The Shoshone (also spelled Shoshoni) are Native Americans of
the Great Basin region, and south and east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
Shoshoneans are distributed widely--from Southern California,
Death Valley and Mono Lake, through Utah to Western Colorado.
Sacajawea, the woman who guided the Lewis and Clark expedition,
was a Utah Shoshone.
While the beliefs of other Shoshonean tribes are fairly well documented,
there is little published information about the mythology
of the Great Basin Shoshone per se.
This collection reveals that the Western Shoshone, who
lived in central Nevada, were very similar
to the Northern Californians in this regard.
Their myths are inhabited by the lusty trickster Coyote, and other
primordial zoomorphic demigods.
