This early culture gave way to the Desert Archaic in place in Utah by 8,000 YBP. These people were nomadic hunter-gatherers and lived in open pits and caves along the shores of the Great Salt Lake and other waterways for a period of 4,500 years. They hunted game including small animals and antelope with spears and slings using the flesh for meat, the bones for tools and the hides for clothing. Meat was something of a luxury and salt tolerant plants including cattails, sedges, pickle weed and burrow weed provided the basic diet for many Archaic people. The Desert Archaic subsisted in a fairly settled manner for many generations. Their fate was tied to the rise and fall of the Great Salt Lake which affected marsh habitat and lake edge subsistence. Finally about 3,500 YBP the lake rose and populations decreased dramatically. The Desert Archaic people virtually disappeared and left the Great Basin unoccupied for 1,000 years.

The next great culture to spread north into Utah was the Fremont in about 2,500 YBP. They emerged out of this desert tradition with a lifestyle similar enough to the Archaic that some scholars believe there is a common ancestry. The Fremont people also occupied parts of Utah where the water meets the land. Their technologies, however, were sufficiently different from the Archaic to regard them as an entirely different people. They used bows and arrows, and in addition to cave dwelling built pit houses and granaries. By 800-900 AD the Fremont had incorporated a maize-bean-squash agriculture component, although the question of where these people learned to farm remains obscure. Equally important the Fremont people made pottery. It is generally believed that agriculture and pottery as well as other aspects of Fremont culture originated in the Southwest.

Contemporaries of the Fremont, the Anasazi were the most famous of the prehistoric Indians of Utah. Anasazi is a Navajo word meaning “ancient ones”. The Fremont and Anasazi cultures may have shared a common ancestry, the Fremont evolving in the north and the Anasazi in the south. The Anasazi, however, lived in elaborate villages perched on canyon walls in the San Juan River region. They manufactured more elaborate pottery and jewelry and were more dependent on agriculture often constructing dams and canals for irrigation.

The Anasazi produced astonishing achievements in house building. Their villages were large and constructed of adobe, rock and wooden poles. The dwellings often contained decoration and fine masonry especially in latter periods of their influence. The large and elaborate villages were made possible through extensive agriculture which allowed them to stay in one location over long periods.
Both the Fremont and Anasazi cultures abruptly left the region about 1300 AD never to return. The reasons for the abrupt departure remains unclear, but a prolonged drought, crop failure or intrusion by the Numic hunter-gathers forcing them south seem plausible explanations.

Of all the prehistoric Utahns the Fremont perhaps best represent the ability to live in the harshness of the Great Basin desert. A true crossroads people they identify with what Utah has always been. A place were people sweep across the landscape and disappear. A place where life depends on those locations where the desert meets the water.

In Utah the Fremont and Anasazi were replaced by the Numic or Shoshonean peoples of the Uto-Aztecan language family. The Shoshonean people evolved into four distinct groups; the Northern Shoshone (Shoshoni), the Goshute or Western Shoshone, the Southern Paiute and the Ute peoples. Based on the extent of land occupied the Shoshonean peoples are regarded as one of the most important linguistic families of North American Indians. They lived and traveled in extended family groups of vast areas of Utah, southern Idaho, Nevada and western Wyoming.

The various bands gathered periodically to trade and socialize and for protection against enemies. Numerous explorers and trappers including Escalante, Bridger, Carson, Ogden and Goodyear traveled through Utah and made contact and traded with the Shoshone. The rendezvous events depicted today represent a period in the early to mid 1800's when these explorers and trappers would gather with Shoshone bands. While these early white men did establish economic relations with the Shoshone that exerted little effect on their lifestyle.

When the Mormons entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 it was a neutral buffer zone between the Shoshone to the north and the Ute people to the south. At that time there were about 20,000 Indians living in Utah proper. Three major bands of Northwestern Shoshone, about 1,500 in number, occupied the valleys of northern Utah—especially Weber and Cache Valleys and northern shores of the Great Salt Lake. Chief Little Soldier headed the misnamed “Weber Ute” group of about 400 who occupied Weber Valley down to its entry into the Great Salt Lake. Another group of about 450 was headed by Chief Bear Hunter and occupied the Cache Valley and lower regions of the Bear River.

The Northwestern Shoshone traveled with the changing seasons and used the Wasatch Mountains and valleys to harvest small and large game, fish, grass seeds, plant roots and bulbs, berries and pine nuts. Prior to white influence the Northwestern Shoshone traveled by foot and were often referred to as So-so-goi “those that travel by foot.” Shelter was provided by buffalo hide teepees, caves and grass lodges (wicki-ups) in campsites selected near water and protected by trees, willows and sagebrush.

White settlers labeled the Northwestern Shoshone bands as “Diggers” those groups who traveled by foot and harvested plants and roots. It is a derogatory term applied to people at a time when their numbers had been decimated and their cultural organization broken by white settlement. The cattle and sheep of the white man had denuded the Shoshone lands of food and left them in a starving condition forced to crawl on hands and knees in search of food. In reality the Great Basin Shoshone had been among the most ecologically efficient and well adapted Indians of the American West.

By the 1840's the Northwestern Shoshone had adopted the Plains Culture and used horses to hunt buffalo. The northerly expansion of Mormon settlement and farmlands gradually altered the traditional Shoshone homeland. The inevitable aggressive encounters between white settlers and Indians escalated and came to an end with the Bear River Massacre in January of 1863. As pioneer settlement expanded the Shoshone were further forced off their ancestral lands. Permanent Shoshone encampments remained beyond the expanding settler frontier until the turn of the century as Indians attempted to follow the centuries-old migratory circuit. But every year after 1863 plows cut into northern Utah valleys turning under the Shoshone homeland.

References
Lewis, David Rich. Native Americans in Utah; Utah History Encyclopedia

May, Dean L. 1987. Utah: A People’s History. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah

Parry, Mae. The Northwestern Shoshone; Utah’s Native Americans

And a variety of other unreferenced internet sources.

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