Chief Washakie: The Eastern Shoshone Leader Who Shaped Wyoming

Chief Washakie led the Eastern Shoshone for about sixty years. He was born in the late 1790s or early 1800s, had united several Shoshone bands by about 1840, negotiated the 1868 Fort Bridger Treaty that established the Wind River Reservation, sent his warriors to scout for the U.S. Army against the Lakota and Cheyenne in 1876, and died at Fort Washakie in 1900, somewhere around 90 years old. His statue is one of Wyoming’s two in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol, alongside Esther Hobart Morris.

His political strategy was distinct from most Plains Indian leadership of the era. Where Red Cloud and Crazy Horse fought the U.S. Army to a tactical standstill at the Bozeman Trail, where Sitting Bull led the resistance that destroyed Custer at Little Bighorn, Washakie chose alliance with the United States as the strategy most likely to preserve Eastern Shoshone land and political continuity. The choice was contested by some of his own people during his lifetime and remains debated by historians, but the Eastern Shoshone retained a substantial reservation in their ancestral territory while the Lakota lost the Black Hills. Washakie’s strategy worked, by his own measure of success.

This is the documented biography.

Origins (c. 1798-1840)

Birth date and tribal origins are both uncertain. Sources place Washakie’s birth between 1798 and 1810. His mother was Shoshone; his father is variously identified as Flathead (Salish) or Umatilla. Born Pinaquana, he took the name Washakie after he joined his mother’s Shoshone people.

He came of age in the fur-trade era of western Wyoming. He learned French and English from trappers and traders, spoke several Native languages, and counted Kit Carson, John Fremont, and Jim Bridger (later his son-in-law) among his friends. Those relationships built the diplomatic skills that defined his later political career.

One story says the name “Washakie” comes from a rattle of buffalo hide filled with stones that he carried into battle to frighten enemy horses. There are other versions; that one is the most often told.

Becoming chief (1840s)

By about 1840 Washakie had united several Shoshone bands under his leadership. As Great Basin food sources dwindled, more Shoshone and Bannock bands moved east into what is now Wyoming and took him as leader. His standing rested on demonstrated leadership in war and diplomacy rather than hereditary right.

His early chiefship coincided with the Oregon Trail era (1840s-1860s). Washakie made the strategic decision to remain at peace with the wagon trains crossing Eastern Shoshone territory, in contrast to other Plains nations that resisted the trail’s existence. The Eastern Shoshone reportedly assisted multiple wagon trains in difficulty, traded peacefully, and avoided the violent encounters that characterized Plains tribal-emigrant relations elsewhere.

The strategic logic: the Oregon Trail was carrying tens of thousands of armed and well-supplied U.S. citizens through Eastern Shoshone country annually. Resistance was likely to fail and likely to provoke retaliation. Cooperation preserved Eastern Shoshone autonomy and built diplomatic capital with the U.S. government for future negotiations.

This was not the choice every Eastern Shoshone leader would have made. Washakie’s authority was strong enough to make it stick.

The Bozeman Trail era and the 1868 treaty

The Bozeman Trail conflict was fought east of the Bighorns, and it pushed Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho hunters west onto the Wind River, into Shoshone country. The Eastern Shoshone were already contesting those hunting grounds with them, and Washakie’s Oregon Trail-era diplomatic relationship with the U.S. Army made joining the Lakota coalition strategically untenable.

The same year as the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that ended the Bozeman Trail conflict, a separate Fort Bridger Treaty (July 3, 1868) was negotiated with the Eastern Shoshone and the Bannock. Washakie was the principal Eastern Shoshone signatory.

The Fort Bridger Treaty established the reservation on the Wind River: about 3.2 million acres with its heart in the Wind River Valley, less than a tenth of the roughly 44 million acres an 1863 treaty had described as Eastern Shoshone country. It shrank again under the Brunot Cession, negotiated in 1872 and ratified in 1874, which gave up about 700,000 acres in the Popo Agie valley and around the South Pass mining camps. Seventy more years of cessions and court cases brought it to its present size of about 2.3 million acres.

The treaty also obligated the U.S. government to provide annual annuities (food, clothing, agricultural equipment, schools) and to protect the reservation from non-Indian encroachment. Annuity delivery was inconsistent and enforcement against encroachment was weak, but the treaty established the legal foundation that has preserved the reservation through to the present.

Bronze statue of Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone, standing in regalia with one hand raised. — The Dave McGary statue of Chief Washakie, given by Wyoming to the National Statuary Hall Collection in 2000 and now in Emancipation Hall of the Capitol Visitor Center. A McGary Washakie also stands at the Wyoming State Capitol in Cheyenne. Wyoming's two Statuary Hall subjects are Washakie and Esther Hobart Morris. *Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.*

The Battle of the Rosebud (1876)

In June 1876, the U.S. Army campaigned against the Lakota-Cheyenne-Arapaho coalition under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in what became known as the Great Sioux War. General George Crook led one of the three Army columns committed to the campaign, marching north from Wyoming Territory toward the Powder River country.

Crook sent for Washakie’s warriors, and on June 14, 1876, 86 Shoshone and about 180 Crow scouts joined his column. They met the Lakota and Cheyenne at Rosebud Creek in present-day southern Montana on June 17, 1876, and the Shoshone and Crow took the first shock of the attack, buying Crook’s officers time to deploy. Accounts differ on whether Washakie himself, then about seventy, was at the Rosebud.

The Battle of the Rosebud was a strategic Lakota victory. Crook pulled back to his base camp on Goose Creek and was out of the summer campaign, which left Custer’s column unsupported eight days later at the Little Bighorn, where the Seventh Cavalry was destroyed on June 25-26, 1876.

The Eastern Shoshone alliance with the U.S. Army at the Rosebud is the most contested element of Washakie’s legacy. From a Lakota and Cheyenne perspective, the Eastern Shoshone fought against fellow Indigenous peoples in defense of U.S. military expansion. From an Eastern Shoshone perspective, the Lakota had been traditional enemies for generations and the U.S. alliance preserved Eastern Shoshone reservation status when other Plains nations were losing everything.

Both interpretations have substantive grounding. Modern Eastern Shoshone tribal history emphasizes the protection of the Wind River Reservation as the strategic justification.

The Northern Arapaho crisis (1878)

The federal government had promised the Northern Arapaho a reservation of their own in 1868 and then spent a decade not providing one; they drew their annuities with the Oglala at the Red Cloud Agency. In 1878 it settled them on the Shoshone reservation instead.

Washakie was skeptical. The Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho had been in open warfare as recently as 1874. According to Arapaho tradition, the Shoshone agreed to let them settle temporarily; when the Arapaho arrived, Washakie was off hunting in the Bighorns, which historians read as a sign of his doubts.

About 950 Northern Arapaho arrived with an Army escort beginning in March 1878 and have remained there ever since. The “temporary” arrangement became permanent.

The two nations have lived on the same reservation for the subsequent 148 years, generally peacefully but with continuing distinct tribal identities, governance structures, and cultural practices. Modern Wind River Reservation politics still reflects the original Eastern Shoshone-Northern Arapaho tensions.

Washakie reportedly never accepted the legitimacy of the Northern Arapaho presence on Eastern Shoshone reservation land, but he did not seek to remove them by force.

Final years and death (1880s-1900)

Washakie remained active in tribal politics and in dealings with the U.S. government into his eighties and nineties. He pressed for education: in 1887 he gave 160 acres to the Welsh Episcopal missionary John Roberts for a boarding school for Shoshone girls.

The record of his religious life conflicts. A Latter-day Saint missionary, Amos Wright, recorded baptizing him with some 300 Shoshone in 1880. Episcopal accounts have Roberts, his friend, baptizing him about three years before his death, and he died a member of the Episcopal church.

He died at Fort Washakie on February 20, 1900, at roughly 90.

He was buried with full military honors at the Fort Washakie post cemetery. The Architect of the Capitol calls him the only known Native American to have been given a full military funeral. His grave is still tended at the cemetery and is open to respectful visitors.

Military headstone of Chief Washakie at Fort Washakie cemetery, Wyoming, with his name and dates inscribed in the standard U.S. Army format. — Chief Washakie's military headstone at Fort Washakie cemetery on the Wind River Indian Reservation. He died on February 20, 1900, and was buried with full military honors. The cemetery is open to respectful visitors. *Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.*

Legacy

Chief Washakie’s legacy is substantial and contested:

The institutional legacy: the Wind River Reservation, home today to both the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho, still holds the heart of what he negotiated in 1868, though at about 2.3 million acres rather than 3.2 million. The Eastern Shoshone have maintained continuous cultural and political identity on ancestral territory in a way that few other Plains Indian nations achieved. Fort Washakie is named for him; multiple Wyoming geographic features bear his name; his statue stands at the U.S. Capitol.

The strategic legacy: Washakie’s choice of U.S. alliance over resistance is now widely interpreted by modern historians (Henry Stamm’s 1999 People of the Wind River is the standard treatment) as having preserved Eastern Shoshone autonomy and resources at a level his contemporaries who chose resistance did not achieve. The Lakota lost the Black Hills. The Eastern Shoshone retained their core territory.

The contested legacy: Washakie fought against fellow Plains Indians in defense of U.S. military expansion. Some current Indigenous historiography critiques this as collaboration with colonial conquest. Washakie’s own Eastern Shoshone descendants generally honor him as the political figure who preserved their nation; perspectives outside the Eastern Shoshone vary.

The forgotten legacy: Washakie ran a roughly sixty-year tenure as principal chief that was substantially based on diplomatic negotiation, treaty interpretation, and political strategy rather than warrior leadership. His skill in this register was substantial and is generally underweighted in popular Western mythology that prefers the warrior-leader frame.

For visitors to Wyoming, the most direct way to engage with Washakie’s legacy is to visit Fort Washakie on the Wind River Reservation (15 minutes north of Lander) and the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center there. The Cultural Center is small but substantive; respectful visitors are welcomed; the staff provide context for Washakie’s life and the broader Eastern Shoshone history that most Wyoming visitors do not encounter elsewhere.

Small white grave markers scattered through waist-high prairie grass on rolling open ground, a single cottonwood in the middle distance and a storm building over low hills behind. — The Shoshone tribal cemetery on the prairie outside Fort Washakie. The grass is left standing and the markers sit at whatever angle the ground gives them. It is a truer picture of what the 1868 treaty secured than any bronze in a rotunda: not a monument to a closed chapter, a place still in use. *Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress (LCCN 2017885606). Public domain.*

Where to visit

Fort Washakie, Wind River Indian Reservation, about 15 minutes north of Lander on US-287. The Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center holds permanent exhibits on Washakie’s life and Eastern Shoshone history. Washakie’s gravesite at the Fort Washakie cemetery is open to respectful visitors.

The Wyoming State Capitol, Cheyenne, which has its own Dave McGary statue of Washakie.

The U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. The McGary statue Wyoming gave the National Statuary Hall Collection stands in Emancipation Hall.

The Wind River Reservation is high desert country, hot in summer, cold in spring and fall, little shade outside of cottonwood creek bottoms. An insulated water bottle and work gloves are practical carries for an outdoor site visit at this latitude and elevation.

Cultural awareness for visitors

Visiting the Wind River Reservation requires reasonable cultural awareness:

Defer to tribal protocols at religious or ceremonial sites; not all areas of the reservation are open to non-tribal visitors.
Photography: ask permission before photographing individuals or specific cultural items.
The Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center is the right starting point for any first visit; staff there can advise on what is appropriate.
Respect the boundary between cultural appreciation and cultural extraction. Eastern Shoshone history and traditions are the property of the Eastern Shoshone people; visitors are guests.

The Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center publishes guidance for respectful reservation visits. Read it before going.

Esther Hobart Morris and Wyoming’s first-in-the-nation women’s suffrage (the other Wyoming Capitol Statue subject)
The Bozeman Trail and the Fetterman Fight (the contemporaneous Lakota resistance for context)
The Johnson County War: how Wyoming’s cattle barons lost the range
Lander, Wyoming: NOLS, Sinks Canyon, and the East Slope of the Wind Rivers (gateway to the Wind River Reservation)
Buffalo Bill Cody: the man who sold the West to the world