Book Review originally published in Montana Magazine of Western History

Mountain Spirit: The Sheep Eater Indians of Yellowstone, Lawrence L. Loendorf and Nancy Medaris Stone. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2006. Illustrations, map, notes bibliography, index. 224pp. $19.95 paper.

Archeologist Lawrence Loendorf at New Mexico State University and writer/editor Nancy Stone have combined their talents to produce a book that has long been needed by historians of the northern Rockies. W.A. Allen’s 1913 book The Sheepeaters has been in disrepute for many years, and incorrect information about this tribe of Mountain Shoshones that inhabited the fastnesses of the northern Rockies has abounded since Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872. Loendorf and Stone have set out to correct such misnomers as 1) The Sheepeaters and Indians in general did not inhabit Yellowstone; 2) the Sheepeaters were physically small in size (“a pygmy tribe”); 3) the Sheepeaters were cowards or at least timid; 4) the Sheepeaters were retarded or otherwise mentally deficient; and 5) the Sheepeaters were afraid of Yellowstone’s geysers. None of these assertions is true, although white writers have long (and inaccurately) reported all of them as “fact.”

Instead the Mountain Shoshones were a robust people, full of talented artisans who made powerful bows from sheep horns, well-tailored clothing, and intelligently designed shelters. Loendorf and Taylor wish to present them as the historic, archeological, and ethnological evidence suggests that they really were: “intelligent, inventive, congenial tenants of a high-latitude landscape that they occupied without initiating conflict” (p. 1).

Loendorf set the stage for this book in his earlier book, co-authored with UCLA’s Peter Nabokov, entitled Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), but now he expands on what he presented then. We learn the details of the Sheepeaters’ well known bow making, minutiae about their steatite pottery that still can be found among Wyoming mountains, and even how they made the poison that tipped their arrows (“a compound made of the spleen of an animal mixed with crushed red ants, which produced a deadly poison”—p. 131). In individual chapters, Loendorf and Stone examine clothing manufacture, dwellings, hunting strategies, diet, and even the Sheepeater dogs that have become known to some observers.

The book contains a surprising amount of detail, considering the supposed dearth of Sheepeater material for so many years. Of particular interest is a chapter entitled “Living among the Powerful Spirits,” about Sheepeater religion and mythology. Ecological in focus, Sheepeater religion was centered on spirit entities that were embodied in meteorological forces and animals, and those forces were thought to control the dynamics of the mountain environment. These were defined as “sky people” (birds), “ground people” (animals), and “water people” (more than simply fish, these were water ghosts who lived in lakes and streams, which could be huge and heavy in size and weight). Perhaps a titillating bit of early sexual fantasy is revealed in the female water ghost Pa waip, who was believed to lure men into water on the pretext of a sexual liaison, after which consummation she captured and drowned them (p. 40). A great number of petroglyphs of female water ghosts have been found in the vicinity of Thermopolis, Wyoming, suggesting that that area somehow lent itself to the existence of these female water spirits.

Considering the reputation of its senior author and the writing ability of the junior author (which spices the work considerably), this is a book that will probably influence our thinking about the Mountain Shoshones for years to come.

Lee H. WhittleseyYellowstone National Park, Wyoming