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Early accounts of the Goshute tribe by white writers were unsympathetic at best. At worse, they displayed a bigoted ignorance of and disregard for Goshute culture and ways that seem almost ridiculous with 150 years of hindsight.Perhaps no passage better sums up the prevailing attitude whites had toward the tribe than a passage from Mark Twain's book "Roughing It," which was written in about 1861:
"It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men . . . that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing."
If Twain would have spent any time among the Goshutes, it's quite likely he would've changed his mind. True, the Goshutes lived a spartan life in one of the harshest, most inhospitable places on the face of the Earth. But in the Great Salt Lake Desert and its surrounding environs, they not only survived, they prospered.
The traditional area of the Goshutes has been roughly west and south of the Great Salt Lake and west of Utah Lake into eastern Nevada. The Goshutes are Shoshoni, and their language is similar to that spoken by the Western Shoshoni in Nevada.
A more sympathetic observer, Ralph V. Chamberlain, painted a different portrait of the tribe in his "Ethno-Botany of the Gosiute (Goshute) Indians." He described a people who lived in a land "so utterly desolate and uninviting" that it was hard to believe that anyone would be found there. But the Goshutes, he said, possessed a love for their land "as ardent as ever burned in the breast of a patriot."
Before the white man came, the tribe lived a hardy life of subsistence hunting and gathering. They harvested up to 30 different types of edible or medicinal seed; they dug wild onion, sego lily and yampa; ate chokecherries, serviceberries, black currants, raspberries and pine nuts; roasted crickets and locusts; and caught fish barehanded or with nets.
"From root to fruit they knew the plants in form and color, texture and taste, and according to season and habitat," Chamberlain wrote.
One Goshute cure for rheumatism involved catching a rattlesnake. The afflicted person would then address the snake, "My good brother, you are powerful. I wish you to help me."
To complete the ceremony, the reptile was killed with a single shot through the head. Its fat was then placed into a receptacle and its body buried so that it would be seen by no one else. The snake oil was then applied as needed.
Goshute winter lodges were made from cedar logs and poles, and thatched with bark and branches. Despite the cold winds that howl across the west desert, one observer in the last century said the homes were "quite warm and comfortable" with a refreshing odor of cedar.
The targets of Ute slave traders up until the last century, the Go-shute traditionally affiliated and intermarried with the Paiute tribe.
Although pockets of Goshutes can be found in numerous places in the west desert, most of the tribe lives either in Skull Valley or just west of the Deep Creek Range on the Utah/Nevada border. Skull Valley claims 124 registered tribal members, while the Deep Creek reservation has about 100 residents.