The Ute Nation, People of the Mountains

The word Utah comes from the Ute. Spanish soldiers in the seventeen hundreds recorded the name as Yuta, a term that may have meant people of the mountains, or simply the people. The Ute themselves used the name Nooche, which means just that: the people. They had lived in the region for at least a thousand years before Europeans arrived, and arguably much longer.

The Ute were among the first Indigenous peoples in the Great Basin to acquire horses, probably in the early seventeen hundreds through trade networks reaching back to the Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, when Spanish colonists fled New Mexico and left their animals behind. Horses transformed the Ute world. Where before they had hunted on foot in the high country, they now ranged across the Rockies, the Colorado Plateau, and into the Great Plains, trading, raiding, and negotiating alliances with a confidence that impressed and alarmed every outsider they encountered.

Spanish expeditions into Utah, including the famous Dominguez-Escalante party of seventeen seventy-six, were guided by Ute informants and moved through Ute country only at Ute sufferance. The priests who kept the journal marveled at the land but knew they were guests. When American trappers arrived in the eighteen twenties, the Ute continued that pattern of selective engagement, trading, tolerating, and occasionally fighting as circumstances demanded.

The pressure became crushing after eighteen forty-seven, when Mormon settlers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley and began irrigating Ute hunting grounds. The Walker War of eighteen fifty-three and the Black Hawk War of eighteen sixty-five through eighteen seventy-two were both named for Ute leaders, Wakara and Antonguer, also called Black Hawk, who fought to preserve their people's land and lives. Their nations were ultimately removed to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah and to Colorado, a compression of a once-vast world into a fraction of its former extent.