Abandoned Cabin, Wind River

When I began field work on the Wind River Reservation as a graduate student, I decided to compare living conditions in the 1930's when everyone was poor to the late 1960's, when the Wind River Shoshone and Arapaho had been getting some revenue from their oil and gas leases and had more assistance in providing better housing.  This one-room log house was typical of the way people lived in the 1930's and only the more fortunate Shoshone like Tom Wesaw, who worked in the flour-mill, had a frame house with more than a single room.

Whole families would live in this one room, sleeping in beds around the inside of the room.  Often, houses had only a dirt floor, and many people still lived in army-style canvas tents. One Arapaho woman described life in one of those houses as warm and cozy but there was a downside: diseases like tuberculosis spread quickly when people live so close to each other and in the 1930's there was still no cure for tuberculosis. By the 1960's, drugs had almost eliminated that dreaded disease.

This lone house beside the road with its boarded-up front door is a grim reminder of what life was like on the reservation only a few years earlier.