The Ute Nation: Dispossession by Increment

The Ute people call themselves Nuche, which translates roughly as the People. They occupied the Colorado Rockies for centuries before any European set foot in the region, seven bands organized across the mountain landscape from the Great Basin to the Front Range, skilled equestrian hunters who acquired horses from Spanish New Mexico in the early sixteen hundreds and became among the most effective horseback cultures on the continent.

Their territory was enormous. The treaty of eighteen sixty-eight guaranteed the Ute people a reservation covering sixteen million acres, the entire western third of Colorado. It was, by the terms of that treaty, to be theirs forever.

Forever lasted five years. In eighteen seventy-three, the Brunot Agreement stripped the San Juan Mountains from the reservation after silver was discovered there. Colorado wanted what was under the ground. The Ute were compensated with annual payments. The mountains were gone.

The Meeker crisis of eighteen seventy-nine, which this app covers in a separate track, provided the political pretext for the final removal. The Uncompahgre Ute and White River Ute bands were forcibly relocated to Utah in eighteen eighty-one, stripped of nearly all remaining Colorado territory. What had been sixteen million acres in eighteen sixty-eight became two small reservations in the southwest corner of the state by the time the process was complete.

The Southern Ute Indian Tribe is headquartered today at Ignacio, in La Plata County. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe is headquartered at Towaoc, near Mesa Verde. Both are federally recognized sovereign nations. Both run economic enterprises, maintain cultural programs, and govern their own affairs. The Southern Ute tribal government's website, at southernute-nsn.gov, carries their history in their own words. The Ute Mountain Ute website, at utemountainutetribe.com, does the same.

The mountains the Ute defended are still here. The ski resorts that operate on some of those mountains were built by Tenth Mountain Division veterans on land that had been Ute territory within living memory of the men who built them.