The Utes of the Upper Arkansas

Long before the railroad and the smelter, this high valley belonged to the Ute people. The band whose homeland reached across central Colorado was the Tabeguache, sometimes called the Uncompahgre, the people of the great Ute leader Ouray. They hunted through these mountains and river valleys, following game with the seasons across the high country around the upper Arkansas.

Their world changed with terrible speed once miners and railroads pushed into the Rockies. In the year eighteen eighty, leaders of the Ute bands signed an agreement in Washington that called for the Tabeguache to give up much of their Colorado homeland. Ouray himself led the Ute delegation and signed that agreement, believing resistance was futile, and he died in eighteen eighty, before the removal could be fully carried out.

In the year eighteen eighty one, the United States Army marched the Tabeguache and other bands out of Colorado and onto a reservation in northeastern Utah, hundreds of miles from the valleys where they had always lived. After that removal, the only Ute land remaining in the whole state of Colorado was a narrow strip along the southern border. So when you look up at Mount Shavano, remember that its name honors a Ute chief of a people who were pushed off this very land in the same years the town of Salida was being built.