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South of the Uinta Mountains is the Uinta River, a stream with many mountain tributaries, some heading in the Uinta Mountains, others in the Wasatch Mountains on the west, and still others in the western Tavaputs Plateau. The Uinta Valley is the ancient and present home of the Uinta Indians, a tribe speaking the Uinta language of the Shoshonean family.
The two peoples have intermarried freely, and it is hard to think of the Tewas otherwise than as "one kind of Hopi." However, they are of a distinctly different linguistic stock, speaking a Tewa language brought from the Rio Grande, while the Hopi speak a dialect of the Shoshonean.
And no wonder these dun-colored villages seem so perfectly a part of the mesas themselves, for they are literally so their rock walls and dirt roofs having been merely picked up from the floor and sides of the mesa itself and made into human habitations. The Hopi number about 2,500 and are a Shoshonean stock.
C. F. Lummis, who knows them well, believes them to be a crimeless people. The Moquis of Arizona are the most primitive of the Pueblo Indians and are worthy representatives of their race. They are of the Aztecan branch of the Shoshonean family and probably the lineal descendents of the cliff dwellers.
It happens that the Hopi tongue is a composite, mainly a Shoshonean dialect, probably accumulated as the various clans of the present tribe gathered in northeastern Arizona, from the cactus country to the south, the San Juan country to the northward and the Rio Grande valley to the eastward. But the Welsh legend was slow in dying.
On his journeys during these periods he often took with him several of the natives for the purpose of investigating their myths and language. Eventually he became the highest authority on the Shoshonean tribes. In 1874 he was one of the commissioners to select and locate the Southern Pai Utes on a reservation in south-eastern Nevada.
It is a desert to the agriculturist, a mine to the paleontologist, and a paradise to the artist. The region thus described, from Fremont's Peak to the Uinta Mountains, has been the home of tribes of Indians of the Shoshonean family from time immemorial.
The plateaus are covered with low, dwarf oaks and many shrubs bearing berries, and in the chaparral of this region cinnamon bears are still abundant. From time immemorial the region drained by the Grand, White, and Yampa rivers has been the home of Ute tribes of the Shoshonean family of Indians.
The Hopis belong to the people popularly spoken of as "pueblos," but this name signifies nothing more than town Indians, as distinguished from the nomad or wandering tribes. They belong to the great Shoshonean family, and are a short, stocky, gentle people, given to agriculture, sheep raising, basketry and pottery, and a little weaving and silver work. The Navaho Race.
But as the Pierced Noses this nation in the far Northwest was known. They were members of the Sha-hap-ti-an family of North Americans a family not so large as the Algonquian, Siouan, Shoshonean and several other families, yet important. Their home was the valley and river country of western Idaho, and the near sections of Oregon and Washington.
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