Pah Gosa: Ute Sacred Ground and Forced Removal

The word Pagosa comes from the Southern Ute language, from Pah Gosa, meaning boiling water or healing water. The Ute people, who call themselves the Nuche, or The People, have lived in the San Juan Mountains and surrounding high country for centuries. To them, the hot spring at the heart of present-day Pagosa Springs was sacred ground, a site of healing and in Ute tradition a place where competing bands could gather in peace.

The Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight, signed in Washington on March second of that year by representatives of seven Ute bands, formally recognized a Consolidated Ute Reservation covering a vast stretch of western Colorado and portions of Utah. For a time, that treaty seemed to secure the Southern Ute homeland in the San Juan country. The federal government established Fort Lewis at Pagosa Springs in eighteen seventy-eight, officially to maintain peace between Ute communities and arriving settlers.

That same year, on November ninth, representatives of the Capote, Mouache, and Weeminuche bands signed an agreement at Pagosa Springs, establishing the Southern Ute Reservation and relinquishing claims to land beyond its borders. Settlers had been pushing into the San Juan Mountains for years, drawn by silver and gold strikes to the north and by the promise of valley farmland. The Meeker Incident of eighteen seventy-nine, a confrontation at the White River Agency in northern Colorado, gave Colorado politicians and Washington the opening they had been seeking to accelerate Ute removal from the state.

Through the early eighteen eighties, most Ute bands were pushed from their Colorado homelands under military pressure, consolidated onto a much-reduced reservation further south. The springs and mountains that had carried Ute names for generations were absorbed into a new American landscape.