Review by Ed Quillen
Ute History – September 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico
by Virginia McConnell Simmons
Published in 2000 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 0-87081-571-7
DRAW A TRIANGLE with corners at Denver, Taos, and Salt Lake City, and you’ve got the home territory of a nomadic people we know as the Utes.
It’s an imprecise term, for they were diverse peoples spread across a landscape that ranged from barren deserts to fertile littorals, from sheltered valleys to windswept summits. There was never a “Ute Nation,” for they lived in bands like the Pahvants, Yampa, Timpanagots, Weenuche, and Tabeguache, and they may never have numbered more than 10,000 people altogether.
They spoke a common language and held a common religion, and like many aboriginal tribes, they called themselves “the people” — Nùu-ci or Nuche. Unlike many tribes, they had no migration legends; by their lights, they had always abided in the mountains, plateaus, valleys, and basins of central and western Colorado, eastern Utah, and northern New Mexico.
As Virginia McConnell Simmons points out in this new history, modern anthropologists and archæoligists have a different account of Ute origins, though not a definitive one because previous cultures — Archaic and Frémont — differed little from the earliest Utes. They were all gatherers and hunters practicing a little agriculture who used twine and coil basketry, unlike the agricultural Anasazi with their pottery.
Archæology indicates that they migrated north from Mexico, starting in about 2000 B.C. “Some continued to raise corn, beans, and squash as their people had done previously, but everyone depended on hunting and gathering.” By about 1000 A.D., they were in the Death Valley area of California. Linguistic evidence then points to a dispersal: the Paiutes stayed, the Shoshones went north, and the Utes headed northeast, arriving at the Four Corners just as the Anasazi were leaving in 1300.
They hunted and fished in the high country in the summer, and wintered in sheltered but sunny valleys. They used caves, transported tepees, and built brush wickiups. They traded with the Pueblo peoples, gathered roots and berries, and hunted with bow and arrow.
Expeditions around their domain “were seasonal activities of hunter-gatherers, who traveled within circuits as animals migrated or emerged from their wintering grounds and as various plant foods matured. The Utes described the different elevations as Lower Earth, Middle Earth, and Upper Earth. Lower Earth consisted of low valleys and places such as the bottom of the Royal Gorge or Canyonlands. Middle Earth, also known as the Blue Earth, whose Ute name, Saguguachip, has evolved to Saguache and Sawatch, took in mountain valleys and parks and their foothills… Upper Earth included high, rocky ridges and peaks.”
And that’s about as much as we know of the Utes before 1637, when they fought their first battle with Spanish soldiers at San Juan Pueblo in New Mexico. The Spanish took 80 captives to work in a textile sweatshop in Santa Fé, some escaped three years later and brought some horses back with them, which the Utes quickly adopted.
Simmons is strongest in detailing those years, roughly from 1640 to 1880, when the Utes were an independent people at the fringe of empire, with an economy that included a goodly amount of slave-capture and trading. Looking out for themselves, they shifted alliances frequently, treating the Comanche, Spanish, Pueblos, and Apache as friends or foes, depending on circumstances.
Spanish policy, in general, was to persuade the Utes to serve as a friendly buffer zone to protect against French, and then American, intrusions, and it often worked — Muache Utes found Yankee trapper James Purcell in South Park in 1805, and took him to Santa Fe. On the other hand, Walkara’s horse raiding along the Old Spanish Trail frustrated Spanish efforts to hold the empire together.
By then other forces were pushing at the Utes — Mormons in Utah, colonists pushing north from Taos, then Americans looking for gold.
The resulting removal to reservations is a violent and tragic story, told well by Simmons, who provides an abundance of detail, and she doesn’t stop it with the arrival of the 20th century; she carries it to the present day.
Much is less than pleasant to read about. But on the other hand, on a per-capita basis, Colorado’s Southern Utes are among the richest tribes in America, their political power is evident in the continued survival of the Animas-La Plata water project, their language remains in daily use, and every spring, there’s the Bear Dance.
In other words, the Utes remain an active force in the American Southwest, just as they have been for the past millennium — or even longer, the way they see it. Simmons does a fine job of explaining how it all happened, and she doesn’t fall into the trap of romanticizing people who were generally pragmatic. It’s a welcome addition to our region’s history.
— Ed Quillen
