Shoromba

The Shoromba were a taiga Yukaghir tribal group of the upper Indigirka River. Their name comes from the Yukaghir word shoromo, a man or person. Scholars place them among the southern Yukaghirs, who may have retreated upriver under Evenki pressure.

The Shoromba first met Russians in 1639, when Ivan Postnik led a party to the Indigirka. Allied with the Yangin clan, the Shoromba attacked the Russian winter post of Uyandinsk in 1642 but were driven off, and by 1656 all twelve of their clans, about three hundred and sixty people, paid fur tribute.

Smallpox struck in 1657, 1667 and 1693, cutting their numbers to roughly one hundred and twenty by 1723; warfare with Cossacks and Lamut Even bands did the rest, and the Shoromba had vanished as a people by the middle of the eighteenth century.