The Tabeguache: This Was Ute Country

For centuries before any prospector or rancher saw this valley, the upper Arkansas belonged to the Ute people, and mostly to one band, the Tabeguache, later known as the Uncompahgre. They were the largest of the Ute bands, and their yearly round was built on this country. Summers were spent high in the valley, hunting deer, elk, bighorn sheep, and even bison along the river and up into the parks, while winters were passed in the milder country far to the west.

The most famous of all Ute leaders, Chief Ouray, was Tabeguache, born around eighteen thirty three, and the band's name survives today on Tabeguache Peak, one of the fourteen thousand foot summits southwest of here, right beside Mount Shavano, named for a Tabeguache chief. Even the word Poncha, as in Poncha Springs and Poncha Pass at the valley's south end, is thought to come from a Ute word. The dispossession came in stages.

In eighteen fifty five, United States cavalry clashed with a Ute band between what are now Salida and Poncha Springs. The Conejos Treaty of eighteen sixty three took large parts of Ute land on paper, though Ute families kept traveling and hunting this valley for another decade until the mining rushes filled it with settlers. Within a generation the Utes were forced onto reservations in far western Colorado and Utah.

The names on the peaks are what remain here, and they were carried by people who knew this good view first.