Beginnings
The Utes occupied a vast area of the interior West for a long time. Between 1868 and 1923, the fortunes of the Utes in San Juan County declined dramatically. No sooner had the 1868 treaty been signed than six years later the San Juan Cession required Utes to relinquish a sixty by ninety-mile block of land. In 1880 the Utes’ land base dropped further and the government actively intervened in Ute people’s lives, moving the four Northern Ute bands to what is now the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in northeast Utah and the Southern Ute bands to southwest Colorado. As was the pattern, former Ute lands were promptly opened to white settlement. That same year Mormon pioneers founded the tiny town of Bluff on the San Juan River, near the juncture of Ute, Southern Paiute, and Navajo homelands.
Things seemed like they might be looking up for Southern Ute people in 1889. An agreement, signed by three quarters of the adult male population of the Colorado reservation and presented to Congress, called for creation of a reservation spanning from the north bank of the San Juan River to the La Sal Mountains—nearly the whole of San Juan County. Despite the Colorado congressional delegation’s best efforts, the agreement did not pass Congress. A compromise act in 1895 “allowed” the Southern Ute to remain on their already reduced reservation, providing individual allotments to those interested in farming and land in common to the rest. The Weeminuche band, which opposed allotment, moved to the west end of the reservation—a section fifteen by forty miles that contained almost no water. That land became known as the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. A subagency established at Navajo Springs in 1896 oversaw the Weeminuche. Ute Mountain Reservation was formally created in 1897, and Southern Ute established in 1899.
The federal government struck at Ute lands from more than one angle, through conservation. Congress set aside Mesa Verde National Park in 1906, thus blocking Utes from using the land. But in 1909 the government, now seeking to make deals rather than simply take, attempted to swap a parcel of forested land on Ute Mountain in exchange for land the tribe owned near the park. The Weeminuche refused, probably because they considered it poor grazing land for their livestock. At a 1911 meeting the Ute continued to oppose a land swap, noting that they respected and cared for the ancient sites better than white people did. The final compromise, dated 1913, added over 30,000 acres to the Ute Mountain Reservation and 14,520 acres to Mesa Verde. A similarly ambivalent relationship developed in San Juan County, Utah. President Roosevelt created the La Sal National Forest in 1906 and the Monticello National Forest in 1907, thus bringing active federal management to yet another block of Ute homeland. But the national forest impacted white settlers, whether Mormon community builders or Gentile cattle companies, as well, and gave the Utes at least a modest ally. The federal government required grazing permits on what was now national forest land, and men like Hanson Bayles and Harry Green, sheep and cattlemen who ran thousands of head of stock in the Blue Mountains from the turn of the twentieth century, now had to meet forest regulations. But the forest supervisors of what became the Manti-La Sal National Forest developed a more harmonious relationship with the Utes who refused to leave their homes in southeast Utah. San Juan County Ute leader Mancos Jim often carried a letter from La Sal National Forest officials ratifying his allotment of land and stating that interfering with Jim’s allotment would be considered trespassing on federal land.
Meanwhile, even as the United States played monopoly with Ute lands, some Utes refused to go along, and remained in their homeland in San Juan County, Utah. Beset by Mormon pioneers and Gentile cattle companies looking to cash in on beef and wool prices, they found their already modest ranges. Their relations with the invaders were uneven and often poor. Utes in San Juan County sometimes sought work with settlers to put food on the table, resisted when they could, occasionally killed a cow or sheep for food or from sheer frustration, and always, tried to stay alive and stay in the land that was their home. It was no easy task, and a series of small and occasionally large confrontations developed as early as the turn of the century. In 1903 Posey, a man of Paiute heritage who held a prominent position in the small communities of refugees in San Juan County, found himself accused of stealing a white man’s horse and arrested. He promptly escaped across the San Juan River, establishing what would become a legacy of at times confronting, at times fleeing, settler notions of justice. In 1908 another leader, John Benow, and a few associates blocked Mormon cattlemen, who had burned a fence to gain access, from running their cattle on Patterson Mesa. “I had no trouble with cattle men so long as they kept their cattle off the mesa where I and my friends live,” Benow recalled, adding that when he returned from a trip he found that “cow-boys had burned my fence.” Benow indicates the impossibly awkward situation in which San Juan County Utes found themselves: He reported that not only was this the land where he lived, but that various white settlers in authority had agreed that he and his family could live there. Meanwhile, others said “this is a white man’s country. The Indians belong on a reservation.” Whether they went along or not, Utes in San Juan County would always find themselves on a piece of land a white settler wanted, acting in ways the white settlers could not abide.
A stolen horse here, a small confrontation there—all the while numbers of white settlers’ cattle and sheep increased. Some 95,000 sheep and 40,000 cattle roamed San Juan County in 1908. The stock ate up the grass and eroded the Utes’ means of staying alive. As Mormon farmer and merchant Nephi Bailey put it in 1908, “in my opinion the trouble between whites and Indians arises largely from a desire upon the part of the whites to acquire more grazing land, as their flocks and herds increase.” The white settlers in San Juan County, for their part, tirelessly worked to have either the state or the federal government remove the Utes, sending a stream of complaints and lawsuits to Salt Lake City and Washington, D. C., all alleging that the Utes were disrupting the peace of the county and preying on helpless settlers. The federal government took note of such goings-on, and continually tried without success to bring the San Juan County Utes to the Ute Mountain Ute reservation. The federal government took the position, as it so often did with Indigenous people, that the Utes were probably in the right, but would probably have to be removed anyway, whether to “civilize” them or simply to stop the settlers’ complaints. For example, following an investigation in 1908, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington reported that “many of the alleged depredations were committed years ago, and that the whites were in the wrong in some instances and the Indians in others. It also shows that the Indians went into that country first, and have rights there which some of the whites, particularly the cattlemen, have not been disposed to respect.” E. B. Bennett of Colorado put the matter even more blatantly in a 1915 letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs: “From the Indians point of view, they feel justified in most all of their retaliatory measures against the encroachment of the white men upon their rights. The white man assumes the Indian has no particular right that should be recognized.”
by Jedediah Rogers