Ammon Pubigee was an influential leader in the Washakie Ward who served as superintendent of the Sunday School and as the first Shoshone ward clerk.¹ He was an Eastern Shoshone born to mother Che-Uh-Gah and father Ma-we-yun-Gah near Green River in present-day Wyoming.² As a child, he apparently had two Shoshone names: Pubigee, meaning “weasel,” and Biagwina, which means “big eagle.”³ He was born sometime between 1855 and 1865. According to family tradition reported by his granddaughter Lila Pubigee Jones, when Pubigee Biagwina was a small child, his parents brought him from Wyoming to present-day southern Idaho to visit their Northwestern Shoshone relatives, and they were present during the Bear River Massacre on 29 January 1863. His aunt helped him escape, and the family returned to Wyoming.⁴ During his lifetime, however, Pubigee Biagwina consistently reported that he was born in 1865, two years after the massacre; it is possible that he did not know his actual birthyear.⁵

In summer 1875, Pubigee Biagwina traveled with his parents and hundreds of other Eastern Shoshone to northern Utah Territory, where they were baptized in the Bear River by Latter-day Saint missionary George Washington Hill on 1 August 1875.⁶ They were baptized just as the “Corinne Scare” was engulfing the fledgling Latter-day Saint Shoshone community in northern Utah. Pubigee Biagwina later recalled that soldiers “came and warned them to leave the country, threatening to massacre them as Indians had been slain in the Bear river battle.”⁷

While most of the Eastern Shoshone returned to Wyoming, it appears that Pubigee Biagwina and his parents remained in northern Utah. Later reminiscences described Pubigee Biagwina and his father, Ma-we-yun-Gah, as helping to build the Logan Temple in the late 1870s and early 1880s.⁸ Although contemporaneous sources do not mention them, they presumably lived at the Shoshone Latter-day Saint communities at Lemuel’s Garden and then, after 1880, at Washakie. According to Northwestern Shoshone historian Mae Timbimboo Parry, Pubigee Biagwina was among the first students to enroll at the Washakie day school. “He already knew some English” and “he proved to be one of the brighter students,” Parry reported.⁹ Likely with the encouragement of Hill and other Euro-Americans, Pubigee Biagwina took the given name Ammon after a missionary in the Book of Mormon and then adopted Pubigee as his surname. He apparently stopped using the name Biagwina at this time.¹⁰

In the early 1880s, Ammon married Padzoka Ottogary—later known as Eliza—a member of a prominent Northwestern Shoshone Latter-day Saint family. Even as a teenager, she was recognized as a leader when she was called as the first Shoshone counselor in an otherwise Euro-American presidency of the Washakie Ward’s Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association in 1883.¹¹ She and Ammon had six children together, three of whom lived to adulthood—Seth (ca. 1884–1950), Enos (1897–1949), and Elias (1900–1976).¹² On 11 March 1885, Ammon attended the Logan Temple—with his name inscribed in the records as “Ammon Pabigee”—and received his endowment.¹³ He was then sealed to “Pats-un-gwa.”¹⁴ Two years later, he applied for a homestead at Washakie—with his name inscribed as “Ammon Pab-i-gee (Indian)”—and began to make his livelihood as a farmer.¹⁵

During the 1880s and 1890s, Shoshone Latter-day Saints increasingly replaced white missionaries as leaders in ward organizations. In 1890, Ammon was called as first assistant to Moroni Zundel, the first Shoshone superintendent of the Sunday School. Following Zundel’s death two years later, Ammon was called as superintendent, with the responsibility of overseeing the congregation’s religious education.¹⁶ On 18 February 1893, a Euro-American visitor to the Washakie Ward Sunday School described the “young Indian superintendent” calling the sixty participants to attention. “The exercises consisted of singing from the Sunday school hymn books, recitations, Indian songs, readings, testimonies and speaking in English by some of the boys.”¹⁷ On 12 April 1908, Ammon was called as the congregation’s first Shoshone ward clerk, charged with keeping congregational records.¹⁸ Alongside this new responsibility, he continued as Sunday School superintendent.

In 1913, Ammon was called to serve a short-term mission with his brother-in-law Willie Ottogary among the Goshute, a Shoshone-speaking people who lived in arid lands in Tooele County, west of Salt Lake City.¹⁹ The missionaries went first to Deep Creek, near the Utah-Nevada border, where they “visit[ed] every family in town” and held church meetings. According to Willie’s report, Ammon spoke at one meeting on “Sunday School duties,” and at a second meeting, he discussed Jesus Christ’s visit to the “Nephites people and Lamanites too” described in the Book of Mormon. The missionaries subsequently visited a second Goshute reservation in Skull Valley, where they again visited individual homes and preached the Latter-day Saint gospel.²⁰ Willie and Ammon left their mission believing that “they have done much good and that if the matter is followed up that it would result in quite a number of baptisms.”²¹ Following his return to Washakie, Ammon was released as ward clerk and as Sunday School superintendent. In subsequent years, he continued to serve in various capacities in the ward, including as secretary of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association, on the ward amusement committee, and as first assistant in the Sunday School.²²

On 31 March 1919, his beloved wife, Eliza, died at age fifty-two of “stomach trouble.”²³ Just over eight years later, he found companionship again, civilly marrying Towange Timbimboo, the widow of Soquitch Timbimboo. They remained together until her death in 1935.²⁴ Although Ammon remained physically strong during these years, his hearing began to diminish, leading him to request a release from his callings in 1927.²⁵ Despite his disability, the following year he was set apart as a high priest by apostle George Albert Smith.²⁶

Ammon was known in the community as a hard-working and competent farmer who cared for his family. Euro-American Newel J. Cutler, who served as bishop of the Washakie Ward and the church farm supervisor in the 1950s, indicated that Ammon “maintained his 160 [acres] right up until the time he died. He farmed it. He had raised a little grain of his own which provided him with some cash.”²⁷ His descendants remembered his beautiful horse herds and remembered him as being a skilled carpenter, shoemaker, and brick maker.²⁸ He was also described as a bo’hagunt, or recipient of spiritual power, and as a practitioner of traditional Indigenous medicine.²⁹ According to family tradition reported by his granddaughter Helen Pubigee Timbimboo, in the 1940s Ammon healed his grandson Andrew of radiation poisoning suffered in Japan during World War II. Although physicians concluded that Andrew would lose his leg, Ammon combined traditional Shoshone “big medicine” with “a good priesthood blessing.” Helen recalled that Andrew “never lost his leg.”³⁰

In 1949, just five years before Ammon died, a journalist described him as “a spare, wiry old man” and as “lean and alert.”³¹ In 1954, despite being noted as “the oldest member of the ward,” Ammon was an active participant in sacrament meetings, giving talks and bearing his testimony. During sacrament meeting on 22 August, he “showed the People some Indian sign language to benefit the visitors.”³² On 12 October 1954, Ammon died of old age in his home after a brief illness. He was buried in the Washakie cemetery.³³