Shoshoni

The Shoshoni group spans the Great Basin: the Western Shoshoni, the Kusiutta, or Goshute, of western Utah, the Bannock of the Snake River plains and the Numu bands of western Nevada. Their ancestors were Proto-Numic speakers who spread out of the southern Sierra Nevada.

Families lived in small bands that gathered pine nuts each autumn and joined communal rabbit and pronghorn drives. Horses reached the region by 1730, and some eastern bands took to mounted bison hunting and split off as the Bannock. The Comanche, who stayed Shoshoni until about 1700, left for the southern plains.