Where Indians Are Cowboys Professor Chronicles History, Culture Of Shoshone-Paiute Cattle Ranchers

In the grassy meadows of the Shoshone-Paiutes’ Duck Valley Reservation straddling the Idaho-Nevada border, the cowboys are Indians.

Nomadic bands of Shoshone and Northern Paiutes relegated to the reservation at the turn of the century have built a complex culture around cattle ranching that influences many aspects of their lives.

“It’s one of the reasons why that particular reservation has the cultural integrity that it does,” Boise State University anthropology professor Robert McCarl said. “It hasn’t been checkerboarded, hasn’t been divided up.”

With the help of former tribal Chairman Lindsay Manning, McCarl is recording photographs, interviews and other documents into computerized archives. Those records will be used in collections for the university, the tribes and the contributing families.

He also anticipates a CD-ROM program for Idaho’s public schools.

“I sometimes think it’s a real disservice that when kids hit the fourth-grade curriculum and they tend to study Indian peoples, they are only a 19th-century phenomenon,” he said.

Manning, who is working on a teaching degree at Boise State University after 20 years in tribal government, believes the project can begin closing the growing gap between reservation children and the tribes’ origins.

“They come to an age, and it becomes an identity crisis,” Manning said. With the archive, “We’re not only recording the past but taking a snapshot of the present.”

Once the tribes were relegated at Duck Valley, it became clear to the then-War Department that they needed some kind of subsistence.

“The Indian agents, or extension agents, gave families a grubstake of sorts: a shovel, a mule,” McCarl said. “Originally, a lot of their energies were dedicated to small self-contained farms with hand-dug drainage ditches, fruit trees, hand-hewn log cabins.”

The Shoshone-Paiutes also started raising horses - lots of horses - before realizing that if they did not want all their grazing lands dedicated to horses, they had to replace some with cattle.

Unlike other reservations, the land in Duck Valley is held in common. Under the Western Shoshone Livestock Association, each family may own individual cattle. But the grazing, veterinary and stud fees are all handled communally as a ranching cooperative, McCarl said.

A lot of the young men took jobs with the huge non-Indian ranches around the reservation, and learned the trade of a “buckaroo” - Great Basin slang for cowboy.

“There’s actually a kind of pecking order,” McCarl said. “If you’re a buckaroo, that puts you in a much different status than a hand that stays back on the ranch and takes care of the grounds.”

“From the tiniest kid in a family, everybody works. Ranching isn’t a trade for the delicate or faint of heart. It’s a bloody business.”

The cowboy life has worked its way into tribal art. Artists weave handmade riatas to catch ponies. They adorn leather gauntlets with bead patterns.

And they craft the tapadera, a kind of “leather bumper” on the saddle stirrups to keep them from snagging on sagebrush. McCarl said that is a direct link to the vaqueros, the cowboys of Mexico.

The buckaroos still compose folk songs, what they call “tear jerkers,” to sing around the camp.

The Shoshone-Paiutes also have held onto their tribal heritage while blending it with Main Street reality. Their Fourth of July celebration is a case in point.

“There are a number of the veterans groups that are very, very active,” McCarl said. “Having military experience and being a veteran is considered a prestigious role in Indian society.”

The tribes revere their land - an austere tract the federal government found easy to part with and still seems to disregard. Sonic booms by jet sorties from the Mountain Home Air Force Base repeatedly shudder their quiet ranches and sacred sites.

McCarl sees the activity as the equivalent of “low-level exercises over a cathedral on a Sunday morning.”

Cowboy Reggie Sope, who is quoted by McCarl in a recent article on the project, still teaches the tribes children to combine the Shoshone-Paiute’s two worlds - the cowboy life and the Indian tradition.

“There are lots of rules in the traditional way and kids still need to know what the rules are. Kids sit at a drum and that is how they learn. Before you drum, you sweat.”