Following 19th-Century Ute Trails
From Pueblo, Colorado, to Price, Utah.
By: Candy Moulton 08/01/2007
The Utes roamed this region until 1862, a year after the Colorado Territory was established, when tribal representatives met in Denver with Indian agent Lafayette Head, who ran the agency at Conejos. In Denver, the tribal representatives told Territorial Gov. John Evans they would live in harmony with the newly arriving settlers so long as the Utes could retain their own lands in Colorado and, by extension, in Utah. Subsequently, in the spring of 1863, a Ute contingent traveled to Washington, D.C., met with President Abraham Lincoln and ultimately ceded a portion of their lands, including the San Luis Valley and mountain areas where miners had already staked claims.
After the Ute Treaty in 1868 that established one reservation for all seven bands, the Utes had one agency on Los Pinos Creek some 50 miles northwest of Saguache on the west side of Cochetopa Pass, and another in northwest Colorado on the White River near the present-day town of Meeker.
Ouray’s Uncompahgre Utes
Despite the treaty, the Utes remained near Saguache and the agency on Los Pinos Creek until mining activity escalated in the San Juan Mountains to the west. This led to the Brunot Treaty of 1873 that further concentrated the Utes in the western part of Colorado Territory by closing Los Pinos Agency near Saguache and opening a new agency near present-day Montrose on the Uncompahgre River. This agency, known as Los Pinos II or the Uncompahgre Agency, led to a renaming of the Tabeguache band under leadership of Chief Ouray, which became known as the Uncompahgre Utes.
To follow the route the Utes took when they were moved from Los Pinos Agency to the Uncompahgre Agency, I drive along Colorado Highway 114 west from Saguache through ranch country to connect with U.S. 50 just east of Gunnison, and then continue west to Montrose.
Ouray is one of the most well known of the 19th-century Utes. He spoke Ute as well as fluent Spanish and English, a fact that enabled him to negotiate on behalf of his people. He died in 1880, a year before his people would be uprooted once again.
Land near the south edge of Montrose that once was a farm owned by Ouray and his wife Chipeta is owned by the State of Colorado and operated as the Ute Indian Museum. Chipeta is buried here and Ouray’s remains, which were initially interred in a cave south of Ignacio on the Southern Ute Reservation, have also been removed to this farm site.
Ute Mountain Utes
As part of the treaty negotiations in the 1860s-70s, the Ute bands were separated. I head south from Montrose on U.S. 550 over the San Juan Skyway and the Million Dollar Highway to Silverton, once the site of a Ute camp and later a silver mining boomtown, to Durango, then west on U.S. 160 to Cortez and southwest to Towaoc. Much of the route is over old Ute trails. By any measure, it is spectacular, with some of Colorado’s Fourteeners rising above the highway.
For a century, the Ute Mountain Ute tribe has occupied the land near Towaoc, in view of Sleeping Ute Mountain. Although you can visit the tribe’s casino, I avoid that attraction and instead go to the Ute Mountain pottery plant where workers make the distinctive pottery decorated with black-on-white designs.
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