The Yamparika: First People of the Yampa Valley
Near Steamboat Springs, Colorado
The Yampa Valley belonged to the Yamparika band of the Ute Nation long before any Euro-American set foot in northwest Colorado. The Yamparika, sometimes called the White River Utes, moved through a territory spanning much of northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah, following the seasons between high mountain meadows and lower winter valleys. The Yampa River corridor was central to their world, rich in game, in roots and berries, and in the hot springs that made winter camps more bearable. The river's Ute name, Yampa, referred to the wild carrot plant that grew abundantly along its banks.
Contact with Euro-American traders and settlers came gradually through the first half of the nineteenth century, and then rapidly and catastrophically in its final decades. A series of treaties through the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies steadily reduced Ute territory. The event that effectively ended the Yamparika's presence in the valley came in September of eighteen seventy-nine, when Nathan Meeker, the Indian agent at the White River Agency south of Steamboat, attempted to plow the Utes' horse pastures for farming. The confrontation that followed became known as the Meeker Massacre, in which agency workers were killed and Meeker's family taken captive. Though the causes were rooted in years of treaty violations and forced cultural change, the event gave the federal government justification for forcible removal.
By eighteen eighty-one and eighteen eighty-two, the Yamparika and related Ute bands had been removed to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, a territory far smaller than the lands they had occupied for generations. The Yampa Valley was opened to Anglo settlement almost immediately. The cattle ranchers followed within the year.
