Paiute Posey and the Last White Uprising

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 53, 1985, No. 3

Paiute Posey and the Last White Uprising

BY ROBERT S. McPHERSON

BLANDING, LIKE MOST SOUTHERN

Utah towns in the 1920s, was a quiet, conservative community that took pride in its pioneer heritage. Many of its citizens had roots extending back to the first settlers of the region who had been commissioned to teach and convert their Indian neighbors to the life-style and beliefs of the Mormons. From the beginning, attempts to work with the Utes and Paiutes in the area became increasingly troubled; and in 1923 a conflict, since christened the "Posey War," erupted. Though eulogized by many Blanding settlers as a fair yet definitive solution to a knotty problem, the events proved disheartening for the Indians involved.

The Mormon mission to tame the wilderness of San Juan County had been frustrated from its outset by an inhospitable environment, competing cattle companies, and lawless elements from white society. Worst of all were the Indians of Ute/Paiute mixture, who were angered by encroachment on their lands. (Note: Though the Indian band was predominantly Ute, it was often referred to as Paiute.) As the natural food supply and grass diminished, the Indians went to the next best source of sustenance and wealth — the settlers. Cattle, sheep, and horses disappeared regularly from homesteads and found their way into the Indian camps. To the white men, who were barely eking out an existence, these Indian thefts became a serious concern. Survival, not proselytizing required the Mormons' major efforts.

Threats, counterthreats, and depredations continued, with violence breaking out in 1915 and 1921, during which small numbers of Indians were killed or wounded. Yet this brought little satisfaction to the settlers. At one point Tse-ne-gat, a Ute involved in the 1915 disturbance, was sent to Denver to stand trial. Much to the chagrin of the Blanding people, he was acquitted in the courtroom, dined in the best restaurants, and revered as a noble Indian. Infuriated by these developments, the whites vowed silently that the next time a serious fight started, there would be a different ending.

When the second outbreak occurred in 1921 the settlers were ready. A calf belonging to John Rogers had been killed, so an armed posse was dispatched to the Indians' camp west of Bluff. Emerging from their shelters, the Utes spotted the armed skirmish line, did some fast calculating, and came out shooting. The Indians fought their way out, one being wounded in the shoulder and leg, while two women were captured, one of whom was convinced that she was to be shot on the spot. Bluff was put on full alert, with armed guards ringing the community in outposts, waiting for the Indians to exact revenge. It never came. Activities settled back into their normal sway with the occasional stealing of livestock, demands at a cabin door for biscuits, or warlike threats made to procure a desired article.

Beneath the surface of many of these problems lay the gnawing question of hunger. To the Utes and Paiutes of the San Juan area, survival as a traditional hunter-gatherer society was becoming more and more an impossibility. The lush grass that once stood as high as a man's waist was gone, the result of massive erosion of topsoil caused by overgrazing. Herds of deer had disappeared, and settlements like Bluff, Monticello, and Blanding had removed favored campsites and springs from Indian use. Not impressed with the Mormons' religious mission and highly incensed at their encroachment, the Indians both suffered and fumed at their deteriorating situation.

The Mormons were also aware of what was happening. Leland Redd recalled the situation and how his uncle Lemuel Redd reacted: "I know that Uncle Lem wrote a letter back to the Indian Department. . . . He wanted to know when the government was going to come down and help to feed these starving Indians. He said, 'They are starving to death right in our backyards.' It was true."

Compared to the Indians, the Mormons were affluent; but these Mormons, compared to most other Americans in the 1920s, were impoverished. Every sack of flour, every stolen cow, every pan of biscuits that went to the Indians removed provisions from the Mormon larder. Still, the settlers gave food because of fear of Indian trouble, because of a sometimes strained altruism to help the "Lamanites," and because they were instructed to do so by their presiding church leaders.

Resentment grew unavoidably, while few outside the community seemed to know or care. In a letter written in 1914 to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Cato Sells, the citizens of Blanding (then Grayson) told of their woes and concluded by saying, "The Indians are not making any decided advancement and we feel that the strong arm of the Government should manifest itself and have the Indians placed where they can be advanced along civilized lines and relieve the good people of the County of the burden of being preyed upon by a reckless bunch of Indians." A few attempts were made to meet this request, but nothing permanent was achieved.

Incident upon incident added to the Mormons' long list of grievances. Albert R. Lyman, in speaking of the Utes said, "Their whetted appetites craved warfare with its promise of cruel pleasure and unlawful gain. When men become so hungry for trouble that they go out hunting for it, they do not hunt in vain." Lyman was partially right in assessing the Indians' search for trouble, but the "hunger" was as much physical as emotional.

Contrary to much of the literature written about this period of San Juan history, the Mormons helped to fan the coals of anger. For example, George Hurst told of an incident in which an Indian boy left a gate open and when asked to close it refused.

So we went to rear end kicking. I kicked his hind end every step for a block. He shut the gate.

A few days after that, I was down at the old ranch and Old Posey came down on his white horse. He rode up and said, "It is all right, son." I was alone. He sat down and he said, "Say, what the matter with you beat my boy ass?" I talked back and forth to him. Finally I said, "You old son of a geezer, if you don't get out I'll kick yours." "All right, all right," he said, "I'll go over here and catch my gun. Pretty soon I'll come back and kill you." I sat in the door of my cabin until midnight that night with a thirty-thirty across my lap, waiting for the old buzzard to come.

Similar examples fill the statements of the pioneers of this time, all showing the same enmity between Indian and white.

There were some exceptions. Kumen Jones expressed his paternal admiration for the Indian. His attitude sprang from Mormon doctrine that looked for a brighter day: "When the day of accounting arrives, all conditions and opportunities and environments are taken into account, our dusky 'sons of the desert' may loom up far better than we may have figured." Albert R. Lyman, a sometimes embittered pioneer of San Juan, found good in the Indian. He said, "Neither their ignorance, their superstition nor their filth concealed the real charm of life as they lived it; such extravagant liberties — such novel partnership with the wind and the flowers and the trees. ... I was captivated; I wanted father to confirm a whispered report that I had a distant Indian ancestor. . . ." These attitudes were more the exception than the rule in this frontier setting where most whites were reacting to their own struggle to survive.

One of the major Indian personalities to emerge from this period of conflict was a Paiute who had married into the Ute tribe — a man named Posey. By 1923 he was between fifty and sixty years old and had been involved in the previous conflicts of 1915 and 1921, making his name to many settlers synonymous with troublemaking, arrogance, meanness, and thievery. If anything was stolen, killed, or molested, Posey was seen as the culprit, whether he was or not. For the Mormon settler steeped in religious doctrine, it was explained that "From the time that his fierce ancestors of the Gadianton persuasion swept their pale brethren from the two Americas, his people had known no law, but in idleness had contrived to live by plundering their neighbors. Posey inherited the instinct of this business from robbers of many generations."

By other settlers Posey was seen as a pure scoundrel who took advantage of a situation in which he would push and provoke a fight to obtain a favorable outcome. It is not surprising that most of the problems Posey was involved in centered around food — begging, threatening, or stealing whatever he thought he could procure. Add to this a temper, impatience with a frustrating economic situation, the view that Indian lands had been illegally usurped, and the patronizing attitudes of the settlers toward the Utes and one starts to better understand why Posey often took a defiant stance.

A different opinion was offered by Lyman Hunter, who spent two years (1920-22) in Blanding and gave an outsider's judgment of Posey. His insights add another perspective to the Indians' point of view and the concerns that Posey had.

I could see a little of their point of view, which the people who lived down there couldn't. Posey felt that the country belonged to them. They, I suppose, had driven out the Navajos and so he felt it belonged to them. What the right and the wrong of that is I just don't know. . . . The Mormons had come in and settled and had made farms. . . . Now from the Indian's point of view, this was very bad, and I talked with Posey many times about it. These days, I think some people would have called Posey an ecologist. He was somewhat concerned about preservation of the land. He told me and Mancos Jim told me a time or two before how the country had been when Posey was a boy. And their expression always was something like the grass would grow up to the belly of the ponies. He said there was lots of grass and lots of deer and there was hunting.

Things had changed since the cattle companies and the settlers had moved into the territory.

Because of the general resentment against the Mormons, it did not require much to get another armed conflict started. The Posey War erupted when two young Utes named Joe Bishop's Little Boy and Sanup's Boy were arrested for robbing a sheep camp, killing a calf, and burning a bridge. This was not the first time that they had been in trouble. In fact, their names — along with Posey, Poke, and Tse-ne-gat (who had died a few years before) — were constantly mentioned as the center of much of the turmoil. During the problems of 1915 and 1921 all had been visibly involved. With the arrest of the two Indians, antagonism and distrust started to gain momentum.

The boys were apprehended by Sheriff William Oliver. They came into town peacefully and were turned over to Deputy Sheriff John D. Rogers who was to watch them for a few days before the trial. Rogers kept them with him while he was building a house, indicating that he expected little trouble to occur. That first night, however, two men with rifles showed up to stand guard, and the Indians became noticeably alarmed. Joe Bishop and Sanup, the boys' fathers, came from Westwater (the Indian settlement near Blanding) to Rogers's house and started to protest, refusing to leave. " 'Me seeum now,' Sanup said. 'All night men with two guns, watch, watch, watch. Me too, all night, watch, watch, watch.' " Rogers noted that shortly after these words were spoken, the guards went outside to help gather firewood, leaving their unattended rifles in the house with the Indians. If escape and killing were part of the boys' motives, they did not take advantage of their opportunity.

A few nights later, Joe Bishop's Little Boy was served some scalloped potatoes and became violently ill. Rogers indicated that the Ute may have been faking, but he let both boys go to their homes at Westwater with a promise that they would return for the trial. The next day, Joe Bishop's Big Boy showed up at the settler's home and actively complained of his brother's treatment to Rogers's wife. " 'All night boy shook like poisoned coyote,' he shouted at her. He waved his arms and shook himself violently. 'Mebbe so die! Me talk to Posey and he say cook potatoes and milk, make heap poison.' " It seems strange that if the two prisoners were really intent on escaping, that this brother would have gone over to protest their "poisoning." And it seems equally strange that if escape were a concern, that on March 19, 1923, the boys would have both arrived at the trial as had been promised, Joe Bishop's Little Boy limping into court on a stick, apparently still feeling the after effects of his "poisoning."

By this time there were a number of other unsettling points for the Utes to consider. First of all, Joe Bishop was concerned about his son. He realized that his boy had been antagonistic towards the settlers and that there were some strong feelings against him. Lyman Hunter, talking about Joe Bishop's Little Boy, said: "I think his father had a lot of trouble with him from the way Joe Bishop talked with me about what he had tried to do. Joe Bishop talked with me just like an ordinary father who is having trouble with his son that was growing up, and he just didn't know what to do with him."

A second problem was that Fred Keller was the prosecuting attorney — the same man who had shot Dutchie's Boy in the shoulder and leg two years before during the trouble in Bluff. Despite these drawbacks, the Indians' attitude was that, "they thought something ought to be done. . . . The [Indian] people would talk to the kids about it there in jail, and they [the prisoners] would tell them all about how they did it. They were hungry. . . . [but] These old Indians were on the side of the law this time."

The trial was conducted without interruption until lunchtime. The prisoners had been found guilty and were to return after noon recess for their sentencing. When the courtroom had cleared, Sheriff Oliver took the Indians out of the basement of the schoolhouse where the trial had been held and started to get them on their horses to go to jail. Here the statements of witnesses vary greatly, but the majority of them indicate that Joe Bishop's Little Boy hit Oliver with his stick, the sheriff drew his pistol which twice failed to fire, and Joe Bishop's Little Boy grabbed the gun away, mounted his horse and as he rode out of town, turned and fired at the sheriff, wounding his horse. Sanup's Boy, in the meantime, went with Posey, who was blamed by most as being at the bottom of this incident, and together they returned to Westwater.

The war was on. The first shot had been fired, and "The news soon spread through Blanding and every man dropped what he was doing and ran for his horse and his gun and rushed to volunteer." The streets in town were quickly sealed off, and any Indians who could be found were rounded up and put in the basement of the school building for a week until a stockade could be completed.

Many of the statements made about this conflict insinuate that it had been planned previously, that the Indians all knew what was happening, and that they had even cached food to be used during their flight. This is hardly believable. After the initial search had been completed, approximately forty Utes/Paiutes had been captured — over half of the populace of Westwater — and put in the school. The scant Indian testimony available on this event shows that they had no idea what was going on; the settlers just came and locked them up, never telling them why. Many of the settlers insisted that Posey was "sullen," acting "deceitful," and that the Paiutes had come into town bedecked in warpaint. There is little substance to these claims. The great Indian uprising appears to have been more of a white uprising against the grievances of the past.

The men of Blanding mobilized quickly. With a nucleus of a half-dozen World War I veterans and some help from Dave Black who had had fighting experience in Mexico, the concerted effort, led by Sheriff Oliver, to round up any Indians in town was completed. George Hurst told of how Dave Black brought in Joe Bishop, who insisted that he did not want trouble and would make every effort to bring his boy back. Black let Bishop go, but when the Indian thought he was out of sight, "he just whirled and took off as hard as he could ride. Dave galloped up and stopped him. Joe Bishop kind of resented it. Dave said, 'You old son-of-a-bitch. You turn around and go back or I'll let your guts out right here.' "

Those Indians not caught in the initial sweep had fled from Westwater and started for Comb Ridge with the probable intent of reaching the Navajo Mountain area, which could be used as a sanctuary. They never got that far.

Posey and three or four others had gone five miles south of town to Murphy's Point, where they entered an old cabin to get supplies. The posse, under Sheriff Oliver, had left town and was soon joined by Dave Black and his group, which "had blood in their eyes and were ready to die if they had to in order to bring these people to justice." Oliver took this opportunity to make the proceedings legal by saying, "Every man here is deputized to shoot. I want you to shoot everything that looks like an Indian."

Not everyone in the posse shared the same sentiments. ^^ Alma Jones, during an inter- Bp, view, was asked what his feelings were toward Joe Bishop's Little Boy. He said,

He was just as friendly. He would shake hands with me and talk. He would want to know what I was doing. I remember when I was in that posse on his trail, I just kind of asked myself, "What am I doing here? What would I do if I did come face to face with that boy and had to choose between shooting him or letting him shoot me?" It would be just like shooting one of your friends. He never done anything to harm me.

A running gun battle erupted in which Posey and his small group bested the posse. Who fired the first shot is questionable; but Posey's highpowered 30.06 rifle put the white men at a disadvantage, and the Indians made good their escape. Soon after, Posey and two or three others fought a delaying action near White Mesa Canyon in order to give men, women, and children time to escape their pursuers. Who did the actual shooting is again questionable, but Albert R. Lyman pictured Posey "concealed there with his big gun on a dead rest over a rock ... he figured on cutting down the men of the posse like clay pigeons when they appeared around the point of rock. . . . with more careful aim he could slaughter everyone who came in sight." Two close misses left Rogers's horse mortally wounded and three passengers in a Model-T Ford thankful they had not been skewered by a bullet that passed four inches from them.

That night in Blanding, the first of a number of mass meetings was held to decide on a course of action against the Indians. Great excitement and storytelling had been prompted by the day's incidents, all of which helped to convince the people of Blanding that strong measures must be taken. John Rogers, speaking of this gathering said, "It was unanimously decided that this was going to be a fight to the finish. We all knew that Old Posey wasn't going to be taken alive, and there was not one dissenting vote about what we must do."

The following day, determined posses fanned out through the hills and ravines looking for the fugitive Utes. Posey appeared near Comb Ridge and was shot at but did not return fire. Shortly after this, Joe Bishop's Little Boy and Sanup's Boy were spotted as they chased a member of the posse up a canyon. The harried white man, Bill Young, hid behind a bushy cedar tree until the Indians were close, then fired a shot, killing Joe Bishop's Little Boy instantly. The other Indian escaped, although Young could have killed him. One testimony claimed that Young said, "There's one good Indian up there." Another claimed that he said, "It was no fun to kill an injun." But probably the most realistic and sensitive report came from Alma Jones who remembered, "It wasn't long until he came down. He was upset. He said, T have killed a man.' He just kept saying that. That wasn't like Bill Young at all. He is one of the most calm and collected men that you ever saw. He was really upset."

Although the posse did not know that Posey had been wounded and taken out of action, events from this point on proved to be part of the denouement. The white men soon realized that the Indians had no desire to fight, since the Utes had left strips of white cloth tied to trees or on branches stuck in their moccasin tracks. Two more freezing days and nights, food shortages, and uncertainty forced the women, children, and men to surrender. The Indians approached the settlers standing around a fire — first a woman, then other refugees, until all of them had come in unarmed, having left their weapons hidden in the canyon. They were nervous, afraid of what might happen to them, but they also realized that resistance was futile. Only one incident marred the truce, when "Sanup's Boy became frightened and suddenly ran from the fire and escaped into the darkness. Mr. Newman from Bluff, who had formerly been sheriff in Arizona, fired a shot at him as he vanished into the darkness. He was quite upset to find that he had missed the mark."

The next day, word was sent to Blanding for two trucks to haul the prisoners to town. Only one arrived and so after fitting in all they could, the posse still had eight Utes left. Following a short wait, the settlers decided to start walking their captives to Blanding. But the posse was taking no chances.

We lined the Indians up abreast in the bottom of Comb Wash and a man with a gun got behind each Indian. The Sheriff on his horse rode out on one side of the wash, and I on my mule rode out on the other side. We told the Indians that if Posey attacked or any trouble started, the possemen would immediately each kill an Indian without questions. The Sheriff and I were to fire shots if Indians were sighted or any trouble was encountered. This would be the signal for the others to shoot the prisoners. If we'd have fired a shot for any reason at all, those eight Piutes would have been killed.

Finally, two or three miles later, the second truck arrived.

These last eight prisoners were detained in Bluff overnight. The white men thought it would be a good idea to interrogate each Indian individually in order to find out where Posey was located. Joe Bishop's Big Boy was the first to be separated from the group and questioned. Next, Anson Posey was taken out. His response was immediate, four or five men having to wrestle him down in order to control him. He then started to express his fear of the situation. ' 'Me know! White man kill Joe Bishop's Big Boy and skin him now!' he said, his voice full of terror. 'Mebbe so kill me and skin me too!' " Although no such incident occurred, the Indians viewed their captors as being capable of such actions.

Another event that shows the attitude of some of the people at the time was related by George Hurst. Early one morning, two men came into his camp, saying that they had found the hoofprints of shod horses headed towards Black Canyon Mesa. Thinking that they may have been made by Indian ponies, the men got in a car and followed the tracks until they spotted a figure in the distance. Their first reaction was to shoot, but Hurst cautioned, " 'No you can't,' I said, 'If it is an Indian, we'll take him, but you're not going to shoot a man in his back.' When we caught him, it was a kid from Texas that had been punching cows for George Dalton over here in Verdure."

In the meantime, the people of Blanding had not been idle. After the initial outburst of fighting, Fred Keller, as district attorney, ordered a $100 reward for Posey and filed charges against seven or eight Indians for conspiracy against the government and other crimes. U.S. Marshal J. Ray Ward had arrived from Salt Lake City with the intent of using posses and Navajo trackers. The Mormons resented his presence, remembering earlier dealings with the federal government, with representatives of the Indian Rights Association from the East, and with "outsiders" in general. The settlers wished to keep the entire operation an in-house affair, handled by people who "knew what was happening."

A stockade had been erected in the center of Blanding. Navajos had been hired to build two hogans inside the 100-foot-square compound made of cattle fencing with barbed-wire strung along the top. There was talk at one point that the wire was to be electrically charged, but this was never done. Within a week after the Indians had been settled in the schoolhouse basement, they were relocated in the stockade where some additional makeshift shelters were constructed and where a twenty-four-hour armed guard insured that all eighty of the inmates made no attempt to escape. The Mormons' attitude towards the Utes in the stockade was one of victory.

We built a barbwire stockade, a "bullpen," and put them in it as a bedraggled bunch of pinyon busted steers. Standing on the outside of the corral and looking them over, as we had long been wont to do after a successful roundup, Bishop Wayne H. Redd remarked, "This is the first time these fellows have been stopped since the days of Gadianton.

The Indians' view was markedly different. Even though the settlers occasionally let a person or two out of the "bullpen," made provisions to care for the Indians' livestock, and fed the Indians well, the Utes were still afraid. Harry Dutchie, a youth in the stockade, remembered that the children were not frightened but that the adults were apprehensive. When asked if he recalled any threats, he said, "Yeah, kill you all those people say." He then repeated that the white men had said they were going to kill the Indians. White testimony, however, does not reflect any such plan.

Throughout the month between the initial outbreak and the discovery of Posey's body, the newspapers had a field day. Two reporters — one from the Chicago Tribune, the other from the Salt Lake Tribune — fired off press releases with a thin veneer of truth covering a mass of outright lies. Under such headings as "Piute Indians Again on War Path; Attack Southern Community" and "Piute Indians are Reinforced," C. F. Sloane of the Salt Lake Tribune allowed his imagination to run rampant. He had Blanding surrounded during "thirty-six hours of terrorism"; Indians in warpaint riding the streets; Posey, "the red fox," forming a "mobile squadron"; a well-planned Paiute conspiracy that included robbing the San Juan State Bank; and finally "sixty men skilled in the art of the mountains awaiting the call of service." In the best tradition of the yellow press and reminiscent of the lively reporting of World War I, the newsmen gave the town a military character: "Blanding since the outbreak has become more or less an armed camp. It wears the aspect of a military headquarters. The arrival and departure of couriers from the front is a matter of public interest." Unfortunately for the correspondents, the plane with "bombs and machine guns" that had been requested never arrived in San Juan County.

The citizens of Blanding were not fooled. Many of them kidded the reporters about their coverage of the incident, but this had little effect on what went out by telephonic relay. When one person asked a correspondent why he was not writing the truth, a very simple answer was received: ' 'We're not ready to go home yet and if we don't keep something going, we'll be getting a telegram to come home.'"

There were yet other sources of information out of southeastern Utah. Marshal Ward returned to Salt Lake City and on April 7 spoke to the Exchange Club, relating what a "dangerous man" Posey was. Ute Indian Agent E. E. McKean from Ignacio, Colorado, arrived in Blanding to take care of the dispossessed Indians. The BIA was also anxious to have the problem solved, yet it had little influence on the outcome. Probably the most ironic yet sincere statement came from Lemuel H. Redd, who went to Salt Lake City to confer with U.S. Sen. William H. King about events in San Juan County. He said:

The trouble with the outside world is that they don't fully understand the situation down there. This isn't a last stand of a noble red man. It's the pursuit and capture of criminals who in the past years have killed thousands of dollars worth of livestock and who have in various other ways committed depredations resulting in much property loss to the people of the basin.

The lands which the settlers occupy there were not stolen from the Indians. They were acquired under the homestead laws of the federal government. That land was never given to the Indians. It was always open for settlement.

The people of Blanding and the farming territory surrounding it haven't any grudge against the Indians. We have always taken care of them; we are in fact taking care of them right now. . . . Today, in the stockade, they are better fed than perhaps at any time in their lives.

He then concluded by complimenting the Salt Lake Tribune on its excellent coverage of events in the Posey War. Redd, unwittingly, brought out many of the causes for the outbreak. Yet he never asked himself such questions as "Who gave the government the land to give to the settlers?" or "Why had so much livestock been killed?" He was right when he said they were "taking care of the Indians" by putting them in the stockade and that the Utes now were probably better fed than at any other time in their lives.

The search for Posey dragged on for about a month. Finally, when his signal fires on Comb Ridge could no longer be seen, the Indians in the stockade sent for Marshal Ward in Salt Lake City. He met with them privately, the Indians exacting a promise from him that they would show where Posey was if the marshal would not tell the Mormons. He agreed and the next day was led to Posey's corpse. The body was emaciated, showing signs of having suffered a painful death from blood poisoning due to the gunshot wound inflicted by Dave Black at the beginning of the war. To the Indians, however, Posey had died from poisoned Mormon flour. 35 Ward buried the body, taking care to conceal the grave, and then returned to Blanding. That night, he gathered the men of the town together. John D. Rogers remembered the meeting: " I have given the Indians my word that I will not tell where Posey is buried,' Mr. Ward told us. 'But I assure you that he is dead. He is buried where no white man can possibly find him. And I ask that you take my word for it.' That closed the matter as far as Marshal Ward was concerned and he returned to Salt Lake the following day."

Not so for the settlers. They were out the next day, tracking Ward's footprints to the burial site, where they unearthed the grisly remains and had their pictures taken with it. A few days later Agent McKean said that he needed proof, and so he also went out with some of the men from town, dug up the body, and had his picture taken. Even in death, Posey was disturbed by the white man.

McKean was in Blanding for yet another purpose. He had come to take charge of the Ute/Paiute children in the stockade, with the idea of hauling them to Towaoc to attend the Indian school. Part of the procedure entailed the de-Indianizing of the reluctant students, done with all the sensitivity that a frontier town could muster:

They were just like wild kids. They went in there and old Edison [Palmer] was the barber. He had his sleeves rolled up just like that. He would catch those kids just like you would catch a porcupine or a badger and he would hold them. Old Edison would just start clipping their hair. He had a can of kerosene. When he started clipping, the lice would come up onto his hand. The kerosene would kill them. We would get that done, we would take the clothes off of them. We would give them a sponge bath. We would put gingham aprons on the girls and a calico shirt and a pair of overalls on the boys. I think they were taken away the day before they moved them out.

Before the Indians were released from the stockade, the question of land had also been settled. An area around Cottonwood and Allen Canyon drainage was set aside for the Indians' use. Approximately 8,360 acres now belonged to the Ute/Paiute band, the land being broken into individual allotments for farming and grazing. Later, in the 1940s and 1950s, the Indians would be moved again, to their present location at White Mesa, ten miles south of Blanding.

When the prisoners finally walked out of the stockade, there was an obvious relaxing of tension, but not everyone was happy. After Joe Bishop learned of his son's death, his reaction was like that of any father: "He cried when he knew that his son was dead. I could hardly help but feel that he was kind of relieved this thing was over. Of course, his sympathy would be with his boy, but he was peaceful; he didn't want any trouble." Ironically, one of the white men noticed that, "the Utes were as friendly after the war as before."

The conflict was over. Viewed in a totally objective light — two men had been killed, a final solution had been found to the theft of livestock, the Indians were settled on their own lands, and the treatment of the prisoners was considered to have been humane.

For the Indians it was not a war and there was never any plan to turn it into one. A desperate flight to Comb Ridge, a few shots fired as a delaying action, and a very rapid surrender hardly justify the elevating of an exodus into a war.

But to the white settlers it was a war. Letting loose all of the pent-up fear and frustration that had accumulated over forty years, they mobilized quickly, combining old frontier know-how with twentieth-century warfare. Talk of electrified fences and aircraft armed with machine guns and bombs, the use of prisoner stockades, and the dissemination of volatile propaganda in the yellow press, combined with tracking Indians in Model-T Fords, horse-mounted posses, and old-fashioned gunfights, made this outbreak dramatic if not unique. One can see that as the old frontier passed away, modern inventions started to create a new era dominated by machines and technological advances.

Today, Paiutes and Utes come into Blanding and walk the streets where once their ancestors were held captive by armed guards. White children of a younger generation go in search of "Old Posey's grave," an activity inspired by fathers and grandfathers who remember him, while adults still hike the Posey trail, talking about gunfights and the bravery of the posse. Yet underneath the calm exterior of the Indian citizens there lies an unrest born of a frustration in accepting an Anglo-American world that moves too fast for the older people. Posey may have died more than sixty years ago, but the problems of cultural disintegration that he confronted still exist, awaiting answers that the Posey War failed to give.

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