Copied from Animal Names and Anatomical Terms of the Goshute Indians, by Ralph V. Chamberlin. 1908.

The Indians that formerly held possession of the region from Salt Lake Valley to Weber Valley, were close in language and customs to the Goshutes proper; but they had a distinct tribal organization. Their last chief, named Goship, is said to have been buried south of Salt Lake City, near the present site of the State Prison. According to the statement of survivors of this band, in the days of Goship’s prime, when he seems to have been renowned as a war-chief, his followers numbered some thousands. Beginning with the advent of the Mormon pioneers, however, a rapid decrease in this band occurred, so much so that in a surprisingly few years it was practically extinct. The principal agency in this decimation was certain diseases, brought by the whites, to which the natives had never before been exposed, and to which, as a consequence, they had acquired no special resistance. They died off, it is said, by the hundreds. Almost overnight an entire camp would be swept free of every living soul. In 1848, for example, an epidemic of measles broke out among them. Ignorant of the proper treatment of the disease, and not knowing whence it came, many assembled at the Warm Springs north of Salt Lake City, and sought relief by bathing in these waters. They died off in large numbers, as many as forty being heaped in a single grave. The few individuals that now survive from a once proud tribe have taken up their abode with neighboring tribes and bands. The Goshutes proper, in the valleys to the west, also suffered strong reduction.

The languages of the Goshutes and of the Goships, as we may conveniently and in accordance with their own usage designate the Indians of the two chieftaincies above mentioned, are very close to that of the Shoshones proper, much closer to that of Utahs, notwithstanding some widespread statements to the contrary. Between the dialect used by the Goships and that of the more western bands the differences are largely phonetic, certain sounds in one replacing certain ones in the other with great regularity. Thus, y at the beginning of syllables in Goshute words commonly becomes n in the Goship. For example, yin’up, Goshute for sternum, becomes nin’up in Goship; and, similarly, pai’ya, Goshute for wasp, becomes pai’na. The names for less common animals or other objects were occasionally quite different. Even between the Indians of the Skull Valley and Deep Creek bands, between which there has been continual intercourse and migration, certain phonetic differences in language are found. Thus, the sound of z in the Skull Valley dialect commonly changes to the sound of th in the Deep Creek; e.g., ma dzi’ka, to cut, and madza’lua, to close, in the former, become respectively ma dthi’ka and ma dtha’tu a in the latter.