Shoshone Chief Washakie (Whoshakik): A Biographical Sketch
For most modern Wyoming residents and many historians of the American West, the names of Chief Washakie, the Shoshone Indians, and the Wind River Reservation seem inseparable. Yet, it was not always so. The Eastern Shoshone band of American Indians, for whom the Wind River Reservation was created by the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868, represents an amalgam of various bands of Shoshone and Bannock peoples, most of whom originate from Nevada, Utah, and Idaho, not Wyoming.
Washakie, the best-known leader of the Eastern Shoshones in the latter part of the 19th century, is still considered by some Shoshones as an outsider because he was not a full-blood Shoshone.Indeed, Washakie was of mixed tribal heritage.