Kuchun-deka

The Kuchun-deka are the Kuccuntikka, the Buffalo Eaters of the Eastern Shoshone, also called the Plains Shoshone and later the Wind River Shoshone. Their country lay along the upper Green and Wind rivers of western Wyoming, and they kept the largest horse herds of any Shoshone band.

Mounted early, they pushed far north on to the plains of Montana and Alberta until the Blackfoot, armed through the Hudson's Bay trade, drove them back; the surveyor David Thompson found most of that northern territory lost by 1787. Their kinsmen the Comanche had already split off for the southern plains in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.

Around the Wind River Range they fought the Crow over prime bison ground, and from the 1820s their camps anchored the Rocky Mountain fur trade's summer rendezvous.