wind river reservation

In the 1860s, the Eastern Shoshone people signed two treaties with the U.S. government. The first set aside vast holdings for them. Just five years later, as the transcontinental railroad was approaching, a second treaty established a Shoshone reservation in the Wind River valley—with less than a tenth the earlier amount of land.

The Mountain Shoshone, sometimes called Sheepeaters, lived at high elevations in what’s now northwestern Wyoming from prehistoric times down through the mid-1800s. Recent archaeological discoveries shed increasing light on the lives of these peoples, ancestors of some of today’s Eastern Shoshone.

Recurring oil theft on the Wind River Reservation in the 1970s eventually led to better practices that focus on preventing such losses and protecting American Indian tribes’ oil and gas revenues. 

Fremont County, created in 1884 and named for famed explorer John C. Frémont, is still as diverse both economic factors and population as it was in the early days. Members of the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes continue to live and work on the Wind River Indian Reservation. Former reservation land north of Wind River was first opened to homesteaders in 1906. Ranching and irrigated farming have provided steadying influences over the decades to a local economy tied closely to booms and busts in gold, coal, uranium, iron-ore, oil and gas production.