How San Juan County Nearly Became a Ute Reservation (Season 1, Ep. 11 - Part 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:06)
Welcome back to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history. Our guest today is Dr. Greg Thompson, Associate Dean at the University of Utah's J. Marriott Library, and also a Western historian. Thompson's very fascinating story about the Bears Ears area, a one-if story, how very much it could have been different for what we have today in the San Juan County area.
Greg, thank you again for being here.

**Greg Thompson** (0:33)
Pleasure.

**Brad Westwood** (0:35)
What are the reasons that people made? What are the arguments about not having San Juan County as a reservation?

**Greg Thompson** (0:44)
They began to build with some force in the early part of the 1880s, after the agreement of 1880, which was established to move the Southern Ute Three Bands to the Plata Mountains. And that turns into being seen as a failure. Once you start looking at, and there's a commission that's built or put together, I think this one came from St. Louis, and a later one comes from Leavenworth, Kansas.
Can you imagine the trip out to Ignacio, Colorado and essentially Monticello, Utah in those days? It was a tough assignment. But there is an effort to look for a solution of what to do with the Utes.
You now have nearly 2,000 people who have been held in a kidnapped way, not knowing where they were to go and how to establish their economic lifestyle in the lands. And it was very hard. These people are still livestock people. They still have herds of cattle of 3,000, 4,000. They have horse herds that are in the hundreds for the bands. And you have goats and sheep. And they're trying to keep these animals alive, fed and themselves. So it's a pretty harsh scenario that we're talking about for the Ute people.
As you move into the decade of the 1880s, and this effort to move to Utah actually takes shape.
And at a point in 1888, Ignacio, now the major leader of the Weeminuche or the Ute Mountain Utes, is pushing hard to see the move to San Juan County happen. And it took me a while to understand the dynamics of this. But what's really going on here for him, he was going home to his native land. He was born in San Juan County. And it was a natural for the Ute Mountain Utes to want to go there.
The Capote and the Moch on the other hand, were Colorado based Utes and New Mexico based Utes. They weren't so sure they wanted it. But as their rectangle piece of reservation land below the San Juan National Monument, or National Mountains, National Lands area and mountains, becomes more and more penetrated by non-Indian people. Roads are built through their reservation. They can't stop them. They have to give up part of their reservation for a railroad. The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad comes in and heads in Durango, a new established community in 1881 drives its way to Silverton, Colorado up the Animas Valley the next year. All of these things are putting pressure on the Utes. And they know that they are in serious trouble. So they're pressing to go, their solution becomes go to San Juan County.
At the same time, the population build up in San Juan County moves at a very rapid rate. It's amazing what kind of development goes on in San Juan County in the 1880s and by 1895 It includes individuals coming in and staking land rights.
Many of them Utahns looking for land to own. You have a small gold rush on the San Juan river banks. It's on the northern side of the San Juans. That drives miners into that area. The cattle companies continue to grow and take over lands. There's a lot of aggressive contact between the Indians and the cowboys. The cowboys were pretty rough and tumble. They'd just as soon shoot an Indian as talk to them. At least that was the emotion that was around. You had a whole new movement in the country for changing the policy, the American Indian policy of the federal government.
Prior to 1887-88, that policy had been to move American Indian tribes and groups onto reservations, try to segment them out of the way of the onrushing settler filling up the West. That obviously was failing. The Southern Ute reservation was a perfect example of how and why it didn't work. There had to be another way. The way that emerged came out of the 1880 Ute agreement where they tried to move the Utes to the La Plata River and give them individual allotments of land to farm.

**Brad Westwood** (6:29)
Equally as disastrous, but somehow at that period it was a solution.