The Southern Paiute and the First European Encounter
Near Cedar City, Utah
The land that would become Cedar City was Southern Paiute territory for centuries before any European set foot here. The Paiute people of the region were desert foragers and dry-land farmers, moving seasonally through the valleys and plateaus of southwestern Utah, gathering seeds and piñon nuts, hunting game, and tending small plots of corn and squash in the more favorable lowlands. The juniper berries that later confused pioneer settlers about the name of their trees were a Paiute food source. The bark was used for weaving and insulation. The trees were not background scenery. They were a resource that shaped how people moved through this country.
The first documented European encounter with the Southern Paiute in this area came in October of seventeen seventy-six, when the Dominguez-Escalante expedition passed through on its attempt to find an overland route from Santa Fe to the California missions. Near present-day Cedar City, the party met Southern Paiute people living in the valley. The expedition journal, kept by the priest Escalante, is among the earliest written descriptions of the Southern Paiute.
Today Cedar City is home to the headquarters of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, which includes the Cedar Band among its member communities. The tribe administers cultural and language preservation programs in a region where their ancestors had been naming the creeks and cataloguing the plants long before any outsider arrived to give them the wrong name.
