The institution of police, which was obviously borrowed from Wyoming, is of unknown antiquity. It was largely civil and consisted of four or five middle-aged men, Bannock or Shoshoni, who had a civic spirit. They were selected and instructed by the council.
Actual soldier societies were not present in Idaho. The policemen were primarily responsible for keeping the traveling band together and were secondarily concerned with the buffalo hunt.
We specifically queried our Shoshone and Bannock informants on the presence of police societies or of any techniques for control of impulsive buffalo hunters. The responses were all negative, nor is there any historical reference to police societies. The Shoshone and Bannock, we learned from contemporary Indians, needed no coercion to keep them from premature and individual preying upon a buffalo herd. Such action would not be to any individual's self-interest, it was said, and the censure of the community imposed sufficient control over individual behavior. But we cannot deny the existence of the two societies or of the dances associated with them. Rather, we would surmise that the police societies were not important elements in social control nor were they ever a key element in Shoshone social structure; the fact that they have been only imperfectly preserved in traditional knowledge is, itself, of some significance. We hypothesize, then, that the symbolic content of soldier societies had reached the Shoshone without major effects on the ordering of personal and group relations. These conclusions are much akin to Wallace and Hoebel's for the Comanche, who were, it seems, able to hunt buffalo quite effectively without institutionalized coercive restraints (Wallace and Hoebel, 1952, pp. 56-57).
Chieftaincy was more highly developed in the eastern sectors of the Shoshone occupancy than among the people farther west. But even among the mounted bands, the authority of the chiefs was limited. Lewis and Clark commented on the essentially egalitarian nature of Shoshone society, and later travelers present evidence leading to the same conclusion. The wealth differentiation characteristic of the later history of other Plains tribes never became a significant factor among the Shoshone. This is no doubt owing in part to their weak military position and the consequent heavy losses of horses to enemy tribes. Moreover, the Shoshone were only marginally involved in the buffalo-hide trade, and large horse herds and extensive polygyny did not have the utility that they did among, for example, the Blackfoot, who employed women as an essential part of the labor force (cf. Lewis, 1942).