The First People of the Red Land

Stand anywhere in Utah and you are standing on ground that human beings have called home for at least twelve thousand years. Among the oldest traces of people here are fluted spear points, found near the shores of what was then a vast inland sea. That sea was Lake Bonneville, a freshwater body roughly the size of Lake Michigan, which covered the western third of the state during the last ice age and drained catastrophically roughly seventeen thousand five hundred years ago. The salt flats you see today are its ghost.

After the ice retreated, people moved into every ecological corner of this varied landscape. In the canyon country of the south, the Ancestral Puebloans, sometimes called the Ancient Ones, built stone granaries and cliff dwellings along ledges that seem impossible even now. Their petroglyphs cover canyon walls from the San Juan River to Nine Mile Canyon: spirals, bighorn sheep, corn plants, human figures with broad shoulders and antlered heads. Alongside them, or in neighboring territories, were the Fremont people, a distinct culture that flourished from roughly fifteen hundred to seven hundred years ago, farming the river bottoms, hunting game on the plateaus, and leaving behind their own distinctive figurines and rock art.

The Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan worlds did not disappear, they transformed. Their descendants, and the peoples who followed, became the nations whose names belong to this land: the Ute, whose territory once ranged from Colorado's mountains to the Great Basin; the Paiute, masters of the desert southwest; the Goshute, who refined survival in one of the harshest environments on the continent; the Navajo in the canyon country of the southeast; and the Shoshone in the north. These were not marginal peoples scraping by in a wasteland. They were sophisticated stewards of one of the most demanding and rewarding landscapes on Earth.