The Shoshones[6] are indubitably a very ancient people.  It would be impossible to say how long they may have been settled on this portion of the continent.  Their cast of features proves them to be of Asiatic origin, and their phraseology, elegant and full of metaphors, assumes all the graceful variety of the brightest pages of Saadi.

[Footnote 6:  The American travellers (even Mr. Catlin, who is generally correct) have entirely mistaken the country inhabited by the Shoshones.  One of them represents this tribe as “the Indians who inhabit that part of the Rocky Mountains which lies on the Grand and Green River branches of the Colorado of the West, the valley of Great Bear River, and the hospitable shores of the Great Salt Lakes.”  It is a great error.  That the Shoshones may have been seen in the above-mentioned places is likely enough, as they are a great nation, and often send expeditions very far from their homes; but their own country lies, as I have said, betwixt the Pacific Ocean and the 116th degree of west longitude.  As to the “hospitable” shores of the Great Salt Lake.  I don’t know what it means, unless it be a modern Yankee expression for a tract of horrid swamps with deadly effluvia, tenanted by millions of snakes and other “such hospitable reptiles.”  The lake is situated on the western country of the Crows, and I doubt if it has ever been visited by any Shoshone.]

A proof of their antiquity and foreign extraction is, that but few of their records and traditions are local; they refer to countries on the other side of the sea, countries where the summer is perpetual, the population numberless, and the cities composed of great palaces, like the Hindoo traditions, “built by the good genii, long before the creation of man.”

There is no doubt, indeed it is admitted by the other tribes that the Shoshone is the parent tribe of the Comanches, Arrapahoes, and Apaches—­the Bedouins of the Mexican deserts.  They all speak the same beautiful and harmonious language, have the same traditions; and indeed so recent have been their subdivisions, that they point out the exact periods by connecting them with the various events of Spanish inland conquest in the northern portion of Sonora.

It is not my intention to dwell long upon speculative theory, but I must observe, that if any tradition is to be received with confidence it must proceed from nations, or tribes, who have long been stationary.  That the northern continent of America was first peopled from Asia, there can be little doubt, and if so, it is but natural to suppose that those who first came over would settle upon the nearest and most suitable territory.  The emigrants who, upon their landing, found themselves in such a climate and such a country as California, were not very likely to quit it in search of a better.

That such was the case with the Shoshones, and that they are descendants from the earliest emigrants, and that they have never quitted the settlement made by their ancestors, I have no doubt, for all their traditions confirm it.