Dalles, and the Columbia River (27 April–5 October 1853). Manuscript #FAC 590. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.

Hanna, Esther Belle (McMillan)1852 Diary of Overland Journey from Pittsburgh, PA, to Oregon via South

Pass, Fort Hall, the Dalles, and by Wagon Road across the Cascades to Oregon City, 1852. Typescript. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.

Harris, Jack1938 The Western Shoshone. American Anthropologist 40: 407–11.1940 The White Knife Shoshoni of Nevada. In Acculturation in Seven

American Indian Tribes. Ralph Linton, ed. Pp. 39–111. New York: D. Appleton-Century.

Harris, Marvin1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Harper and Row.

Haviland, William A.1974 Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.1999 Cultural Anthropology. 9th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Keesing, Roger M., and Andrew Strathern1998 Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective. 3rd ed. Fort Worth,

TX: Harcourt Brace.Kerns, Virginia

1999 Learning the Land. In Julian Steward and the Great Basin: The Making of an Anthropologist. Richard O. Clemmer, L. Daniel Myers, and Mary Elizabeth Rudden, eds. Pp. 1–18. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

2003 Scenes from the High Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Layton, Thomas1978 From Pottage to Portage: A Perspective on Aboriginal Horse Use in the

Northern Great Basin Prior to 1850. Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 20: 241–51.

Madsen, Brigham1985 The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre. Salt Lake City: Uni-

versity of Utah Press.


Murphy, Robert F.1986 Cultural and Social Anthropology. 2nd ed. New York: Prentice-Hall.

Murphy, Robert F., and Yolanda Murphy1960 Shoshone-Bannock Subsistence and Society. University of California

Anthropological Records 16(7): 293–338.1986 Northern Shoshone and Bannock. In Handbook of North American Indi-

ans. Vol. 11. Great Basin. Warren d’Azevedo, ed. Pp. 284–307. Washing-ton, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

Nevada Territorial Records1862 Wasson to Nye, January 1862. Folder T-2, Box TERR-0108. Nevada

State Library Archives, Carson City.OIA (Office of Indian Affairs)

1856 Bernhill to Commissioner of Indian Affairs (CIA), 14 June 1856. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,898.

1858 Cumming to Mix, 5 November 1858. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,898.

1863 Doty to Dole, 10 November 1863. National Archives and Records Cen-ter, microfilm roll M-234,901.

1867 Dwight to CIA, 27 July 1867. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,538.

1869a Parker to Gheen, 1 April 1869. Box 391, Western Shoshone Agency, record group 75. National Archives and Records Center, San Bruno, CA.

1869b Gheen to Douglas, 29 December 1869. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,539.

1870a Gheen to Douglas, 30 January 1870. Box 391, Western Shoshone Agency, record group 75. National Archives and Records Center, San Bruno, CA.

1870b Gheen to Douglas, 18 May 1870. National Archives and Records Cen-ter, microfilm roll M-837,1.

1870c Statistical Report 1870 of Western Bands Shoshoni and Other Indians in Nye and Elko and Lincoln Counties by Levi Gheen, Treasure City, NV, 10 July 1870. Box 1, record group 75. National Archives and Records Center, San Bruno, CA.

1873a Ingalls to Gheen, 15 December 1873. Box 391, Western Shoshone Agency, record group 75. National Archives and Records Center, San Bruno, CA.

1873b Statistical Report of Western Bands of Shoshone and Other Indians in Elko and White Pine Counties by Levi Gheen, Farmer for Western Shoshones Indians in Charge of L. Gheen, Hamilton, Nevada, 25 Janu-ary 1873. Box 1, Western Shoshone Agency, record group 75. National Archives and Records Center, San Bruno, CA.

1875a Gheen to Smith, 10 November 1875. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,541.

1875b Gheen to Smith, 30 November 1875. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,541.

1878 Barnes to CIA, 15 October 1878. National Archives and Records Cen-ter, microfilm roll M-234,543.

1879a Statement by Captain George and 15 Other Captains and Leading Men of the Western Shoshone Nation, Signatures of the Above in Council,


25 March 1879. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,544.

1879b Letter from Governor of Nevada John H. Kinkead to Hon. R. M. Dag-gett, M.C., 17 March 1879. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,544.

1880a Affidavits of Hanery (or Henry) Boyle and Levi Harris, 10 January 1880. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,545.

1880b How to CIA, 1 May 1880. National Archives and Records Center, microfilm roll M-234,545.

1884 Mayhugh to CIA, 16 August 1884. Box 372, Western Shoshone Agency, record group 75. National Archives and Records Center, San Bruno, CA.

Palmer, Captain John A., and nine Carlin citizens1879 Letter to the editor. Reno Evening Gazette. March 17.

Pelto, Retel, and Pertti Pelto1976 The Human Adventure. New York: Macmillan.

Pinkoski, Marc2008 Julian Steward, American Anthropology, and Colonialism. Histories of

Anthropology Annual 4: 172–204.Plew, Mark G.

1990 Modelling Alternative Subsistence Strategies for the Middle Snake River. North American Archaeologist 11: 1–15.

Powell, John Wesley, and G. W. Ingalls1873 Tabular Statement of Indians Visited by Special Indian Commissioners,

J. W. Powell and G. W. Ingalls. Reproduced in Fowler and Fowler, eds. 1971. Pp. 104–5.

Price, David H.2004 Threatening Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rabinow, Paul1986 Representations Are Social Facts. In Writing Culture. James Clifford

and George E. Marcus, eds. Pp. 234–61. Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press.

Reno Evening Gazette1879 More of the Same: Peaceable Indians to Be Robbed of Their Farms

by Great White Father. 17 March. Reno: Nevada Historical Society Archives.

Ruben, David-Hillel1983 Social Wholes and Parts. Mind 92: 219–38.

Schultz, Emily, and Robert Lavenda2001 Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition. 3rd ed. Mountain

View, CA: Mayfield Publishing.Schusky, Ernest

1987 Introducing Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Scupin, Raymond

2003 Cultural Anthropology: A Global Perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Service, Elman1962 Primitive Social Organization. New York: Random House.

Smith, Anthony D.1986 The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.


Steward, Frances L.1975 The Seasonal Availability of Fish Species Used by the Coast Tshimshian

of Northern British Columbia. SYESIS 8: 375–88.Steward, Julian H.

1936 The Economic and Social Basis of Primitive Bands. In Essays Presented to A. L. Kroeber. Robert H. Lowie, ed. Pp. 331–50. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1938 Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Socio-Political Groups. Bulletin Number 120. Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

1939 Some Observations on Shoshonean Distribution. American Anthropolo-gist 41: 261–65.

1955 Theory of Culture Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.1968 Review of The Current Status of Anthropological Research in the Great

Basin, 1964. American Antiquity 33(2): 264–67.1970 The Foundations of Basin Plateau Shoshonean Society. In Languages

and Cultures of Western North America: Essays in Honor of Sven S. Lilje-blad. Earl H. Swanson, ed. Pp. 113–51. Pocatello: Idaho State University Press.

Stewart, Omer C.1939 The Northern Paiute Bands. University of California Anthropological

Records 2(3): 127–49.1941 Culture Element Distributions XVI: Northern Paiute. University of Cali-

fornia Anthropological Records 4(3): 361–446.1966 Tribal Distributions and Boundaries in the Great Basin. In The Cur-

rent Status of Anthropological Research in the Great Basin, 1964. Warren D’Azevedo et al., eds. Pp. 167–238. Reno: University of Nevada Press.

1978 The Western Shoshone of Nevada and the U.S. Government, 1863–1950. In Selected Papers from the 14th Great Basin Anthropological Conference. Donald R. Tuohy, ed. Pp. 77–114. Publication in Archaeology, Ethnol-ogy, and History No. 11. Socorro, NM: Ballena Press.

1980 Temoke Band of Shoshone and the Oasis Concept. Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 23(4): 246–61.

Taylor, Robert1974 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Thomas, David Hurst1983 On Steward’s Model of Shoshonean Sociopolitical Organization: A

Great Bias in the Basin? In The Development of Political Organization in Native North America. Elizabeth Tooker and Morton H. Fried, eds. Pp. 59–67. Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society.

Thornton, Robert J.1988 The Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism. Cultural Anthropology 3(3):

285–303.Van den Berghe, Pierre L.

1981 The Ethnic Phenomenon. New York: Elsevier.Watson, William

1985 Journal of an Overland Journey to Oregon Made in the Year 1849. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press.

Documents

Band, Not-Band, Or Ethnie - Who Were the White Knife People (Tosawihi) - - Resolution of a 'Mereological' Dilemma