untain region,
they avoided drunkenness and lewd intercourse with the whites. Their
mental ability was comparatively high, as appears from their skill in
buffalo-hunting, in making dugouts and bark canoes, and in constructing
sweat-houses and lodges of both skins and rushes. Even today the lower
Kutenai are noted for their water-tight baskets of split roots. Moreover
the degree to which they used the plants that grew about them for food,
medicine, and economical purposes was noteworthy. They also had an
esthetic appreciation of several plants and flowers--a gift rare among
Indians. These people lived in the zone of most stimulating climate and,
although they did not practice agriculture and had little else in their
surroundings to help them to rise above the common level, they dwelt in
a region where there was rain enough in summer to prevent their being
on the verge of starvation, as the Indians of California usually were.
Moreover they were near enough to the haunts of the buffalo to depend on
that great beast for food. Since one buffalo supplies as much food as a
hundred rabbits, these Indians were vastly better off than the people of
the drier parts of the western coast.

South of the home of the Kutenai, in eastern Oregon, southern Idaho,
Nevada, Utah, and neighboring regions dwelt the Utes and other Shoshoni
tribes. In this region the rainfall, which is no greater than that of
California, occurs chiefly in winter. The long summer is so dry that,
except by highly developed methods of irrigation, agriculture is
impossible. Hence it is not surprising to find a traveler in 1850
describing one tribe of the Ute family as "without exception the most
miserable looking set of human beings I ever saw. They have hitherto
subsisted principally on snakes, lizards, roots." The lowest of all the
Ute tribes were those who lived in the sage-brush. The early explorer,
Bonneville, found the tribes of Snake River wintering in brush shelters
without roofs merely heaps of brush piled high, behind which the Indians
crouched for protection from wind and snow. Crude as such shelters may
seem, they were the best that could be constructed by people who dwelt
where there was no vegetation except little bushes, and where the soil
was for the most part sandy or so salty that it could not easily be made
into adobe bricks.

The food of these Utes and Shoshonis was no better than their shelters.
There were no large animals for them to hunt; rabb