The first relatively extensive account of European contact with Utes is to be found in the journal of Fray Escalante, a Franciscan, who traveled through Ute territory in northern New Mexico, western Colorado, and central Utah in 1776. In the late eighteenth century Ute Indians were organized into several large equestrian hunting and gathering bands that were named for the territory they inhabited or things they exploited on it. The Great Basin to the west, the Snake River and Wind River drainages to the north, and much of the Colorado River drainage to the southwest were inhabited almost exclusively by Uto-Aztecan relatives of the Utes—Shoshones, Panamints, and Paiutes.
For at least a century after Escalante's visit, the Utes spent parts of the spring and summer in large bands of two hundred or more family camps. The far western portion of Ute territory was occupied by the Tumpanuwaches on the north and the Pahvants on the south. The central portion was occupied by the Parusanuches, the northeastern by the Yamparkas, and the central eastern by the Taviwaches. The Muwaches occupied Ute territory in the southeast, the Kapotas the region of the San Juan River in northern New Mexico, and the Wiminuches the territory around the four corners of what are now Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona.
With time, more bountiful environments, the acquisition of horses, and greater opportunities to raid and trade facilitated larger populations, somewhat more complex social organizations, and a richer ceremonial calendar for the Utes than what their Great Basin counterparts had.
During the winter months, aggregates of Ute families dispersed into local communities of sixty or more persons; in the summer, three or four such communities convened—rather informally—into large residential units or bands that recognized common territories. Each such unit was directed by a band chief, who gained his position through competence and who led by precept and suasion. There were no warrior societies or other groups that were not based on kinship among the Utes. Moreover, no person in any band possessed the authority to allocate strategic resources, civic duties, or scarce food.
Bands provided for common defense and sponsored some public ceremonies. Special groups would split off from bands during the summer periods for raiding, trading, and hunting ventures. The communities in the eastern areas, whose environments were less arid, had larger and more complex band organizations than those in the center and west. They also suffered more aggressive and contentious neighbors—Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches—who raided Ute encampments for horses.
While the Utes had generally maintained friendly contacts with the Spanish in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they often attacked the mule trains that brought white settlers west across the Santa Fe Trail from the San Luis Valley in Colorado to southern California.
In 1847 the first wave of Mormon settlers passed through the Bridger Valley and then into the Salt Lake Valley, where they squatted in Shoshone territory. The closest Ute settlements were in the Utah Lake Valley, thirty miles to the south. Within ten years Mormon pioneer communities comprising forty thousand people had been established along the north-south axis of the Wasatch Mountains. The expropriation of resources and the domination of Utes by Mormons were resisted by Chief Wakara through a series of depredations and skirmishes known as the Walker War, which took place from the late 1840s through the mid-1850s, and by Chief Black Hawk through another series of skirmishes and depredations in the 1860s known as the Black Hawk War.
In 1855, with the Mormons expanding throughout Ute territory along the Wasatch front, the Utah territorial government set aside three temporary "farms" for the western Ute bands, and then supported the negotiation of new treaties in 1861 that required the removal of Utes from the farms to the 2-million-acre Uintah Valley Reservation in eastern Utah. There they became known as the Uintah Utes. Provisions, goods, and annuities were not delivered as promised, however, and the Utes refused to remain on the reservation. Some men, under Black Hawk, conducted raids. Others begged for food at Mormon households. By 1879 the Uintah Ute population had dropped to eight hundred—less than 20 percent of its prereservation size.
In 1870, Uintah Utes, Bannocks, Northern Paiutes, Eastern Shoshones, Western Shoshones, and Yamparka and Taviwach Utes convened in the Bridger Basin in present-day southwestern Wyoming to participate in the Ghost Dance religion, which Bannock missionaries promised would rid the world of whites, resurrect deceased ancestors, and solve the ubiquitous problems facing all Utes, Shoshones, and Northern Paiutes. Utes sponsored Ghost Dances in 1871 and 1872 to no avail before losing interest in them.
The eastern Utes of Colorado and northern New Mexico were pushed from their territories more slowly than were the western Utes. The skirmishes with whites occurred in the 1860s, the major battles in the 1870s. The climax came in 1879, when agent N. C. Meeker of the White River Agency in Colorado, in an effort to stop Utes from gambling and to encourage them to begin farming, plowed up their race track and prime pasturage to make way for gardens. The Ute response triggered several events that came to be known as the Meeker Massacre, in which thirty-seven Utes, twelve U.S. cavalrymen, and eight agency personnel, including Meeker, were killed.
In response, Governor Pitkin of Colorado called for the extermination of all Utes, and the federal government relocated 665 White River Utes to the Uintah Reservation in eastern Utah. In addition, 1,360 Uncompahgre Utes were relocated on 2 million acres adjacent to the Uintah Reservation, even though the Uncompahgres had not participated in the White River revolt. Muwach, Kapota, and Wiminuch Utes were relocated to a narrow strip of land along the southwestern Colorado border. These actions opened over 12 million acres in Colorado to prospectors and miners.
Since 1880, the Uintah, White River, and Uncompahgre Utes have been known collectively as the Northern Utes. The Muwaches and Kapotas came to be known collectively as the Southern Utes. The Wiminuches, following a struggle over the federal expropriation of Mesa Verde for a national park enabled by the Antiquities Act in 1906, gained a 513,000-acre reservation in the Four Corners area and came to be known as the Ute Mountain Utes.
Reservation subjugation was difficult for Utes. They resisted allotment under the Dawes Severalty Act. Small farms would have made it impossible for them to maintain their 12,500 horses and perhaps 15,000 sheep and goats, and so on two occasions Northern Ute groups numbering over three hundred fled the reservation in hopes of returning to their hunting-herding existence. In 1887 a group of White Rivers and Uncompahgres fled to western Colorado, and in 1906, a large group of Uintahs and White Rivers fled to South Dakota. Most of both parties later returned, destitute.
In the late 1880s, Uintah Utes attended Sun Dances on the Wind River Shoshone Reservation. Shamans there had revised the purpose and many ritual acts of the Sun Dance from prereservation forms to assist people in achieving the power to cure themselves and others of maladies. In either 1889 or 1890, General Grant, a Uintah Ute, sponsored the first Sun Dance at the Northern Ute Reservation. Although outlawed by the federal government, the Sun Dance was soon diffused to the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute Reservations, where, as at the Northern Ute Reservation, it was sponsored annually, albeit surreptitiously.
The political and economic histories of the three reservations from 1880 to the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 are quite similar. Each reservation was affected by the same federal Indian laws, and each was affected by the agrarian Anglo communities that grew up in their midst and dominated local production and trade. Tuberculosis and trachoma were endemic among reservation populations, and measles epidemics ravaged students in reservation boarding schools. By 1934, allotment of land in severalty had reduced the Northern Ute Reservation from 3.97 million acres to 355,000 acres and the Southern Ute Reservation from about 1 million acres to 40,600 acres. The Ute Mountain Utes successfully resisted allotment.
Population nadirs were reached on each reservation in 1924-30. Between 1880 and 1930 the Northern Ute population had decreased by 68 percent, from 2,825 to 917; the Southern Ute by 33 percent, from 500 to 334; and the Ute Mountain Ute by 30 percent, from 650 to 462. Livestock, principally sheep, goats, and horses, decreased from about ten per capita in 1880 to about five per capita in 1934. About 75 percent of Indian allotments were leased and cultivated by non-Indians. On the reservation, full-time employment for Utes was extremely rare (3 percent in 1912; 2 percent in 1920); in off-reservation towns it was nonexistent. All Ute employment was provided by the federal government.
The three Ute reservation populations ratified constitutions in 1934 and charters in 1935 under provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Business committees were formed pursuant to IRA charters to govern reservation affairs and to create and oversee tribal businesses. All of the committees foundered for a host of reasons, and through 1975 no successful business was ever established on any of the three reservations. On the other hand, as a provision of the IRA, the federal and tribal governments repurchased and placed in trust some of the erstwhile reservation land that, following general allotment proceedings, had been purchased or acquired through government programs such as the Homestead and Desert Land Entries Acts. By midcentury the Southern Ute Reservation had increased to 310,000 acres (up from 40,600 in 1934), and the Northern Ute Reservation had increased to 1.06 million acres (up from 355,000 in 1934).
Between 1951 and 1962, in three decisions by the Indian Claims Commission, the "Confederated Ute Tribes" (Northern, Southern, and Ute Mountain Utes) were awarded a total of $47.7 million for treaty violations by the federal government (the expropriation of treaty land from Utes in Utah and Colorado in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s). Attorneys' fees ($5 million) and offsetting costs (about $4 million claimed by the federal government for overseeing and maintaining reservation land and providing services to Utes) were deducted. Moneys to the Utes were paid out over fourteen years. Between 1951 and 1959 some of the judgment funds were allotted per capita into individual accounts controlled by Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, who had to be petitioned to relinquish portions of those funds. After 1960, judgment funds were allocated for tribal uses, including youth recreation and education projects, livestock and farming operations, and other business projects.
From the time the Utes organized into corporations under the IRA through 1975, full-time employment seldom reached 10 percent on any of the reservations. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the increase in worldwide oil prices brought energy companies to the three Ute reservations in quest of the abundant reserves of oil, gas, and coal to be found there, and to the Northern Ute Reservation for its oil sands and oil shale as well.
From about 1978 the tribes began receiving royalties—the Northern Utes from oil and gas leases, the Southern and Ute Mountain Utes from gas and coal leases. Attempts to diversify—motels, restaurants, cattle operations, chemical plants, fabrication plants, furniture plants, crafts, a race track, an industrial park—were funded by oil, gas, and coal royalties. Most of these business ventures were defunct by 1984, and all required tribal subsidies until they were finally closed. The single success at the Northern Ute Reservation was a bowling alley that operated in the black, though barely, through 1991. The Southern Utes, following a widespread trend among western tribes, opened a bingo casino, which was operating in the black in the early 1990s.
For each of the three reservations, similar factors have contributed to business failures. As agriculture withered near all of the reservations, the regions became heavily dependent on energy-resource extraction and tourism. Both industries are vulnerable to outside economic forces. In 1990 Ute families enjoyed about half the average income of other American families and about 60 percent of the average income of households adjacent to their reservations.
The Bear Dance, which was the grandest of the precontact rituals performed by Ute bands, is still performed by each Ute community on each reservation (e.g., three Bear Dances, each at a different locale, are sponsored annually—one each by Uncompahgres, White Rivers, and Uintahs—on the Northern Ute Reservation). The Sun Dance religion flourishes on all three reservations, its rituals performed for the same reasons as and in a fashion similar to the Sun Dances first sponsored by Utes in the 1890s. The peyote religion, which was introduced to the Northern Utes in 1914 and to the Colorado (Southern and Ute Mountain) Utes in 1917, also flourishes on all three reservations.
Donald G. Callaway, Joel C. Janetski, and Omer C. Stewart, Handbook of North American Indians "Ute," ed. William C. Sturtevant, vol. 11, Great Basin, ed. Warren L. D'Azevedo (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1986); Joseph G. Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Anne M. Cook Smith, Ethnography of the Northern Ute Museum of New Mexico Papers in Anthropology, no. 17 (Santa Fe, 1974).
Joseph G. Jorgensen
University of California at Irvine
