By Tony Evans
The Bannock Indian War of 1878 raged for months across southern Idaho and as far away as the Columbia River, involving perhaps 1,000 Indians from four or more tribes. The Umatilla, Paiute, Shoshone and Bannock engaged in running battles between Chief Big Horn and the 12th Infantry of the United States Army until many lay dead, and the last of Idaho Indian wars was ended.
On Saturday and Sunday, June 17-18, 100 or more Shoshone Bannock residents of Fort Hall Reservation will make their first organized homecoming to the place it all began, Camas Prairie near Fairfield. They are coming to do what they have done for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years: eat camas bulbs
At issue during the Bannock War was a struggle for a traditional food source, the bulb of the purple-flowering Camas plant, a staple in the Shoshone Bannock diet. After the establishment of the Fort Hall Reservation ten years before in 1868, the Sho-Ban diet had come to subsist largely of government food rations rather than traditional sources. Carolyn Boyer Smith, organizer of the homecoming, which includes a walk from Timmerman Junction to the Forest Service office in Fairfield on Saturday, says the area of Centennial Marsh has long been a part of Sho-Ban traditions.
"The Camas prairie is in our legends and stories," Smith said. "Many of our people have been returning there over the years. Our elders remember when their grandparents told stories about this wintering area." She described the period in 1878 when pig farmers and cattlemen invaded the prairie and began spoiling the camas bulbs traditionally used by the natives.
"Those pigs eating the camas bulbs was what really began the Bannock War," she said.
In 1878, General Crook of the U.S. Army stated, "It was no surprise...that some of the Indian soon afterward broke out into hostilities, and the great wonder is that so many remained on the reservation. With the Bannocks and Shoshone, our Indian policy has resolved itself into a question of war path or starvation, and being merely human, many of them will always choose the former alternative when death shall at least be glorious."
Ten years before the Bannock War, in 1868, the Fort Bridger Treaty was established between the United States Government and Shoshone and Bannock tribes establishing the Fort Hall Indian Reservation near Pocatello. Semi-nomadic tribes that flourished in southern Idaho for many generations were confined to an area of 200,000 acres, well out of the way of miners and other settlers making their way west from Ft. Boise.
Included in the Fort Bridger Treaty is an area called the Kansas Prairie which Carolyn Boyer Smith, organizer of the homecoming, claims was a misspelling of "Camas Prairie."
According to Fort Hall policy director Claudio Bronco, this typographical error ultimately led to the Sho-Ban's loss of this traditional foraging ground south of the Wood River Valley.
On Saturday and Sunday, the Sho-Ban homecoming party depart an encampment adjacent to the Forest Service office in Fairfield and proceed to the Centennial Marsh where a demonstration will be held between elders of the tribe and younger tribal members on the location, digging and preparation of Camas bulbs.
"This will be the first time an organized homecoming will take place from Fort Hall," Smith said.
Camas in bloom
