Review by Jeanne Englert
Ute History – February 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Massacre: the Tragedy at White River
by Marshall Sprague
Published in 1980 by the University of Nebraska Press
ISBN 0-8032-4107-0
MARSHALL SPRAGUE, one of Colorado’s foremost historians, wrote the definitive account of the Ute uprising at the White River agency in 1879 in which Indian agent Nathan Meeker and other agency employees were murdered, his wife and daughter and another woman, abducted. This “incident,” as the contemporary Utes call it, provided the excuse for Governor Frederick Pitkin and other prominent Denver citizens to demand removal of the Utes from Colorado. “The Utes must go,” was their rallying cry.
Fortunately for us, Sprague’s book has been reissued in a Bison paperback edition.
What provoked the White River Utes to take up arms was that Meeker, a sincere but unwise Fourierien socialist — he was the principal founder of the Union Colony at Greeley — pushed the Indians too far in his zeal to make model farmers out of these nomadic, horse-loving Indians. The last straw came when Meeker plowed up Ute Johnson’s pony pasture and racetrack in Powell Park near the agency headquarters (west of the town of Meeker) as a punitive act to show who was boss.
Though the Meeker Massacre is the climax of the book, it contains much more, such as the founding of the Los Pinos Agency on an unnamed tributary of Cochetopa Creek above Saguache, and an excellent capsule biography of Otto Mears, that “one-hundred-pound bundle of flamboyant mercantilism,” who later became the czar of the mountain narrow-gauge railroads.
In Sprague’s own words, this story is not “just another local melodrama in which some more Indians drew life sentences for the cardinal sin of blocking the economic progress of the United States.” He goes on to say, in the foreword, “Here in one story were all the forces, good and bad, which built the nation and destroyed the red man’s world — the insatiable land hunger of white men, their vast immigration, fantastic industrial expansion, monumentally corrupt government, Federal-State feuds, Army discontent. intellectual unrest…”
Sound familiar?
Not only does Sprague give his readers an excellent history of those times–circa 1868-1880–he’s a damn good writer. Consider this sample: “How Otto Mears happened to be kneeling in prayer with Felix Brunot, Chief Ouray, and General Charles Adams out there in the Colorado wilds is a cosmic mystery, like drawing a cold hand royal flush.”
Since I’ve been there, I can vouch for the accuracy of Sprague’s description of Powell Park and the location of the battle on Milk River. Clearly Sprague had gone there himself to get the lay of the land. And nowhere can you get a better rendition of the confrontation between Meeker and Jane, a household maid Meeker employed because he believed she would be useful as a source of Ute gossip, thereby keeping him abreast of what the Utes were thinking, not realizing she was actually a spy to let the Ute camp know what Meeker was up to. (Meeker even featured her in an editorial he wrote for the Greeley Tribune, titled, “Woman, the Natural Savage.”)
It was this confrontation that sealed his doom. Not only did he say the Utes didn’t own the White River Valley, but that they couldn’t even stay there if they didn’t do what Meeker wanted them to do. In an inexplicable strategic blunder, Meeker wrote down the whole conversation for publication in the Greeley Tribune. Meeker was, wrote Sprague, “like a small boy who breaks six more windows after recovering from the shock of breaking one.”
I suppose a nitpicker might quibble over a fact or two in Sprague’s epic tale, but I have yet to find fault with it. For example, he wrote about Governor Juan de Bautista Anza long before Ed Quillen discovered him.
Nobody who cares about the history of our state can do without this book.
— Jeanne W. Englert