Driven Like Coyotes
In March 1914 a Mexican shepherd named Juan Chacon was found murdered on the Ute Mountain reservation. Tse-ne-gat, Polk’s son, blamed for the crime, refused to surrender. He and other Ute resisted officials intent on forcing a surrender. Maj. Gen. Hugh L. Scott of the United States Army eventually brokered a peace. Tse-ne-gat was put on trial in Colorado, where he was acquitted. Posey, Polk, and other Ute leaders signed an agreement, under force, to remove to Colorado. Under the leadership of US Marshal Aquila Nebeker, a posse drove 160 Ute noncombatants from their homes in San Juan County and forcibly took them to the Ute Mountain Reservation. No sooner had the Utes been deported, than white settlers swooped in and attempted to take up the land. It took years for the Utes to return to San Juan County, though return they did. Most accounts from the period agree that the San Juan County Utes had no desire to leave their homes in southeast Utah and go to a dry, harsh reservation where they often felt unwelcome.
In the years following the 1915 “Ute War,” Utes trickled back to their homes in San Juan County. But quarrels with white settlers intensified, as did local, state, and federal efforts to somehow or other put paid to the ongoing problem of landless Utes attempting to live in a county where invaders had made them unwelcome. Special Indian Agent WW McConihe noted in a summer 1915 report that despite the San Juan County Utes’ forcible removal to the reservation that spring, Posey and his band had already returned to San Juan County, with Polk not far behind. Posey emerged after 1915 as the most recognizable Ute figure and as a strident voice for the preservation of the land. He blamed “Mormonee” ranchers for the degradation of the range lands, which has driven deer and elk and left no grass for Ute horses. The few settlers who spoke with him found him to be “angry,” but it was an anger borne of deep resentment for the way particularly younger settlers treated his people and the land. Posey was a kind of voice for younger Ute like Goomitz (Joe Bishop’s boy) who wanted to fight for the preservation of their lifeways.
One of the most notable developments on the part of the government between 1915 and 1923 were calls to purchase the town of Bluff for use as a small reservation for the San Juan County Utes. Clearly an adaptation of the failed plan to establish a large reservation in 1890s, the proposal found adherents both locally and nationally. As early as 1915 a Presbyterian missionary wrote the Commissioner of Indian Affairs promoting the idea. Lending strength to its attractiveness was a series of reports documenting the miserable condition of the Ute Mountain Ute reservation, a place so uninviting that even the superintendent and his staff lived in squalor. As one inspector put it in 1916, it “seems that about all we have is the raw material and most of it decidedly raw.” Bluff, on the other hand, was a ready-made town with well-constructed facilities already in place.
In 1919 white stockmen petitioned the Utah legislature to have the Utes removed permanently, prompting a state investigation. In 1921, responding to Utah Governor Charles Mabey’s reference to the situation in San Juan County as a “powder magazine,” BIA officials appointed Elfego Baca to San Juan County on a fact-finding mission. Arriving in Blanding in 1921, he took affidavits of prominent members of the community, who spoke of the “degraded” and “destitute” Ute “preying” on livestock. Incidences in early 1921 and again in 1922 presaged the full-blown conflict of 1923. Baca’s final report to the Interior secretary on September 29, 1921, recommended Bluff be acquired for use as a reservation.
The federal government was, like the San Juan County Utes, ambivalent in its approach. Beginning in the 20th century the Indian Service made a concerted effort to promote agriculture on reservations. Commissioner Cato Sells announced in 1913, “The political conditions of the world will make the next few years a period of great prosperity for the American farmer. Let us see that the Indian with his broad acres is in truth an American farmer and that he properly participates in this unusual opportunity.” What this meant in practice was that the Indian Service would promote cattle ranching. Repeated visits and surveys to the Ute Mountain Ute reservation, however, revealed that whether the land was viable for farming or not, there was so little water that even cattle grazing would be a marginal activity at best. The Utes in San Juan County were too busy trying to stay alive with a dwindling land base to attempt to increase their herds.
Mancos Jim, himself eager to return to Allen Canyon, clearly explained the situation in January 1923. He had lived there all his life, his father and grandfather lived there and were buried there, his children were born there, he raised corn and tended his flocks there. He thought it was very hard that he should be forced onto the reservation. As an old man, he said, he should be allowed to end his days in peace, among the graves of his forefathers and his children. But as these Utes returned, the white invaders made them feel unwelcome again. White homesteaders had already filed on the best lands. Cattle and sheep belonging to the settlers ate up grass needed for their own herds and livestock and for the animals they hunted.