Kuhtsutuuka

The Kuhtsutuuka, whose name means Bison Eaters and was written Kotsoteka in Spanish documents, were a Shoshone-speaking division whose ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers in the Wyoming mountains. They were probably among the first of the Shoshonean groups to break away: during the sixteenth century the proto-Comanche crossed the Rocky Mountains, and after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 they became mounted bison hunters on the southern plains.

In the late 1770s their leader Cuerno Verde, who had inherited his father's green-tinted horned headdress, led raids on Spanish settlements. Governor Juan Bautista de Anza marched against him with Ute, Apache and Pueblo auxiliaries and killed him in a running battle in Colorado in September 1779.

Through the early nineteenth century the Kotsoteka remained one of the strongest Comanche divisions, until the Cheyenne and Arapaho advance of the 1830s severed their last links with the Shoshone of Wyoming.