Kusiutta

The Kusiutta are the Goshute, the westernmost of the Western Shoshone, whose desert country ran from Great Salt Lake west to the Steptoe Range and south to Simpson Springs. They call themselves Newe, the people, and neighbouring Numic groups used the name Kusiutta.

Their families were concentrated in the Deep Creek, Skull Valley and Tooele areas, gathering two or three times a year for pine-nut harvests, communal pronghorn hunts and winter villages under a village headman. Women harvested nearly a hundred wild seeds and roots while men took rabbits and lizards and, when luck allowed, deer and bighorn sheep.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Ute and Navajo raiders carried them off as slaves, and the Goshute remained largely on foot after their neighbours had horses. The trapper Jedediah Smith left the first written account, crossing their lands toward Bear Lake in 1827.