There's some fairly nice options to do this sort of thing, like this thing from Paul Components to adapt modern bar-end shifters from TT bikes: https://paulcomp.com/shop/components/shimanothumbies/
Or you can get Shimano ones for damn near nothing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CY9DA1A?psc=1
I dismissed this out of hand when first presented with the idea, because all I remembered was the terrible old school ones that had no indexing, but these have nice solid clicks to them. I keep thinking about a Surly big dummy for caching tools in the deep backwoods trails we work on, & if I do buy one, this will be the setup on it.