Here's What Life Is Actually Like On The Wind River Indian Reservation [View all]

[xchrom]

http://www.businessinsider.com/wind-river-indian-reservation-in-wyoming-2013-2?op=1

The Wind River Indian Reservation is not an easy place to get to, but I had to see it for myself.

Thirty-five-hundred square miles of prairie and mountains in western Wyoming, the reservation is home to bitter ancestral enemies: the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.

Even among reservations, it's renowned for brutal crime, widespread drug use, and legal dumping of toxic waste.

But no matter how much you hear about Wind River, there always seemed to be something unsaid. I spent over a week there and in the nearby towns. It was perhaps the most dramatic and unbalanced place I've ever been.


The Wind River reservation is located in central Wyoming. The landscape is unlike anything most people have ever seen


Out 'here' is the 3,500 square miles where Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes share unforgiving land that neither tribe called home until the U.S. forced them to in 1868. Before being forced to share the same reservation, the two tribes were enemies.


The locals call Wind River the 'Rez' and it's not far from the town of Shoshoni.


Wind River is in fact one of the deadliest places in the United States.