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expand1997 (1)
1Author:  Flint Timothy 1780-1840Add
 Title:  The Shoshonee Valley  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: The Shoshonee are a numerous and powerful tribe of Indians, who dwell in a long and narrow vale of unparalleled wildness and beauty of scenery, between the two last western ridges of the Rocky Mountains, on the south side of the Oregon, or as the inhabitants of the United States choose to call it, the Columbia. They are a tall, finely formed, and comparatively fair haired race, more mild in manners, more polished and advanced in civilization, and more conversant with the arts of municipal life, than the contiguous northern tribes. Vague accounts of them by wandering savages, hunters, and coureurs du bois, have been the sources, most probably, whence have been formed the western fables, touching the existence of a nation in this region, descended from the Welsh. In fact many of the females, unexposed by their condition to the sun and inclemencies of the seasons, are almost as fair, as the whites. The contributions, which the nation has often levied from their neighbors the Spaniards, have introduced money and factitious wants, and a consequent impulse to build after the fashions, to dress in the clothes, and to live after the modes of civilized people, among them. From them they have obtained either by barter or war, cattle, horses, mules, and the other domestic animals, in abundance. Maize, squashes, melons and beans they supposed they had received as direct gifts from the Wah-condah, or Master of Life. The cultivation of these, and their various exotic exuberant vegetables, they had acquired from surveying the modes of Spanish industry and subsistence. Other approximations to civilization they had unconsciously adopted from numerous Spanish captives, residing among them, in a relation peculiar to the red people, and intermediate between citizenship and slavery. But the creole Spanish, from whom they had these incipient germs of civilized life, were themselves a simple and pastoral people, a century behind the Anglo Americans in modern advancement. The Shoshonee were, therefore, in a most interesting stage of existence, just emerging from their own comparative advancements to a new condition, modelled to the fashion of their Spanish neighbors.
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