Both treaties promised the tribes that signed them annuities for 30 years the payments continued a few years longer as part of the tribes’ agreement to sell the hot springs in 1896. The Shoshone had signed the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 and the Arapaho had signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

Īt the same time, annual payments of food and supplies guaranteed to both tribes were about to stop coming. A great many of the animals that grazed it were owned by local white ranchers who didn’t pay for the privilege, or only recently had begun paying very low grazing fees to the tribes. Land north of the river was much drier and used mostly for grazing. Land south of the river was well watered by the many creeks and small rivers flowing off the Wind River Mountains, and most of the Indian people lived there. The loss of these two portions left a reservation of around 2.3 million acres, roughly bisected from northwest to southeast by the Big Wind River. In 1896 both tribes agreed to the sale of the Big Horn hot springs at what’s now Thermopolis, Wyo., for $60,000. The Shoshone had ceded the southern third of their reservation on Wind River in 1874, just a few years after it was established. Pressure on them to sell their lands had been steadily increasing for decades. Joseph Dixon photo, Wyoming Veterans Memorial Museum. Northern Arapaho Council Chief Lone Bear, shown here in traditional dress, objected in 1904 that the 1.5 million acres north of the Big Wind River were worth twice what the government was offering. Poverty was widespread, hunger was routine, disease was constant and the populations of both tribes had fallen to their lowest level ever. At the turn of the last century, the fortunes of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on the Shoshone Reservation in central Wyoming were reaching a low ebb.

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