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

**Brad Westwood** (0:06)
Welcome to the podcast, Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history. My name is Brad Westwood. I'm Senior Public Historian, Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. The past is never truly in the past. It's all around us. It informs us. It speaks to both our shared and to our separate identities. Speak Your Piece, the podcast where writers, historians, curators, all those who contribute to Utah's history, share their insights and discoveries. If there's one place, one podcast to get your history fix, this is the place.
If you like what you're listening to and you'd like to hear more, we recommend that you also check out Writing Westward, a podcast produced by the Red Center at Brigham Young University.
Today, my guest is Dr. Greg Thompson, Associate Dean at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library for Special Collections and an adjunct professor of history. Hello, Greg.

**Greg Thompson** (1:04)
Good morning.

**Brad Westwood** (1:06)
Thompson has been a major force for history in Utah in the gathering and preserving of vital primary sources, published works, and archival materials. As the Director of U of U Special Collections and its university archives, Greg established, among others, the U of U Ski Archive which documents the entire ski industry in Utah.
Also, many of Utah's ethnic archives have been collected and have been a deep area of interest to Dr. Thompson. He has also developed archives for the Women's History Archive, LGBTQ Plus Archive, and so much more. He is also editor for the Tanner Trust publication series, Utah, the Mormons, and the West. In 2019, the Utah State Historical Society acknowledged his statewide influence, his career in writing, teaching, collecting, and documenting Utah's history by making him a fellow, the highest honor of the Utah State Historical Society. So good to have you here in Speak Your Piece, Greg.

**Greg Thompson** (2:11)
Thank you very much for having me.

**Brad Westwood** (2:13)
In this episode, we will be discussing the late 19th century Ute Indian Nation, San Juan County, located in the southwest corner of Utah, and a little known story about Bears Ears.
So first, Greg, as it truly is a spoiler, tell us briefly what happened in the late 1880s and 1890s related to the Bears Ears area within the Utah San Juan County. Just what is the story here?

**Greg Thompson** (2:43)
At core, the state of Colorado citizens were pushing to remove the Southern Ute reservation in the southwest corner of the state, adjacent to the Fort Corners, out of the state of Colorado, and into Utah. They had tried to combine the Southern Ute reservation residents with the Uinta Basin, Uinta and O'Rea Ute reservation citizens, and making it into one large Ute reservation.
The effort spanned for nearly 25 years, and it proved to be a failure, but only by a vote in the House of Representatives in Congress that the Senate had already supported a measure to move approximately 1,700 to 2,000 Southern Utes out of Colorado into San Juan County, Utah, on a 2.1 million acre reservation. San Juan County, Utah is 4.9 million acres. So as you can see, they were going to take a substantial portion of the existing San Juan reservation and make it into a Ute reservation. That included the lands of Bears Ears and the Bears Ears National Monument and the public lands in surrounding that area.

**Brad Westwood** (4:32)
Now the Southern Utes were not foreign to that land, were they?

**Greg Thompson** (4:35)
They were not. There are three major groups that make up the Southern Utes as they were pulled together in the 1860s.
And one of those groups was known as the Weeminuche or the Wee-nooch depending on your choice of terms. Today we call them the Ute Mountain Utes. They live in the furthest west southwest corner of the state of Colorado today. And those people considered the area of Bears Ears up to the LaSalle Mountains and beyond as part of their aboriginal lands.

**Brad Westwood** (5:22)
Among other tribes, I suppose as well.

**Greg Thompson** (5:25)
Yes, the Paiutes were the Paiutes today we recognize them as the San Juan Paiutes lived on both sides of the Colorado River and into San Juan County and were considered neighbors of the Utes.

**Brad Westwood** (5:42)
So speaking of Colorado and southeastern Utah and the Utes there, what's their way of life? How are they living in those decades?

**Greg Thompson** (5:52)
For generations, almost centuries, at least three, they lived as a nomadic people. They had their own areas of influence that covered Colorado, three quarters of Colorado, Utah and into northern New Mexico as we know it today. They had developed very early a tremendous capacity with using the horse as a major mode of transportation. They became known as the Mountain People and with all the characteristics of Mountain People, they hunted, they also, using the horse, were able to go out on the plains and hunt buffalo. Buffalo became an absolute important part of their economic lifestyle and they lived in tepees, very formidable tepees, as well as using a form of wiki up somewhat like the Paiute people use of the Great Basin.