Chief Ouray and the Town That Carries His Name

The Tabeguache Ute called this valley "Uncompahgre," meaning "hot water springs." They had camped here for generations, moving through the San Juan Mountains with the seasons, and what they found at the base of the cliffs was exactly what the name described: geothermal springs seeping from volcanic rock, water at a temperature that made winter camping possible and summer bathing a ritual. The Ute considered the springs sacred.

The man the town is named for understood both worlds well enough to know what was coming. Chief Ouray, whose name means "Arrow" in the Ute language, was born around eighteen hundred thirty-three to an Apache father and a Tabeguache mother. He had spent enough time among Anglo settlers to speak Spanish and English, and the United States government, finding him the most practical negotiating partner among the Ute bands, assigned him the title of Chief of all Utes in Colorado, a designation that overstated his actual authority over autonomous bands but simplified the paperwork of dispossession.

In eighteen seventy-three, under pressure from federal negotiator Felix Brunot and with the promised return of his son, who had been captured by the Sioux years before, Ouray agreed to the Brunot Agreement. Four million acres of mineral-rich San Juan Mountains land were transferred to the United States. Prospectors moved in almost immediately. They found silver in the mountains above the hot springs valley and named their new town after the chief whose signature had made the valley accessible to them.

Ouray survived the silver crash of eighteen ninety-three better than most San Juan towns because of two things: the gold deposits at the Camp Bird Mine, discovered in eighteen ninety-six by Thomas Walsh, and the hot springs themselves. Walsh's mine produced ore worth nearly thirty million dollars before he sold it in nineteen hundred two. The springs kept people coming when the mines went quiet.

Chief Ouray died on August twenty-fourth, eighteen eighty, before the Uncompahgre Ute were forcibly removed to a Utah reservation. He did not live to see the result of the agreements he had signed, which was the permanent displacement of his people from the landscape named after him. The town's elevation is seventy-seven hundred and nine feet, and it sits in a natural amphitheater of cliffs on three sides that is, by any measure, one of the most dramatically situated small towns in the American West.