The Lemhi Shoshone were the specific band of Northern Shoshone, led by Chief Cameahwait, who encountered the expedition at the Continental Divide in August 1805. They were Sacagawea’s birth people — the band from which she had been captured as a child.
The Lemhi Shoshone lived in the Salmon River country of present-day central Idaho, a resource-rich but geographically isolated region. They possessed many horses but few guns, making them vulnerable to raids by the better-armed Blackfeet and Hidatsa.
The band’s decision to trade horses to the expedition — influenced heavily by Sacagawea’s reunion with her brother Cameahwait — was one of the most consequential moments of the journey. Without Shoshone horses, the expedition could not have crossed the Rocky Mountains.
The Lemhi Shoshone were later removed from their ancestral lands and placed on the Fort Hall Reservation in southeastern Idaho in 1907 — a removal they have contested ever since.
