Fremont County is a county in the U.S. state of Wyoming. As of the 2020 United States Census, the population was 39,234, making it the fifth-most populous county in Wyoming. Its county seat is Lander. The county was founded in 1884 and is named for John C. Frémont, a general, explorer, and politician. It is roughly the size of the state of Vermont.
Fort Washakie is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fremont County, Wyoming, United States, within the Wind River Indian Reservation and along U.S. Route 287. The population was 1,759 at the 2010 census. The headquarters for the Eastern Shoshone Tribe is located in Fort Washakie, as well as the Bureau of Indian Affairs agency for the Wind River Indian Reservation.
Lander is a city in Wyoming, United States, and the county seat of Fremont County. It is in central Wyoming, along the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River, just south of the Wind River Indian Reservation. It is a tourism center with several nearby guest ranches. Its population was 7,487 at the 2010 census.
Washakie was a prominent leader of the Shoshone people during the mid-19th century. He was first mentioned in 1840 in the written record of the American fur trapper, Osborne Russell. In 1851, at the urging of trapper Jim Bridger, Washakie led a band of Shoshones to the council meetings of the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851). Essentially from that time until his death, he was considered the head of the Eastern Shoshones by the representatives of the United States government. In 1979, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
The Wind River Indian Reservation, in the west-central portion of the U.S. state of Wyoming, is shared by two Native American tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho. Roughly 60 mi (97 km) east to west by 50 mi (80 km) north to south, the Indian reservation is located in the Wind River Basin, and includes portions of the Wind River Range, Owl Creek Mountains, and Absaroka Range.
Shoshone National Forest is the first federally protected National Forest in the United States and covers nearly 2,500,000 acres (1,000,000 ha) in the state of Wyoming. Originally a part of the Yellowstone Timberland Reserve, the forest is managed by the United States Forest Service and was created by an act of Congress and signed into law by U.S. President Benjamin Harrison in 1891. Shoshone National Forest is one of the first nationally protected land areas anywhere. Native Americans have lived in the region for at least 10,000 years, and when the region was first explored by European adventurers, forestlands were occupied by several different tribes. Never heavily settled or exploited, the forest has retained most of its wildness. Shoshone National Forest is a part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a nearly unbroken expanse of federally protected lands encompassing an estimated 20,000,000 acres (8,100,000 ha).
Fort Washakie was a U.S. Army fort in what is now the U.S. state of Wyoming. The fort was established in 1869 and named Camp Augur after General Christopher C. Augur, commander of the Department of the Platte. In 1870 the camp was renamed Camp Brown in honor of Captain Frederick H. Brown, who was killed in the Fetterman Massacre in 1866.
Fort Totten State Historic Site is a historic fort that sits on the shores of Devils Lake near Fort Totten, North Dakota. During its 13 years of operation as a fort, Fort Totten was used during the American Indian wars to enforce the peace among local Native American tribes and to protect transportation routes. After its closing in 1890, it operated until 1959 as a Native American boarding school, called the Fort Totten Indian Industrial School. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971; in its nomination form, the State Historical Society of North Dakota called it "one of the best preserved military posts... in the Trans-Mississippi West for the Indian Wars period".
Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who, in her teens, helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition in achieving their chartered mission objectives by exploring the Louisiana Territory. Sacagawea traveled with the expedition thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, helping to establish cultural contacts with Native American people and contributing to the expedition's knowledge of natural history in different regions.
Washakie is a ghost town in far northern Box Elder County, Utah, United States. Lying some 3 miles (4.8 km) southeast of Portage, it was established in 1880 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the settlement of the Northwestern Shoshone. The Washakie Indian Farm was home to the main body of this Native American band through most of the 20th century. By the mid-1970s, Washakie's residents were gone and the property sold to a private ranching operation. Today the tribal reservation consists of a small tract containing the Washakie cemetery, and the tribe is seeking to acquire more of the surrounding land. The old LDS chapel in Washakie is now on the National Register of Historic Places.
James Trosper is the current Eastern Shoshone Sun Dance chief. He is widely regarded as “a respected voice on traditional Plains Indian spirituality.” He is Director of the High Plains American Indian Research Institute. HPAIRI facilitates a wide variety of partnerships between the University of Wyoming and the tribes of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Fort Washakie, Wyoming “to work together in ways that empower tribes, nurture innovation for American Indian sustainability, and demonstrate respect for Native peoples’ cultures, traditions, laws, and diverse expressions of sovereignty.”
This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in Fremont County, Wyoming.
Eastern Shoshone are Shoshone who primarily live in Wyoming and in the northeast corner of the Great Basin where Utah, Idaho and Wyoming meet and are in the Great Basin classification of Indigenous People. They lived in the Rocky Mountains during the 1805 Lewis and Clark Expedition and adopted Plains horse culture in contrast to Western Shoshone that maintained a Great Basin culture.
John Roberts was a Welsh Anglican priest, writer and missionary in the Bahamas and Wyoming.
Sherman Coolidge, an Episcopal Church priest and educator, helped found and lead the Society of American Indians (1911–1923). That first national American Indian rights organization run by and for Native Americans pioneered twentieth-century Pan-Indianism, the philosophy and movement promoting unity among American Indians regardless of tribal affiliation.
St. Michael's Mission is an Episcopal church mission established about 1887 in Fremont County, Wyoming to minister to the Arapaho and Shoshone of the Wind River Indian Reservation. It was founded by Reverend John Roberts with the permission of Shoshone Chief Washakie. The community of Ethete grew around the mission, given its name by Washakie's assent in the Shoshone language, ethete. In 1900 a small log church was built about 3 miles (4.8 km) from the present location. In 1910 the mission received an endowment from Mrs. Baird Cooper and the new site was developed over the next seven years. In 1920 the original church was moved to the mission, enlarged, and named "The Church of Our Father's House.
The Wind River Agency Blockhouse, also known as the Trout Creek Blockhouse, was built in 1871 on the Wind River Indian Reservation. It is one of the oldest surviving structures in Wyoming. The blockhouse was built at the suggestion of Chief Washakie as a defensive position for the local Shoshone and non-Indians against attack by Cheyenne, Northern Arapaho and Sioux raiders. After the Wyoming Territory became more stable the structure served as a jail and as a storehouse.
The sculptor David McGary has created a standing statue of Chief Washakie, leader of the Shoshone people, in multiple versions, as well as an equestrian statue of the same subject.
Friday (Arapaho: Teenokuhu or Warshinun, also known as Friday Fitzpatrick, was an Arapaho leader and interpreter in the mid to late 1800s. When he was around the age of eight, he was separated from his band and was taken in by a white trapper. During the next seven years, he was schooled in St. Louis, Missouri and went on trapping expeditions with his informally adopted father, Thomas Fitzpatrick. After he was recognized by his mother during an encounter with the Arapaho, he returned to the tribe.
Scott J. Ratliff is an American politician in the state of Wyoming. An Eastern Shoshone, he is the first Native American to be elected to the Wyoming State Legislature and served as a Democrat for Fremont County, Wyoming from 1980 to 1992.
