The Brunot Agreement and the Ute Dispossession That Built This Town

The land around Durango was Ute territory when the railroad arrived. The Ute had lived across the Colorado Plateau and the Rocky Mountains for centuries, and Colorado's mountains were at the center of their world. In eighteen sixty eight the federal government established a Ute reservation covering the western third of Colorado, roughly the size of the state of Indiana.

Within five years, the discovery of silver and gold in the San Juan Mountains changed the political calculation in Washington. In eighteen seventy three the federal government negotiated the Brunot Agreement, named for Commissioner Felix Brunot, with the Ute leaders. The agreement transferred millions of acres of the San Juan mountain country, the mineral-rich heart of Ute territory, from the reservation to federal control in exchange for promised annual payments.

The Silver and gold that would flow from those mountains over the following two decades built Durango, Silverton, and the railroad that connected them. By eighteen eighty one, following the Meeker Massacre in northern Colorado, mounting political pressure forced the Uncompahgre and White River Ute bands to relocate to Utah. The Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute peoples remained on a reduced reservation in the southwestern corner of the state.

Durango, founded in eighteen eighty and incorporated in eighteen eighty one, was built on lands that had been Ute territory under a federal treaty just seven years before its founding. The Southern Ute Indian Tribe today governs lands to the southeast of Durango, and the tribe is among the more economically successful Native nations in the United States, in part because of natural gas revenues from tribal lands.