Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum

The trading post this country is named for is gone, and the ground it stood on belongs to the people it traded with. Fort Hall went up on the Snake bottoms in 1834; the site now lies inside the Fort Hall Reservation, and the way to walk it is on a tour arranged through this museum, which the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes run at the I-15 exit where their hotel and casino stand.

The museum is small and it is theirs. Its photographs follow tribal government from the men who signed the Fort Bridger Treaty in 1868 through the generations since, and it traces the bands brought together here: Shoshone from the Boise and Weiser country and the southwest; the Bannock, a smaller Northern Paiute people who intermarried with the Shoshone until most families here are both; and the Agaidika, removed from the Lemhi Valley in 1907, the valley the Sacajawea Center remembers. Exhibits on Chief Pocatello, whose name the city twenty miles south carries, sit beside beadwork, traditional dress and artifacts from the old fort.

It also tells how the reservation shrank. The treaty land has been cut down since, by cessions for the railroad and for the Pocatello townsite among others, to about 546,000 acres across four counties. The Oregon, California and Lander trails ran through the tribes' hunting and gathering grounds, and settlers' cattle crowded the rest; the Bannock War of 1878 grew out of that squeeze.

Call ahead. Hours are seasonal, and tours of the fort site and the reservation bottoms have to be booked.