The Ute tribe are one of the numerous Native American tribes who are believed to have thrived in North American before the famed discovery of the region by Christopher Columbus in 1492
The book, “They Came Before Columbus,” by Ivan Van Sertima provides arguments for the presence of certain people in America even before the Atlantic Slave Trade.
While the book favors black American existence in the Americas before Columbus arrival, native Americans, including the Ute people, had dominated the lands of present-day Utah and Colorado for many centuries.
The Ute tribe, whose history dates back to the 14th century, boasts of a rich ancestry and culture that tracks down to this day.
We will now review the historical development, culture, and facts of this unique Native American tribe.
Ute Tribe History
Pre-European Contact
The first appearance of the Ute tribe as a distinct people dates back to AD 1000-1200, as a Numic-speaking branch of America’s Uto-Aztecan ethnicity that gave rise to the Great Basin tribes, including the Chemehuevi, Hopi, Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute peoples.
They lived as hunters and gatherers in the southern part of the Great Basin, somewhere around eastern California and southern Nevada.
Migration to the Four Corners region of southeastern Utah, southwestern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, and northwestern New Mexico by AD 1300 established the tribe, laying the groundwork for a continued dispersion across Colorado’s Rocky Mountains over subsequent centuries.
17th Century
Language changes were the likely cause of the dispersion, contributing to cultural, genetic, and linguistic similarities between these tribes.
However, mutual intelligibility existed among all Numic-speaking tribes, representing various social networks despite the tribe’s vast colony across Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
Ute territory covered regions across the Central and Southern Rockies, the Colorado Plateau, and the Great Basin by the early 17th century, housing an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people.
In the 17th century, the tribe natives grouped themselves into several nomadic and closely associated bands, mostly considered today as the Northern, Southern, and Ute Mountain Tribes.
It encompassed four eastern bands primarily located in present-day Colorado and six western bands in Utah, with three in both states.
The Yampa, Tabeguache, Capote, and Muache belonged to the eastern bands, while the Uintah, Seuvarits, Pahvant, Moanunts, Sanpits, and Timpanogos belonged to the western bands.
However, the Parianuche, Sabuagana, and Weeminuche occur in both states.
European Contact – 18th Century
The earliest European contact with the Ute people came from the Spanish as far back as 1581 after discovering the high-quality deerskin processed by the tribe.
Trading with the Spaniards occurred in the San Luis Valley from the 1670s, in northern New Mexico starting in the early 1700s, and in Ute villages in present-day western Colorado and eastern Utah.
They traded deerskins, meat, buffalo robes, and other goods for ornaments, maize, flour, blankets, cloth, guns, and horses.
Trades resulted in Ute territories as many Ute tribe members learned Spanish before a conflict in 1637, where the Spanish captured and enslaved some of the tribe members.
Records of European contact with Indigenous inhabitants include Spanish explorer Juan María de Rivera, who explored western Colorado during two expeditions in 1765.
About eleven years later, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Escalante’s expedition saw them travel farther north to the White River in 1776 before diverting west to Utah.
Nineteenth Century
Fur trade increased in Ute territories in the early 19th century thanks to reduced trade restrictions from the Spaniards in 1810, Mexico’s independence in 1821, traffic from the Old Spanish Trail, and French-Canadian and American arrival to obtain fur from otters, beavers, and other animals.
The Old Spanish Trail between Santa Fe and California gave the tribe new trading and looting opportunities and welcomed land and resource seekers.
Sadly, the 19th century would be the beginning of the end of fundamental lifestyle the tribe such as their migratory lifestyle.
Eastern and southern Ute bands maintained their traditional lands and were minimally affected by the white expansion through the early 1800s.
However, the three Southern Ute bands would later suffer drastic encroachments on those territories after the Mexican-American War that ended in 1848.
The encroachment gave rise to the first treaty with the United States — the “Peace Treaty of Abiquiú.”
Twenty-eight principal and subordinate Ute tribe chiefs signed this treaty on December 30, 1849, with new U.S. Indian Commissioner James S. Calhoun.
The 1849 treaty would be the first of many treaties between the Native American tribe and the United States government.
The tribe’s migratory existence for centuries was forcefully bowing to the government’s settlement allocation resulting in increasing hostility towards the government and settlers from other communes.
Many Ute people moved to separate jurisdictions following the creation of new non-native territories in the 19th century.
Sadly, reduced trade relations and decreased access to hunting territories forced the tribe to depend on the U.S. government for food and supplies.
Twentieth Century
Land cessions continued until the 20th century before government policies gradually tilted from internal colonialism by the 1930s.
The tribe suffered their last cession in 1911 when the government acquired one of the last pieces of land from the Ute people for the Mesa Verde National Park.
Restoration orders returned 222,000 acres (346.875 square miles) to the Southern Ute Tribe in 1937 and thirty thousand acres to the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in 1938 following the adoption of a constitution and a tribal council in 1936.
Ute Culture
The tribe’s culture was influenced by invading neighboring Native American tribes, including cultural modifications that drew them parallel to the Plains Indians.
Early Cultural Days
The Ute people lived in conical tents made of animal hides or pelts, called tepees, in the 17th century.
Some occupied domed willow houses all year-round while others lived in these houses during the summer.
However, all groups sheltered in structures between ten and fifteen feet in diameter made of conical pole frames and brush.
Some groups also lodged in hide-tepees and partially enclosed shelters, mostly with roofs and no walls.
Horse riding is an integral part of Ute culture, as records indicate that the tribe got their horses from the Spaniards.
Utes became seasoned horsemen, using the animal to improve their mobility, trade, hunting, and warfare.
They became one of the most powerful and feared tribes in the Four Corners by the early 1700s, thanks to horse acquisition and mastery to enhance welfare and warfare.
The equestrian era also witnessed the Ute people raid neighboring tribes.
Still, they viewed horses as highly prized possessions and symbols of pride and wealth.
While the Utes often rode horses bareback, they designed accessories like leather pads with short stirrups that hung from the horse’s mane.
They designed saddles with animal horns as a pommel in the front and a cantle in the back.
The short stirrup innovation enabled the rider to plunge sideways and shoot under the horse during battle.
Family
The Ute people coexisted in extended family groups, usually between twenty and a hundred people.
They traveled to seasonal camps, engaging in other activities, including hunting and gathering food in the spring and summer.
Children received training on industriousness through various routines and would grow to decide on their spouses even though parents provided some insight into their decisions.
The culture did not frown on polygyny and divorce; however, pregnant couples and menstruating women suffered restrictions.
Dressing and Grooming
Men and women had similar grooming choices, featuring rabbit skin robes and woven and leather clothing.
They wore long or braided hair.
Activities And Division of Labor
The Ute society featured a division of labor across genders.
Men were primarily responsible for hunting, and with the introduction of horses, buffalo, elk, rabbit, antelope, deer, hens, beavers, otters, and sage-hunting became a major part of Ute societies.
Women were responsible for processing and storing meat and cultivating, gathering, and preparing food, including yampa, roots, berries, pine nuts, yucca, and seeds.
However, some groups cultivated wild tobacco. Warriors were solely men, but women matched as gatherers and singers behind war parties.
The Ute tribe embraced clay art as early as the 16th century, evidenced by pottery dating back to the 1500s.
Food
Utes had a wide variety of food options, including fresh or smoked and sun-dried meat, freshwater fish, and corn.
Some western groups hunted and ate reptiles like lizards.
Farm implements featured wooden tools, stones, and bones, while they used baskets and skin bags to carry goods.
Beliefs
The Ute tribe believed in the presence of supernatural power in all living things; no wonder they relied on medicine men for their spiritual and physical health.
They had various spiritual ceremonies, including the sweat ceremonies, the annual fasting and purification ceremony Sun Dance, and the Bear Dance.
However, subsequent generations embraced Christianity.
They bury their dead in their best clothes, facing their head eastwards.
They destroyed their possessions, cut their horses’ hair, or killed them.
Ute Tribe Fact
1. Ute-owned enterprises have handled some major United States projects.
The Weeminuche Construction Authority partnered with BLM to build the Animas–La Plata project dam and intake pump station.
The Ute Mountain Casino is the largest employer on the reservation.
And the Farm and Ranch Enterprise is an award-winning producer of various crops.
2. White settlers and the discovery of large mineral deposits diminished the Utes’ tribal lands in the 19th century.
The Treaty of 1868, penned by most of the Colorado Ute bands, reduced the tribe’s lands from roughly 56 million acres to approximately 18 million acres.
Mineral discovery in the San Juan Mountains in the early 1870s caused a further reduction of 3.7 million acres from the Ute Reservation in western Colorado after the Brunot Agreement between the Ute tribe and the U.S. government in 1873.
3. All Ute reservations have a say in oil and gas leases and are among the Council of Energy.
4. The University of Utah’s athletic teams are called the Utes with permission from the Ute tribe to use the name.
5. “Utah” is named after the Ute tribe.
Conclusion
The Ute tribe is among the several Native American tribes in the United States with rich heritage and ancestry.
Their travails from the A.D. 1000s to European contact about 600 years later and the welfare and warfare developments after then suggest an unquenchable thirst to thrive.
Sadly, failing to ally with other Native American tribes cost them to preserve their culture as the country expanded.
Nevertheless, traces of the culture across present-day Utah and Colorado still exist, and their history is one to relish.
