Tukudeka Erotic

The Tukudeka took their name from what they hunted. In Shoshoni the word means sheep eaters, and the bighorn sheep of the northern Rockies shaped almost everything about how this band of Mountain Shoshone lived. Their relatives on the plains built their lives around horses and buffalo, but the Tukudeka stayed high. They worked the ridges and basins of what is now Yellowstone National Park, the Absaroka and Wind River ranges of Wyoming, and the mountains of central Idaho and southwestern Montana. Many families kept dogs rather than horses and used them to carry their camps between seasonal hunting grounds.

They spoke Shoshoni, a Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family. Shoshone communities across the Great Basin and the Snake River country share the language, and it is closely related to Comanche. Shoshone band names were food names, not fixed tribal borders. A family that moved down to the rivers and lived on fish could become salmon eaters, and one that took up horseback buffalo hunting could become buffalo eaters. The Tukudeka were less a closed tribe than a way of making a living in the mountains.

That living took real skill. Hunters built log catch pens and drive fences to steer bighorns into traps, and remains of some still stand in the high country. To make their bows, they softened ram horn with heat, shaped it and backed it with sinew. People across the region prized these bows, and a single one could be traded for horses. Their tanned sheep and deer hides impressed outsiders. A fur trapper who came across a Tukudeka camp in the Lamar Valley in the 1830s described the people there as well dressed and content. Religious life centered on puha, the spiritual power Shoshone people sought through dreams and solitary vigils. Researchers have linked the ghostly figures carved into rock at Dinwoody in the Wind River Basin to Mountain Shoshone belief.

The nineteenth century ended life in the mountains. Early Yellowstone officials described the Sheep Eaters as a timid, poor remnant. For decades the park also told visitors that Native people had avoided the geyser country, a story historians and archaeologists have since disproved. In Idaho, the Army's 1879 Sheepeater campaign chased a small group through the Salmon River Mountains over killings that may not have been theirs. By the 1880s most Tukudeka had moved onto reservations, mainly Wind River in Wyoming and Fort Hall and Lemhi in Idaho. Their descendants are enrolled today among the Eastern Shoshone and the Shoshone-Bannock, and some families still trace their line to the Sheep Eaters.