Utah Centennial County History Series - Grand County 1996

NATIVE AMERICANS AND I n historic times the dominant Native American group in the Grand County area has been the Ute Indians. The ancestors of the Ute Indians are thought to have migrated into the area of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau perhaps as early as the twelfth century, after beginning their wanderings sometime around A.D. 1000 in the area that is now southern California. The Utes as well as the Paiutes and Shoshone Indians speak Numic-a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language. Although there is some dispute regarding the date of their entrance into the area and the extent of their domain, they were the dominant Native American group at the time of extensive European contact in the eighteenth century.

The Utes shared the land with members of other tribes. In the late nineteenth century there were Paiutes in Grand County, and their ancestors may have been there long before; however, it appears to modern researchers that many frontier observers classified as Paiutes some people who were actually Utes. It is also possible that Navajo Indians immigrated into the region as early as the fourteenth century, although there appears to have been little occupation of