In the evening two hundred Indians passed our camp, on their way to the village, which was situated at the lower butte. They were Ponacks, as they are generally called by the hunters, or Po-nah-ke as they call themselves. They were generally mounted on poor jaded horses, and were illy clad.
In November, 1832, it was reported that "a village of Snakes and Ponacks amounting to about two hundred lodges on Gordiez [Big Lost] River" was attacked by a party of Blackfoot (ibid., pp. 185-186). The "Snakes" drove them off, but the "Horn Chief" was killed. The Horn Chief was reported on the Bear River in 1830 (ibid., pp. 71-73). This group may have been the same one mentioned a month later as being in winter camp on the Portneuf River (ibid., p. 188). Another Bannock camp was found in December, 1832, on the Blackfoot River. Ferris wrote (ibid., pp. 189-190):
I visited their village on the 20th and found these miserable wretches to the number of eighty or one hundred families, half-naked, and without lodges, except in one or two instances. They had formed, however, little huts of sage roots, which were yet so open and ill calculated to shield them from the extreme cold, that I could not conceive how they were able to endure such severe exposure.
Ferris' description does not seem typical of the Plainslike Bannock Indians. There are two possible explanations: these Bannock had been attacked by hostiles and had lost their possessions; or they had recently moved westward from Oregon. The latter possibility cannot be ruled out, for the Bannock and the Northern Paiute were in contact during the salmon season and the Oregon people drifted over to join their colinguists on the upper Snake River until much later in the century.
The presence of the Horn Chief on the Big Lost River in Idaho and the Bear River in Utah bespeaks the fact that the residents of eastern Idaho entered the northern Utah region quite as frequently as did the Shoshone of western Wyoming. Zenas Leonard reported meeting Bannock Indians some four days' travel west of the Green River. Depending on their speed, the trappers may have been in southern Idaho or some part of northern Utah. Leonard wrote of the Bannock (1934, p. 105):