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A road trip to the Wind River Reservation yields a windfall of native history and culture
James Trosper, great-great-grandson of Chief Washakie.
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James Trosper turned to face the mountains, his sharp, tan features etched like the distant peaks, long braids bobbing in the breeze. “We strongly believe there is medicine there, there is power there, that the creator has given us,” he said.
Trosper was speaking of the Wind River Range, which looms over his land and provides a bulwark behind Fort Washakie, headquarters of the Wind River Indian Reservation. A member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe, he is the great-great-grandson of Chief Washakie, the revered leader whose negotiation with the U.S. government secured this land for his people in the 1860s.
I had come to the reservation seeking some of that medicine, so to speak, tired of being cooped up in Jackson Hole in the midst of a long, cold winter. Ostensibly, my goal was to visit the new Wind River Casino, the reservation’s most popular tourist destination, but I would wind up wandering like the bands who once roamed these hills on horseback, following the buffalo herds. Trosper, who serves on the board of the Grand Teton National Park Foundation and who I had met through a mutual friend, was my guide around Fort Washakie.
Despite its proximity, the Wind River Reservation is a place most Jackson Hole residents pass through on their way to somewhere else. The border, just east of Dubois, is about a ninety-minute drive. The reservation covers some thirty-five hundred square miles and is the seventh-largest Indian territory in the United States. It is shared by the Eastern Shoshones and the Northern Arapaho tribe, which the federal government relocated here in 1878.
Three to five feet of snow blanketed Grand Teton National Park as I drove northward, and the banks heightened as I crossed the Continental Divide on Togwotee Pass. But after leaving behind the serrated ridges of the Brecchia Cliffs, I descended into red rock badlands and what the Shoshones call “Warm Valley.” The sight of bare earth was soothing; I might have thought it was spring, until I stepped outside and felt the most distinctly Wyoming of the elements: wind.
In an era of visitor centers, fee booths, and carefully managed travel experiences, the reservation is refreshingly open and undeveloped. One does not need to sign in with any authorities before having a look around. Fort Washakie has one major intersection, the Ethete (EE-thuh-te) Road, which leads toward Riverton and the Wind River Casino. And here it’s okay to use the word “Indians,” James explained; because of its sovereign government and land, the tribe doesn’t “feel the need to be politically correct.”
Based on what I had read in newspaper stories, I expected to find a barren landscape ravaged by poverty and drug abuse; instead, as James and I drove through the countryside, I found a fairly prosperous agricultural community reaping a bounty from oil and gas development on outlying tribal lands. “It’s not enough to make any one person rich,” James explained of the monthly royalty checks each member of the tribe receives, “but it’s still enough.”
Some of the major attractions on the reservation are the grave sites of two of the most well-known Shoshones: Sacajawea, companion and translator for the Lewis and Clark expedition (it should be noted that some scholars argue Sacajawea is actually buried at Fort Manuel, South Dakota), and Chief Washakie, who was afforded a full U.S. military funeral upon his death in 1900 at the age of 102. A sign points the way toward Sacajawea Cemetery; the chief is buried in a smaller plot west of the tribal government buildings. Pilgrims have left beads, shells, coins, and other tokens by both headstones, amid markers for the departed with surnames like Soonup and Wagon.
A must stop, I found, is the Eastern Shoshone Tribe Traditional Center, located about a half mile down the Ethete Road. Chief Washakie’s buckskin shirt and pipe are on display, along with copies of the treaties he signed with the federal government in 1863 and 1868 promising a “firm and perpetual peace.” Visitors can read of his triumph over the Crow chief in the battle at Crowheart Butte in 1866 and his victory at Trout Creek in 1872, when the outnumbered Shoshones dug trenches on the inside of their tipis to dodge bullets and rallied to defeat the Sioux and Cheyenne.
As executive director of the Washakie Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to education, James is carrying on the legacy of his great-great-grandfather, who set aside one hundred and sixty acres of sacred tribal land for a school founded by the Welsh missionary Rev. John Roberts in 1889. “I fought to keep our land, our water, and our hunting grounds,” the chief said in his elder years. “Today, education is the weapon my people need to protect them.” We drove to the school, which closed in 1945, and strolled through the orchard of apple and plum trees planted in Washakie’s day, which still bear fruit.
