Review by Ed Quillen
Colorado history – January 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
People of the Shining Mountains: The Utes of Colorado
by Charles S. Marsh
Published in 1982 by Pruett
ISBN 0871086131
Nineteenth-century politicians may have been better about keeping their campaign promises than their modern counterparts. In 1878, Frederick Pitkin ran for governor on a simple platform, “The Utes must go.” The Republican took office in 1879, and went to work to keep his promise to expel the Utes from their reservation, which then covered most of the Western Slope of Colorado.
Pitkin (namesake of Pitkin County, whose seat is Aspen) got considerable assistance from William B. Vickers, a reporter for the Denver Tribune. Vickers deserves more fame than he now enjoys because he contrived the first real “red scare” in American history.
Vickers did not invent the customary “redskin depredation scare” with lurid tales of scalping, fires, and female captives — that sort of thing was a staple of American journalism since colonial times.
Vickers did indulge in plenty of that, blaming the Utes for everything from missing livestock to extensive forest fires.
But he came up with something new when he argued that the Utes must be sent away, since they “are actual practicing communists.” Further, “the government should be ashamed to encourage them in their idleness and wanton waste of property” — i.e., they were a bunch of welfare cheats.
Vickers got his patronage reward from Pitkin — a state job as the governor’s private secretary — and tensions built in Colorado, culminating in the “Meeker Massacre” and the removal of the Utes to three reservations: Uintah in Utah, and Southern Ute and Mountain Ute along the Colorado-New Mexico border.
Aside from those small Ute incursions into the Colorado rectangle, Pitkin fulfilled his campaign promise. But as People of the Shining Mountains makes clear, the Utes had held on to their lands much longer than most other tribes had in the face of an invasion from the east. When dozens of other tribes had been conquered and relocated in the mid-19th century, the Utes were still going about their business where they had always lived.
“Always” is generally an inaccurate word in describing tribal homelands. The Sioux, for instance, were originally a Great Lakes people, not a Black Hills people. But the Utes seem to have been here since the departure of the Anasazi 500 years ago, and perhaps before that. Unlike most other tribes, they have no migration legends.
When the Spanish empire ventured north, the Utes stopped the expansion at Taos, and forced Spain to come to terms.
To see how successful the Utes were in halting Spanish expansion, note that Hernàn Cortés landed in Mexico in 1518. The Spanish empire reached more than 1,000 miles north, to Santa Fé, by 1609.
Then the Spanish encountered the Utes. It took 242 years for Spanish settlement to move less than 150 miles north of Santa Fé with the founding of San Luis (the oldest town in Colorado) in 1851.
The Utes were nearly as successful at resisting the Yankee advance. Tribes that were pushed west (Lakota, Arapahoe, Cheyenne) found the Utes and the Rocky Mountains an impossible barrier. When prospectors arrived in Colorado in 1859, the Utes negotiated strategic withdrawals, holding on to vast territories until 1879 — long after the Cheyenne and Arapahoe had been exiled to Wyoming and Oklahoma.
People of the Shining Mountains does an excellent job of explaining Ute-Spanish relations, and a tolerable job on Ute-American conflicts. Marsh comes down squarely on the side of “Chief Ouray as the far-sighted hero who got the best possible deal for his people,” rather than the revisionist “Ouray was a sell-out who ignored his people while collecting a handsome annuity from the government.”
The book is quite readable, a blessing for the casual reader, and it has an excellent index, a blessing for the researcher.
But the book is also sloppy on some important history. It glosses over a major factor in the Ute economy — slavery and the associated capture and selling of captives.
Its mining lore falters: “[In] 1860, an important gold strike was made at California Gulch, and 5,000 would-be miners scrambled and crawled over the Continental Divide to found the city of Leadville.” Leadville was not founded until 1878, and there’s no need to cross the Divide to reach Leadville from the east.
The book perpetuates the myth that the Cheyenne and Arapahoe inhabited the Colorado plains for time immemorial, when in fact they did not arrive until about 1800, well after white folks had visited Colorado.
It contends Nathan Meeker (later killed by the Utes, who drove a stake through his throat “to stop his lying”) escorted people “west by wagon train” to found today’s city of Greeley in 1870 — when they in fact arrived by rail to settle on land they had purchased from the railroad.
It states that “News about the `Ute War’ traveled by wireless throughout the West” in 1879 — a decade before “the wireless,” a/k/a radio, was invented, let alone in common use in a place as remote as Colorado.
People of the Shining Mountains is in its fifth printing, and you’d think that in the fifteen years since it first appeared, these flaws would have been corrected.
On that account, I can’t recommend this as a solid history of the first Coloradans, unless you need its account of Ute-Spanish relations. Much better on all other counts is a more recent book, People of the Red Earth: American Indians of Colorado (by Sally Crum, Ancient City Press, ISBN 0-941270-88-2).
— Ed Quillen
