The Utes Must Go

The mountains around you, if you are in the Estes Park area or anywhere on the Front Range approaching the high country, were Ute territory. Not ancestrally and distantly: actively, within recent memory of the oldest living Coloradans of the early twentieth century. The Ute people had hunted and camped in these mountains and on these plains for centuries. They were still here after the Spanish, still here after the Mexicans, still here through the first two decades of American settlement.

The Meeker Massacre in eighteen seventy-nine changed that. Nathan Meeker was the federal Indian agent at the White River Ute Agency in northwestern Colorado. He had been appointed to force the White River Ute to give up their horse culture and become farmers. He plowed up their horse-racing track to plant crops. When White River Ute men killed Meeker and ten agency employees in September of eighteen seventy-nine, the response across Colorado was immediate and categorical.

Newspapers ran a phrase that became a slogan and then a policy: the Utes must go. Governor Pitkin said it. Colorado's congressional delegation said it. The editorial boards said it. The Uncompahgre and White River Ute, roughly four thousand people, were removed to Utah and to Indian Territory in Oklahoma in eighteen eighty-one. It was done with Army escort.

The removal was not a fait accompli of history. It was a political decision made by identifiable people in response to an event that, in the full context of forced farming and treaty violations, was itself a predictable outcome.

The Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribes remain in the Four Corners region of southwestern Colorado. Neither occupies the Front Range or mountain territory their ancestors used. The national parks and ski resorts of the high country stand on land from which the Ute people were removed within living memory of the early twentieth century.