The Unwanted Indians: The Southern Utes in Southeastern Utah

The Unwanted Indians: The Southern Utes in Southeastern Utah

BY GREGORY C. THOMPSON

IN 1879 THE UTES OF COLORADO were disgruntled with the way their government agent was treating them. Trouble seemed imminent and, indeed, it occurred. The events, although far from southeastern Utah, played a major part in the attempts to make San Juan County into a Ute Indian reservation.

The Colorado Utes had been under tremendous pressure from intruders since gold was discovered in the Pikes Peak region in 1858. That event caused an instant population boom along the eastern slope of the present-day state of Colorado and helped establish Denver as a thriving town. From the eastern slope, miners and their support audience of trail and road builders, storekeepers, and saloon operators moved west into the heart of the mountain country of Colorado in search of the precious yellow metal. This push brought the Utes face-to-face on their own territory with these intruders. By 1879 the Indians had been pushed onto lands along the western slope of Colorado, and the miners and others of Colorado were calling for the removal of these people from their most traditional lands. The cry of the Coloradans in their local newspapers and to the nation at large was to remove the Utes from within the boundaries of their state.

Colorado had been named a territory in 1861, eleven years after both Utah and New Mexico; but, because of the existence of gold in large quantities, it had been granted statehood in 1876 — the centennial year — long before either Utah or New Mexico gained similar status. The political power that accompanied statehood became very important to Colorado, especially when it was surrounded by territories with only limited power in the national legislature. The citizens of Colorado did not waste this advantage as they gathered their forces in the attempt to remove the Utes from their state.

Combined with forces created by the arrival of miners, ranchers, and land developers were those of the national government and its changing Indian policy. From the latter 1860s through the 1880s the government had struggled with outraged Indian tribes who resented the intrusion of people onto their traditional or reservation lands. Numerous tribes located on the plains had fought for control of their lands, causing major problems for the army and the Indian Department. As a reaction to these outbreaks, the government, with the help of reformers, struggled to create a new approach to the Indian problems by establishing the Grant Peace Policy. Under the philosophy of creating peace and protecting Indian lands, reservations were either created or recognized that the U.S. Army felt it could protect; and sympathetic agents, representing the major religious denominations of the nineteenth century, were named to administer federal Indian policy at the local level.

Nathan C. Meeker, although not a religious representative per se, was sent to the White River Agency, located in northwestern Colorado, as agent. Meeker, a former correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune and an admirer of Greeley himself, brought his enthusiasm for Utopian colonies and modern farming practices to his new appointment. He was determined to teach the Utes to become farmers, but they resisted. Finally, when Meeker sent some of his agency employees to plow one of the White River's favorite horse pastures and race course, the Utes rebelled. Under the leadership of Johnson, Jack, and Douglas, all White River Utes, the agency was attacked after a force of 155 soldiers and 25 civilians entered the reservation against the washes of the Utes and against the promises of Maj. Thomas T. Thornburg, commander of the unit. Meeker, Thornburg, and 28 other whites were killed in the ensuing battle. Only 20 Utes took part in the battle and killings, but the event provided a fine excuse for the citizens of Colorado to demand the removal of all of the Utes from their state.

As the event unfolded and news of the killings spread east, the cry of the Coloradans became a national roar. Pressure forced Congress and the Indian Department to react with great haste. The result of the demands of the people of the United States was a new agreement with the Ute bands located in Colorado, signed on March 6, 1880.

Under the terms of the new Ute agreement, the White River band of Utes was to be moved onto the Uintah reservation in eastern Utah, and by 1882 the move had taken place. After several delays, a change in the agreed-upon reservation, and numerous renegotiations, the Uncompahgre band of Utes was moved out of the mountains of Colorado and onto a very dry and desolate strip of land in central eastern Utah along the Colorado border. Only the three Southern Ute bands, the Weeminuche, the Capote, and the Muache, remained in the state.

The Ute agreement of 1880 also called for the removal of the Southern Utes and for the disestablishment of their reservation. For some unknown reason, perhaps because the Southern Ute bands had in no way contributed to the trouble on the White River and, like the other Colorado Ute bands, had been traditionally very peaceful people, the Ute agreement did not call for their removal from the state of Colorado. Rather, the one clause of the agreement that related to the Southern Utes called for the giving up of their lands and for taking allotments in severalty, which were equivalent to homesteads, along the La Plata.

George Manypenny, one of the three members of a commission who negotiated with the Southern Utes, agreed to help reestablish the tribe on their new lands. Manypenny had been involved in Indian affairs for a number of years; in fact, he had been commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Franklin Pierce administration in the 1850s. Since that time, Manypenny had served in a number of positions, including special investigator and head of the peace commission to the Sioux in 1868, which resulted in the Sioux treaty of 1868. Just prior to joining the Ute commission, Manypenny wrote and published a major indictment of the use of the army in Indian affairs and the need for change in the system. His book, entitled Our Indian Wards, became an important document to a growing number of Indian reformers, most of whom resided in the East. Among his solutions for what was termed the nation's "Indian Problem" was the wide adoption of the homestead principle and the concept of Jeffersonian agrarianism. In more simple terms, Manypenny called for the reduction of Indian reservations through the use of giving allotments of land to individual Indians and teaching them the rudiments of the yeoman farmer. Allotments in severalty and farming would help the Indians enter the mainstream of American society. At the same time, this would remove them from the wardship rolls of the United States government.

On two occasions Commissioner Manypenny surveyed the proposed Southern Ute lands, and on both occasions he found the land along the La Plata River wanting as potential agricultural land. In his report he noted the lack of land presently under cultivation on either side of the river, whether in Colorado or New Mexico. 9 Certainly, the land would not support the agricultural needs of 1,200 Southern Utes.

Naturally, Manypenny's views were not well received in the areas surrounding the reservation nor in the state of Colorado. However, when the senior senator from Colorado, Henry Teller, a man of substantial power in the U.S. Senate, told his colleagues that he concurred with the Manypenny report, the people of Colorado realized that settling the Southern Utes along the La Plata River was not going to be the solution to their "Indian Problem."

For several years after 1880 efforts were made by the Colorado delegation to gain sufficient support in Congress to pass a bill that would either force the removal of the Utes to the La Plata River area or provide that suitable agricultural lands be found for them elsewhere. From 1880 through 1884 numerous alternative solutions to the Southern Ute problem were offered in Congress. All failed, leaving the Utes in a most difficult position.

The mining boom in the San Juan Mountains continued to bring more and more people to the area just north of the Southern Ute reservation. The arrival of the railroad at Durango in 1881 and its extension to Silverton in the mining region and to Dolores in the west, allowed ranchers, farmers, and homesteaders more accessibility to those lands surrounding the reservation. Together, these pressures made the Utes captives on their own reservation and, in some cases, especially with the cowboys from the ranches and the large cattle herds located to the west and south of the reservation, meant people trespassing onto the reservation. With these trespasses came incidents of conflict resulting in increased tension among the Utes. Furthermore, the Utes were left in a most tenuous position with the uncertainty of the status of their reservation. Realizing that they were probably to be removed from the area and wanting to be settled in a permanent home, they nevertheless could not fully prepare for eventual removal when they did not know where they would be moved. Their situation dragged on year after year with no change in their status.

Finally, late in 1885, Senator Teller introduced Senate Bill No. 769 which provided for the Utes to be removed from Colorado. He did not say where they were to be moved, but his action forced Congress to think in terms of removing the Utes from the state.

In February 1886 three Southern Ute leaders, Buckskin Charley, Ignacio, and Tapoche, were sent to Washington at the request of Sen. T. M. Bowen of Colorado to negotiate with the government for a solution to their problem. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs it was quite apparent that the leaders of the three bands would not agree to be removed to the Uintah and Uncompahgre reservations located in eastern Utah. Nor would they consider moving to a separate reservation in the region. Ignacio, headman for the Weeminuche, asked Congress to move them to the west of their present reservation onto land located in San Juan County, Utah.

Commissioner of Indian Affairs J. D. C. Atkins, a former congressman from Tennessee and a member of President Grover Cleveland's first administration, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs that the wdshes of the Utes should be granted. He felt that Senate Bill No.

1916, introduced by Bowen, which called for the Utes' removal to San Juan County, Utah, should receive the support of Congress and would receive the backing of the Indian Department and the administration.

However, Senate Bill No. 1916 died in committee after being referred there while waiting for the Utes to inspect their proposed lands. Not all was lost, though, as the testimony of the Utes, the Colorado delegation, and the Interior Department was important and had an influence on further negotiations with the Utes. Indeed, the views stated in support of the bill became the cornerstone of the administration's policy to try to remove the Utes.

On location at the Ute reservation, the three bands of Southern Utes were becoming very dissatisfied with the inaction of the government and impatient to be located on land they could call theirs. The Utes' desire was aided by two rather strongly worded memorials from the Colorado State Legislature and by strong press support. An editorial in the Aspen Weekly Times stated: "There should be no backdown. The Indians should either leave the state or be cleaned out." The action of the Utes, the legislature, and the press brought results.

Two bills were again introduced in Congress, one in the Senate and one in the House, which called for removal of the Utes to Utah. Although the two bills died without action, compromise legislation drafted from these two pieces was appended to a bill proposing legislation relating to a group of Montana Indians. The bill passed Congress, and with it the secretary of the interior received the right to name a three-man commission to negotiate with the Southern Utes for the relinquishment of their right to any land in Colorado in exchange for new lands outside the state.

After organizing in Kansas City, Missouri, on July 24, 1887, the committee of three traveled to the Southern Ute reservation and by August 4 were ready for business. But the negotiating process did not go well, for by that time the leaders of the bands were against removal. They were unwilling to leave comfortable homes and familiar surroundings for the harsher region to the west.

In hopes of prompting the leaders, a tour of the proposed San Juan County reservation was arranged. The party got as far as the Big Bend on the Dolores River, not far from the present-day townsite of Dolores, Colorado, when conflict developed. The Utes claimed that the eastern border of the proposed reservation should run through the Big Bend, whereas the commission stated that the line w r ould be the Utah-Colorado state line. While meeting in council the three Ute band representatives could not decide if they should proceed on, and a fight broke out that resuited in the killing of one Capote Ute. The remaining Capotes refused to go on and returned home. The rest of the party did manage to get as far as the Carlisle ranch, located just north of the present site of Monticello on the northeast slope of the Abajo Mountains, before they refused to travel farther into Utah. They feared the commission was escorting them to the Uintah reservation and would not allow them to return. The Indians agreed that they had seen enough to know that they wanted to reestablish their reservation in this area.

After returning to the agency in Colorado the Utes signed a new agreement with the commission calling for their removal to Utah and the establishment of a new reservation. The new reservation boundaries paralleled those proposed in Senate Bill No. 1916, with the exception of the north line. Instead of the reservation running for one hundred miles north along the Utah-Colorado line, that distance was reduced to seventy-five miles. This moved the north boundary south of La Sal, a small community that existed by 1889, and out of the La Sal Mountain range. To obtain the consent of the tribe the commission had to have the signatures of 242, or three-quarters, of the adult male members of the three Southern Ute bands. On November 14, 1888, the commission presented a document with 274 signatures, well over the number needed.

The new agreement stated that besides the land, which amounted to 2,912,000 acres or nearly two million acres more than the Colorado reservation they were giving up, they would also receive $50,000 in ten annual payments, $20,000 worth of sheep, a new agency, and permission to hunt on and around the unoccupied lands of the La Sal Mountains.

With the presentation of a signed agreement by the Ute negotiating committee to Congress on January 11, 1889, the signal was clear to the people of San Juan County, Utah, that if they wanted to keep their land and not have their county become a reservation, they had better muster all of the political power they could. The fight was going to be a tough one, for pitted against the Mormon settlers and some very unlikely allies were the citizens of Colorado. The Utahns and their allies lost the first round when on February 1, 1889, Senator Brown of Colorado introduced a new Ute removal bill into the Senate, labelled Senate Bill No. 3894, which passed.

Within the House, the forces opposing removal to Utah were able to rally support and stop the same bill in committee without the matter ever reaching the floor for general debate.

Those fighting the removal attempt made the most unusual and unlikely bedfellows. The most obvious group opposing the move were the settlers of San Juan County. Many of them were from the Mormon party that had come into the area through the Hole-in-the-Rock route and had established small farms and several settlements. They had been sent to the area by the church and felt an obligation to remain. Although some saw the possibility of selling their land claims at a profit to the government and were willing to leave, the number of petitions from the citizens of the area to Congress indicated that most settlers were against moving.

The commissioners who had negotiated the agreement felt that the surveyed lands of the county would be excluded from the reservation; however, there were a number of Mormon settlers who were, according to the commissioners, squatting on unsurveyed land and would have to be moved. It would be only natural for the remaining settlers to feel threatened by the change, and certainly the loss of land for homesteading purposes would hinder the area's ability to expand as a farming region. For the Mormon contingent this was a very important consideration.

Closely linked to the Mormons geographically was a small group of very powerful cattle ranchers and cattle company owners who used much of the proposed reservation land as grazing areas for vast herds of cattle. By 1888 such companies as the Carlisle, or the Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company as it was officially known for a time, located north of Monticello near Peter's Hill, alone ran herds of well over ten thousand head. Others who were either directly or indirectly affected by the proposed reservation included the Rays, the Maxwells, the Taylors, the O'Donnels, John Shafer, Spud Hudson, and Peters. A second large cattle company located in the area and owned in absentia was the Pittsburgh Cattle Company. Owned by Charles H. Ogden and associates, whose operation was located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Ogden and the Pittsburgh Cattle Company led the way in the cattle companies' fight to keep the Utes out of the area. The reasons for the cattle groups joining the settlers of the area were obvious. Less obvious, but more important to the outcome of the battle, was the close cooperation of the owner of the Pittsburgh Cattle Company with a group of eastern middle-class, strongly Protestant reformers.

Organized into the Indian Rights Association and functioning since December 1882, the organization had the ear of the Indian Department and, more important, Congress through its very effective Washingtonlobbyist, C. C. Painter. The organization used its lobbying ability with maximum effectiveness. The Indian Rights Association had been a major force in gaining the passage of the 1887 General Allotment Act. This act called for the end of Indian reservations, the placing of individual Indians on plots of land similar to homesteads taken from the old reservations, and the entering of these people into the mainstream of American economic and social life. Because the Indian Rights Association supported the concept of ending the reservation system, the idea of creating a new and substantially larger reservation for the Utes flew in the face of their national Indian policy desires. With great haste the association organized a campaign to defeat the removal legislation.

Because the headquarters of the Indian Rights Association was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and therefore near the headquarters of the Pittsburgh Cattle Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the two groups formed a lobby that was able to exert considerable pressure on key members of Congress, particularly members of the congressional committees of Indian Affairs.

The argument against removal was best stated by C. C. Painter and the representatives of the Indian Rights Association. Because the hunting lands of the Utes were to be located in and adjacent to the La Sal Mountains, the Utes would again be in constant contact with ranchers and farmers. The same types of problems facing the Utes in Colorado would again develop on their new reservation. Conflict and hostilities would ensue and before long there would be killings on one side or the other. Furthermore, the association questioned whether the Indians could keep their sheep on the reservation or the cattle companies off the reservation with any more success than had been experienced in Colorado. Finally, Painter and the other reformers were unwilling to admit that the Utes had failed their farming test on the Colorado reservation. In following their general policy of the time they were determined that all Indians, or anyway most, were to become the epitome of Jeffersonian agrarians, or successful, small, individual farmers. To encourage this pursuit the Utes needed land that could be irrigated. An inspection of both the present and proposed reservations indicated that the new reservation lacked sufficient water to support a major agricultural effort. Because water existed on the present reservation with a system for delivering the water to individual farms, the association argued it would be too expensive to abandon that location and develop a whole new system. 31 Also, the inspection of the proposed San Juan County reservation indicated that although there were a number of small streams leading off the Abajo Mountains, they ran dry in summer.

Other problems the association brought to the attention of Congress also helped to defeat the first attempt to pass the Ute removal bill. Three communities, largely Mormon in population, as well as numerous ranches were located within the proposed reservation boundaries. The commissioners had not seen that as a problem, but the reformers argued that the cost of compensating the settlers for improvements to the land and for removal would be much too expensive. Francis Fisher Kane and Frank M. Riter, two of the Indian Rights Association inspectors, estimated the cost of settlers' claims would be $150,000. They also noted that there were a number of mining claims located on the north bank of the San Juan River, a product of a gold rush to the area a few years earlier. No one was sure of the number of claims or the cost of quieting either claim or title to the lands. In the final analysis, the association felt the removal effort was impractical, much too expensive, and violated both the intent and practice of national Indian policy. The creation of a reservation and the removal of the Southern Utes to San Juan County would not bring the desired results: the civilization of the Southern Ute bands.

Along with the reformers the cattle companies expressed their displeasure with the attempted move. As stated before, the loss of grazing land would prove very costly and, perhaps, even bring an end to an expanding cattle industry in San Juan County. (Ironically, the decade of the 1890s saw the decline of this industry anyway. Overgrazing, harsh winters, and the depression of 1893 were the villains.) The owners of the cattle companies also realized that the close proximity of their cowboys to.the Indians and their reservation could only spell trouble.

Added to the voices of the local residents and the others were a series of resolutions from the territorial government of Utah. The territorial assembly felt that Utah already had too many Indians within its boundaries and should not have to be subjected to the increased burden of more.

Finally, after reviewing the entire matter very carefully, the commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Harrison administration, T. J. Morgan, felt that the Indians would be better off on allotments on their present reservation. He noted that the irrigation system for farming had been developed and that a few of the Utes were already trying their hand at crop raising. He also noted that a review of the minutes of the negotiations indicated that the proposed move did not fairly represent the desires of the Utes.

The composite voice of these various groups to Congress all helped to defeat the proposed removal bill. The people of Colorado did not give up without a fight, however, as a removal bill was introduced into either or both houses of Congress during each session for the next five years.

The solution to the Southern Ute question came in the form of a bill introduced into Congress by Andrew J. Hunter of Illinois, who was also a member of the House Committee on Indian Affairs. On April 23, 1894, he asked for the allotment of lands to the Southern Utes on their present reservation, the opening of the unallotted lands to white settlers, and the voiding of the 1880 Ute agreement, which called for the moving of the Utes to the La Plata River. The bill passed, and by 1899 the Utes had been allotted their land and the reservation was opened for settlement. However, all did not go as planned. Ignacio and the Weeminuche band of Utes refused to have anything to do with the allotment process, forcing the western end of the reservation to be reserved for them as land held in common.

Today, this area is called the Ute Mountain Ute reservation, with tribal headquarters located at Towaoc, Colorado. One member of that tribal council represents the only evidence of a Ute reservation in southeastern Utah, the White Mesa Utes, located just south of Blanding. These people had earlier held land in Allen Canyon and were moved to their present location by the government during the 1940s and 1950s.

In conclusion, a review of the events leading to the attempted removal of the Southern Utes from Colorado represented a striking shift in national Indian policy for the 1880s. That an attempt was made to exchange a reservation of roughly one million acres for one of nearly three million acres severely violated the intent and meaning of the General Allotment Act of 1887. In the end, a land-hungry nation was not about to let this type of transaction take place, despite the political power of the people of the state of Colorado. During the 1890s national sentiment moved more towards leaving the Southern Utes in Colorado and providing them with the means of becoming Jeffersonian agrarians. One point seems certain. Had this area been legislated a Southern Ute reservation in 1889 or 1890, the history of San Juan County, Utah, would have been much different during the twentieth century.

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