The Ute People and Their Removal

The Ute people are the oldest continuous inhabitants of Colorado. Seven bands ranged across the mountains and high plateaus of what is now Colorado, Utah, and northern New Mexico, following elk and deer through summer and retreating to warmer canyons in winter. After acquiring horses from Spanish traders in the late sixteen hundreds, the Ute expanded their range and their culture significantly.

American expansion began eroding Ute territory almost immediately after the Mexican-American War brought Colorado into United States jurisdiction in eighteen forty-eight. A series of treaties through the eighteen sixties confined the Ute to progressively smaller reservations. The Brunot Agreement of eighteen seventy-three stripped them of the mineral-rich San Juan Mountains, framed as a voluntary cession, just as silver was being discovered in the peaks they were surrendering.

The crisis came in eighteen seventy-nine. Nathan Meeker, the newly appointed agent at the White River Ute Reservation in northwestern Colorado, attempted to force Ute men to plow fields as a condition of receiving rations. The Ute regarded farming as incompatible with their identity as hunters and horsemen. The confrontation escalated. On September twenty-ninth, Meeker and ten agency employees were killed, and several women were taken captive. The Army responded in force.

The government used the incident as justification for a general removal. By eighteen eighty-one, all but two small bands had been relocated to the Uintah Reservation in Utah. The Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute bands were allowed to remain on reduced reservations in the southwestern corner of Colorado, where they continue as federally recognized nations today.