The main plaza of Jackson is full of boutique shops and store of brands such as Eddy Bauer and Gap. At the restaurant, the waiters and waitresses were all well dressed formally there was emphasis on etiquette that had no intrinsic meaning or essence except to signal social status and refinement there was a separate and extensive menu for all kinds of drinks the diners held wine glasses the right way the smart phones were out for pictures and the instant Facebook uploads the expensive bills were conveniently paid by gleaming credit cards. In Jackson, I would get the fancy vegetarian food I was looking for. The contrast from Wind River could not have been sharper. Three hours northeast of Fort Washakie, at the base of the dramatic Teton Range of the Rocky Mountains – jagged peaks that rise suddenly for thousands of feet from the valley, creating a view that is scarcely believable and extensively photographed – is one of the more affluent towns in the country: Jackson. In all, there are 550 recognized tribes and around 300 reservations. The Phoenix metropolitan area, where I spent six years, and the state of Arizona more generally, has a number of reservations, including the largest, the Navajo Nation. It’s a strange term, but now accepted and commonplace I’d encountered it first in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I’d read as a college student. Around 2000 American troops followed the escaping Nez Perce to arrest them and forcibly bring them back within the confines of a reservation - the term refers to a territory designated by the US government for Indian tribes.

Their defiance made them outlaws in their own land. The Nez Perce band had refused to live in lands that US government had designated for them. By this time, America's westward expansion and its capture of land that belonged to Indians had reached its peak. The highway is named after Chief Joseph, the leader of a group of 800 Nez Perce Indians who were escaping from the US army in 1877.

Wind river casino rodeo