In the following years, we hear little of the hunting activities of the Shoshone. They were moved permanently to the Wind River Reservation, where, according to Agent James Irwin in 1873, they showed a strong desire to abandon their nomadic ways and to learn agriculture (Irwin, 1874, p. 612). Irwin claimed that, although the Bannock population of the "Shoshone and Bannock Agency" at Wind River was transferred in 1872 to Fort Hall, 216 still unsettled Shoshone had expressed intent in the following year to move to Wind River. The Shoshone experienced little success in their early attempts at farming, and the government food allotments were seldom adequate to last through the year. This, combined with the traditional value placed on the buffalo hunt, perpetuated the nomadic pattern for a number of years. As late as 1877, Agent Patten wrote (1878, p. 605):
During the month of October last [1876], while the Shoshones were on one of their annual hunts, the village became divided; Washakie, with the greater portion, struck across the country from the base of the Sierra Shoshone Mountains to the mouth of Owl Creek on Big Wind River; the smallest party, under two braves named Na-akie and Ta-goon-dum, started for the river above the mouth of Grey Bull, where having arrived the prospect of a successful hunt was propitious. Large herds of buffalo were everywhere in sight; but the next morning after their arrival this little band, comprising men, women, and children, were suddenly attacked by Dull Knife's band of hostile Cheyenne warriors.
The Plains were evidently still unsafe, and hunting parties traveled in strength. But the end of the buffalo period was not far off, for hide-hunters and settlers had already made massive inroads on the herds, and the open-range cattle-raising industry had begun. It is interesting to note, however, that the itinerary followed in 1876 was much the same as that related by Shimkin's informants and by ours. Except for that given in the one account by Hamilton, it has no antecedents in the historical literature.
Wind River Shoshone informants speak little of activities west of the Continental Divide and tend to place their early economic life almost entirely in the Missouri drainage. This is not surprising when it is considered that eighty-six years had passed between the signing of the Fort Bridger treaty of July 3, 1868, establishing the reservation, and the field work reported here. Almost seventy years had elapsed between that date and Shimkin's 1937-1938 field work. That informants have a one-dimensional view of earlier periods in Shoshone history may well be expected. The type of data that deals with locales and events, the movements of peoples and situational adaptation is history of a different kind from the traditional cultural material with which anthropologists usually work. It would be an understatement to say that it would tax the memory of any human being to ask exactly where and when his people hunted many years before he was born. One of the oldest living Shoshone, for example, responded to our question about the location of the chief's lodge in the camp by saying that the chiefs lived in log cabins near the Agency. And even this was quite a mnemonic feat.