Big Gap

Behind you now, the road you didn't take runs east toward a pass nine thousand six hundred and fifty-eight feet up. Shoshone people just called it Big Gap. In the summer of eighteen seventy-three an army captain named William Jones came through, led across by a Tukudika guide named Togwotee, and Jones renamed the pass for him. Tukudika means eaters of the mountain sheep. It's what these high-country Shoshone called themselves, and some descendants prefer Mountain People. The English version, Sheep Eaters, was once considered derogatory. Names like that said how a band lived on the land, not that it was a separate people. The museum in Jackson says their bows of bighorn horn, soaked in hot springs until the curve reversed, could bring ten horses apiece. A name on the map didn't buy Togwotee much. In eighteen seventy-eight he and his followers were found in a large camp at that same Big Gap, accused of joining the Bannock War, and rounded up by federal authorities. They were only hunting elk. In eighteen eighty-three, Togwotee guided President Chester Arthur's party through Yellowstone. Before that ride, at Fort Washakie, Arthur sat down with Washakie of the Eastern Shoshones and Black Coal of the Northern Arapahos about cutting the reservation into allotments. Both told the President they didn't want it, and they kept saying so all their lives. One packer on that trip remembered General Sheridan lifting his hat at his first sight of the Tetons, and Arthur saying, never in my life have I seen anything so sublime. Now look right. The Shoshone word teewinot described those many pinnacles. To the Apsaalooke, the Crow people, they're the Sharp Mountains. A trapper wrote that the Snake Indians called them the hoary headed Fathers. And Teton? One tradition credits French trappers who thought the peaks looked like breasts. At least one Crow historian says the word comes from the Crow name for these mountains, which sounds much the same and means pointed and jagged. Take a look, and see what you think.