SEVERAL months after Queen May Butler waved the golden wand over her happy subjects, many Coloradans began to think of their empire in terms of science and geography rather than as just so much rock that might be hiding gold and silver. The reason was the appearance, in 1877, of a mammoth publication twenty-seven inches from top to bottom and twenty inches wide, titled Atlas of Colorado with lithographs by Julius Bien. The publisher was the U. S. Department of the Interior. The author was Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, described in the frontispiece as “Geologist in Charge of the U. S. Geological and Geographical Surveys of the Territories.”
Hayden was by no means the first to explore the Rockies with science in mind. Edwin James had scratched the surface during the Long expedition of 1820. Frémont’s cartographer, Charles Preuss, had scratched a bit more, and so had Richard Kern, the astronomer with Captain Gunnison on the ill-fated Cochetopa Pass crossing of 1853. Of greater importance were the limited surveys along the fortieth parallel by Clarence King (1867–1872) and those by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler (1871–1877) in the San Juan country, both under auspices of the War Department. Meanwhile there were the expeditions of a brilliant ex-soldier Major John Wesley Powell, who had lost an arm while fighting with Grant at Shiloh but did not let that handicap him. In 1867 Powell climbed Pikes Peak and also Lincoln Peak in the Mosquito Range. His wife, Emma Dean, climbed with him, proving once again what Julia Holmes had proved on top of Pikes Peak in 1858.
Major Powell, William Byers, and their party in 1868 were the first to climb Longs Peak. Powell spent that winter making an ethnological study of the White River Utes on the western slope. In the spring he began one of the great feats of American exploration, the 900-mile descent by boat of the fearful gorges of the Green and Colorado rivers, including Grand Canyon. During the same summer Professor J. D. Whitney of Harvard brought a group of his mining-school students to climb, measure, and name a cluster of peaks in the Sawatch Range, which he called the Collegiates. The students were loyal fellows. They named the highest of the Collegiates Mount Harvard, and condescended to call a lower peak Mount Yale. Later surveys would show that Mount Harvard (14,420 feet) is third highest in all the Rockies after Mount Elbert (14,433 feet) and Mount Massive (14,421 feet) just north of it, up the Arkansas.
Major Powell pioneered the U. S. Geological Survey, but Hayden’s Atlas of Colorado was in a pioneer class by itself. There had been earlier maps of the Rockies, of course, from the crude drawings of the Dominguez-Escalante cartographer in 1776 to the maps of Colorado Territory made in 1861–1862 by Governor Gilpin’s surveyor general Francis M. Case, so that Gilpin could lay out his first counties and Front Range townships. But none of the early maps of the West—or even of the East—compared with the beautiful plates of the Hayden Atlas. There were twenty sheets, mostly on a grand scale of four miles to the inch. The maps had been drawn from triangulations made by Hayden’s engineers using fifty-pound theodolites—combined transits and levels—which they lugged on foot to the dizzying summits of the principal fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. The triangulations were keyed to the forty-second parallel and to a guide meridian at 104 degrees 30 minutes, which paralleled the Front Range just east of Denver and Colorado Springs.
An economic map in the atlas located the state’s forests, pastures and croplands, its areas of coal, gold, and silver, its railroads inching their way into the hills toward the mining camps, and its network of toll roads. Among the roads shown was one running three hundred miles from civilization at Pueblo across Sangre de Cristo Pass and San Luis Valley and up the Rio Grande to a new silver camp in the San Juan Mountains called Silverton. The road crossed the Continental Divide at Stony Pass (12,594) which was only a little lower than the Mosquito Pass road connecting Fairplay and Horace Tabor’s Oro City. A drainage map displayed accurately for the first time how the Colorado Rockies gathered waters that formed most of the major rivers of the West. Six geological maps in gorgeous reds, greens, blues, and yellows outlined the regions where ancient seas had laid down the sediments of future sandstones, and where volcanoes had erupted.
Dr. Hayden produced his maps with such accuracy, clarity, and knowledge that they survive in Colorado today as the ultimate authority. Modern measuring devices have brought little change to the altitude figures, which were determined a century ago using Hayden’s instruments. The atlas, for example, put the height of Pikes Peak at 14,147 feet above sea level, Longs Peak at 14,271 feet, as compared with present official figures for Pikes Peak of 14,110 and for Longs Peak, 14,255—inconsequential variations.
One achievement of the atlas was to bring permanence to the existing nomenclature that had accumulated through the ages—Indian names like Uncompahgre (hot springs) River; Spanish names like Cucharas (spoon) River; many names for peaks and creeks with which the trappers of the 1830s had honored friends and animals; the later names concocted by the prospectors—Tarryall Creek, Hoosier Pass, Parrott City, Baker’s Park. The atlas resolved confusion by establishing a single name for a feature that had had several historically. It applied “Gunnison River” to the stream bordering the Elk Range on the south, which had been called Flintstone River or Eagle or Compadre. “Eagle River” was shifted to where it is now under Tennessee Pass. The ancient name “Bunkara” gave way to Roaring Fork.
Very few place names in the atlas have been discarded (Hayden’s “Buckskin Peak” in the Mosquito Range is Mount Democrat now; “Union Park” is Taylor Park). Having put Governor Sam Elbert’s name on the territory’s highest peak, Hayden felt obliged to compliment Elbert’s father-in-law, too, so we have that sedate pile southwest of Denver, Mount Evans. Countless landmarks had no names, but Hayden’s young topographers applied them with gusto—“Mount Teocalli” in the Elks above “Coffee Pot Pass” where they had left a pot behind. They spattered their own names about generously—“Mount Wilson” in the San Miguels for Ada D. Wilson; “Marvine’s Creek” for Archibald Marvine, who had been also with Professor Whitney’s Harvard students in 1869. Marvine was a Princeton, not a Harvard, man, and he saw to it that the Hayden atlas had a Mount Princeton in the Collegiates along with Mount Harvard and Mount Yale. Since the men spent much time whirling socially in Colorado Springs, they showed their gratitude by naming a pinnacle south of Pikes Peak “Mount Rosa” after Rose Kingsley, the pioneering daughter of Charles Kingsley, canon of Westminster Abbey. Rose had come to Pikes Peak from England seeking adventure and to serve as a sort of director of social activities for General Palmer’s resort. Her hobby was mountain climbing. The name “Cameron’s Cone,” near Mount Rosa was chosen to honor the Union Colony charter member General Robert A. Cameron, who had platted both Colorado Springs and Fort Collins after platting Greeley for Nathan Meeker.
Though the Atlas of Colorado was spectacular, its prime mover was as nondescript as someone’s gone-to-seed uncle. F. V. Hayden, a small, mild-seeming creature addicted to frayed frock coats, battered hats, and fits of belligerence, grew up an orphan in Ohio, got a doctor’s degree, but never found time to practice medicine. He began exploring the West in 1853 and had become a legend of physical stamina and scientific precision by 1872, when he surveyed and promoted in Congress the future Yellowstone Park, with his expenses paid by the same William Blackmore who had entertained Nathaniel P. Hill in London. After much work in the Yellowstone region, Hayden spent the summers of 1873, 1874, and 1875 directing four small parties of highly trained young men in the prodigious labor of mapping the Colorado Rockies.
Hayden differed from his colleague in western surveys John Wesley Powell. Whereas Powell stressed caution and realism in dealing with the arid environment, Hayden preferred to ignore the limitations. He resembled the nothing-is-impossible Gilpin in contending that Coloradans would find ways to overcome every obstacle so that they could enjoy the blessings of their earthly paradise. His quixotic optimism infected his youthful companions in exploration. Their exuberance and their love for the Rockies rubbed off, in turn, on the citizenry as their adventures were reported annually by the Department of the Interior. They gloried in their health and strength and in the trappings of romance—tattered clothes, ferocious beards, shoulder-length hair in the manner of the mountain men of old. They were too utterly absorbed in the wonders of each day—wonders of paleontology, botany, anthropology, ornithology—to notice dangers lurking about, such as hostile Ute Indians, electrical storms above timberline, rivers in flood, grizzly bears.
During their three summers in the field, Hayden’s mountaineers visited every nook and cranny of the Colorado high country, from North Park and the Flat Tops surrounding Trappers Lake on south through the most rugged region of all, the San Juan Uplift, with its magnificent subranges, the Grenadiers, Needles, San Miguels, and the Sneffels Massif. They explored the precipitous Crestones in the Sangre de Cristos and were the first men of record to climb that towering guardian of San Luis Valley, Mount Blanca (14,363 feet). They virtually discovered major summits of the Elk Mountains, bestowing names on them designed to please Congressmen in Washington—Capitol Peak, Treasury Mountain, Whitehouse Mountain.
In 1874, the San Juan division of the survey, led by A. D. Wilson, stopped at the brand-new gold-silver camp of Lake City on the Lake Fork of Gunnison River. While there, one of the engineers proposed the name “Cannibal Plateau”—still in use—for the nearby ridge where Alfred Packer won immortality by allegedly eating the most appetizing parts of five friends who had become stranded with him on the ridge during the bitter winter of 1873–1874. Packer claimed in court later that his program was a practical exercise in survival. On this San Juan trip, the division’s reporter and philosopher, Franklin Rhoda, struggled to the top of Mount Nebo and delivered a talk to the ptarmigans and pipits on the rapture one felt treading where no man had trod before, only to step, a moment later, on a whiskey bottle discarded earlier by a roving prospector.1
F. V. Hayden was the driving force behind these surveys, but another kind of genius, the photographer William H. Jackson, was the man who brought the work to worldwide attention. His photos of Two-Story House in present Mesa Verda National Park gave people their first views of the Pueblo Indians’ civilization, which had flourished in cliff dwellings a thousand years ago. Jackson persuaded Chief Ouray and his superstitious Ute Indians to permit what they called his “evil eye” to record on wet plates their home life at Los Pinos Agency near Cochetopa Pass. Millions of readers thrilled to newspaper stories of how Jackson and his beloved mule Hypo survived a freezing night on Notch Mountain, waiting for the clouds to clear so that he could be the first to photograph and prove the existence of the Mount of the Holy Cross. Jackson’s son Clarence wrote later:
Cold mist swirled about him as he worked his way very cautiously up to Notch’s naked crest. He felt at once afraid and excited, alone in a sea of cottony white. And then, through a sudden rift of the clouds, he stared out over the gorge at the Holy Cross. It was true.2
The coming of the railroads had the effect of bringing other scientists to Colorado in the 1870s in addition to the official surveyors. Hayden’s friend Othniel C. Marsh, the Yale paleontologist, arrived to gather fossils for his book on the history of the territory’s plant and animal life. The botanists Asa Gray and C. C. Parry climbed the Gilpin County peaks that carry their names. George Bird Grinnell, the naturalist, found his way over the Medicine Bows into North Park and then encouraged ranchers to move into that high and peaceful pasture.
It was all done in the name of scientific progress, but one group of people, the six bands of Colorado Utes scattered about the western slope, were far from sure that science would be progressive for them. Their fears should have increased when the Atlas of Colorado appeared, revealing to everybody the startling fact that more than half of the Colorado Rockies did not belong to the new state but to a handful of Utes. The response of the settlers to this revelation was a slogan—“The Utes must go”—pronounced faintly at first but rising in decibels to a statewide roar.
As Robert M. Ormes has written in his classic Guide to the Colorado Mountains, the Utes were the true mountain people, “the dwellers of the turquoise sky,” as they translate their tribal name. Their number in the 1870s was small—perhaps 3,500 all told. As early as the seventeenth century they had begun riding horses, acquired from the Spanish on the Rio Grande. At that time the more “civilized” southerly Ute bands—Uncompahgres, Weminuches, Muaches, and Capotes—copied the Pueblo Indians and the Navajos just south of them in raising corn and beans, sheep and goats, along with their summer hunting for deer and elk in the mountains and for buffalo occasionally in the plains. The two northern groups—White River and Grand River Utes—were more closely associated with the Utes and Paiutes of Utah. The northern bands, on the whole, were of a wilder, more independent temperament than the southern bands.3
Through the 1859–1861 gold-rush period, the relations of the Utes with the advancing whites were comparatively peaceful, even friendly. The Utes were spared the pressures that drove the Plains Indians to fierce resistance—pressures such as seizure of their lands and destruction of the buffalo on which their way of life depended. Ranch wives along the Front Range learned that Utes passing by meant no harm when they demanded hot biscuits or offered to trade a pony or two for one of the ranch wives’ children. Hordes of prospectors roamed through what the Utes considered to be their private estate, but these invaders kept mainly to the high country, which the Utes cared little about because grass, water, and game were too scarce up there for good hunting.
Still, conflict was bound to develop. To head it off, Governor John Evans called to Denver in 1863 the nominal leader of the six Ute bands, the multilingual Chief Ouray of the Uncompahgres. They concluded a treaty giving the Uncompahgres possession “forever” of the Gunnison and Uncompahgre river valleys. Five years later, Chief Ouray went to Denver again to get specific land guarantees for all six of the Ute bands from Governor Alexander C. Hunt. The result was one of the most generous grants ever assigned to Indians by the U. S. Senate—sixteen million acres “forever”—an area larger than Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island combined. This delectable oblong, 4,500 acres for each Ute man, woman, and child, was one hundred and ten miles from east to west, two hundred and twenty-eight miles from the border of New Mexico northward almost to Yampa River. It was bounded in the west by the Colorado-Utah border, in the east by the 107th meridian, which ran just west of the sites of present Aspen, Gunnison, and Gypsum.
The Senate’s second grant of land “forever” turned out to last for five years. By 1873, the same irrepressible gold fever that created Colorado Territory in 1861 had propelled hundreds of prospectors up the Rio Grande from San Luis Valley and over Stony Pass, where they staked claims on Ute property and began to plat the town of Silverton. Chief Ouray sent word to President Grant by way of Governor McCook begging for troops from Fort Garland to drive out the trespassers. Grant started to send troops but recalled them when congressmen reminded him that soldiers were not allowed to fire on taxpayers.
The upshot was the Brunot Treaty of 1873, made at Los Pinos Agency by Chief Ouray and Felix Brunot, head of the Board of Indian Commissioners. One of the two witnesses to the treaty signing was a tiny man in his thirties named Otto Mears, the official trader at Los Pinos. Mears, one of the first of many Jewish pioneers to make his fortune in the back country, had wandered to Colorado from the bleak steppes of Russia by way of San Francisco, and he had a set of plans ready to exploit the San Juan gold rush with a system of toll roads, maybe even railroads, serving the new camps. The other witness was Governor McCook’s ex-bodyguard and relative by marriage, General Charles Adams, who was Indian agent at Los Pinos after his transfer from service at the White River Ute Agency.
By the Brunot Treaty, amending the Treaty of 1868, Chief Ouray ceded to the United States four million acres of San Juan mineral lands in exchange for hunting privileges and annuities for the six bands to a value in livestock and farm equipment of $25,000 a year. We know now that the San Juan country would produce gold and silver worth a couple of hundred million dollars. That is why in hindsight we can forgive the Senate for its extravagance in doling out $15,000 more so that Ouray and his subchiefs could go East to marvel at the wonders of Washington and to enjoy in New York a special performance of the balletshow, The Black Crook.
It was marked in Hayden’s atlas of 1877 for all to see—a vast Ute Reservation, reduced a bit in 1873 but still containing twelve million acres. Obviously, the Utes must go. What right did that small group of ignorant savages have to those fertile valleys of the Gunnison and Grand, the White, Uncompahgre, Dolores, and the rest? It was deplorable that mining and making money did not interest them. All they cared about were their horses and their hunting. What could they do with those rich coal lands shown in the atlas in the Danforth Hills near the White River Agency? Or those priceless relics of prehistory, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde that they had kept secret for so long? The big problem was how to get the Utes out of Colorado without an uproar from the same misguided Indian lovers back East who had raised such a commotion over the Sand Creek affair. They had committed no atrocities, not even murdering settlers, as the Arapahoes had murdered the Hungate family in 1864. Hundreds of traders and Blake Street saloon keepers defended them because they were good customers. And that wily Chief Ouray—he was the biggest obstacle of all. He kept his bands in order and gave way just enough to white pressure to preserve the better part of the Ute estate.
But a crisis to solve the impasse was developing. In the spring of 1877 a tent-and-shack settlement popped up not far from the Ute Reservation so haphazardly that nine months passed before it got a name—Leadville. It adjoined two gloomy piles of rock to be called Fryer Hill and Carbonate Hill three miles down California Gulch from Oro City. The Ute reservation began just over the Continental Divide to the west, less than forty miles away. Leadville was not much to look at—a bleak spot at 10,152 feet above sea level where snow was common in July and dynamite was used to dig graves in the permafrost. Yet to thousands Leadville came to be beautiful. The incredible richness of its silver mines, surpassing that of Nevada’s Comstock Lode, would make it the second largest city in the state within two years and the greatest single factor in the growth of Colorado up to then—greater than the 1859 gold rush or the boost which the Hill smelter gave to mining or the arrival of railroads.
And the leader of the Leadville boom, its dynamic core, was—of all people—the forty-six-year-old storekeeper with the drooping handlebar moustache, Horace A. W. Tabor, whom we saw last in Oro City apathetically celebrating statehood and wondering why success had escaped him during his eighteen years in Colorado. It has been told how Tabor and his antiseptic wife, Augusta, moved their dying store business from Oro City to the shack-town under Fryer Hill and found themselves, by the spring of 1878, grossing a thousand dollars a day. “If,” the no longer apathetic Tabor announced in newspaper ads, “you want anything from a small-sized needle to a large-sized elephant, come and see me.”4 In addition to acquiring a modest affluence, Tabor had been elected mayor of Leadville and treasurer of Lake County during the winter of 1878.
A phenomenon could be described as a series of extraordinary coincidences producing miraculous results. The phenomenon of Horace Tabor began on April 20, 1878, when a shoemaker named August Rische and his companion George Hook trudged over Mosquito Pass from Fairplay, where they had been trying to learn how to tell ore from rock. They stopped at the Tabor store in Leadville, received from the kindly and popular mayor a basket of groceries in exchange for a third interest in whatever they found as miners, walked up Fryer Hill, and began to dig. Eight days later, at a depth of twenty-seven feet, they hit a rich vein of silver carbonate. They called their strike the Little Pittsburg, and it became during its brief career one of the most famous lodes in the history of silver-mining.
In a few months, George Hook sold his third interest in the bonanza to Tabor and Rische for one hundred thousand dollars. As word of the mine’s richness leaked out, a pack of lawyers began suits alleging that Tabor’s vein surfaced in other claims, infringing the law of apex. Tabor had watched such suits for two decades and knew what to do. The Little Pittsburg was earning eight thousand dollars every day, and he could afford to buy out the claimants. As a further safeguard, Tabor and Rische paid Senator Jerome Chaffee $125,000 for his half interest in another Fryer Hill bonanza, the New Discovery. A bit later Chaffee bought out Rische, which led to a combine of Chaffee, Tabor, and David Moffat in a firm owning most of Fryer Hill, called the Little Pittsburg Consolidated Mining Company.
A feature of the phenomenon of Tabor in this period was his management skill under enormous pressure. He accepted his sudden imperial status calmly, switching from penny profits in the sale of “needles and elephants” to the handling of sums large enough to buy much of Colorado. His shambling, apologetic style did not change when he found himself to be the largest single stockholder of Chaffee’s First National Bank of Denver—which meant, in effect, that he had become the state’s top financier. He remained diffident when he was elected the Republican lieutenant governor of the state, an honor which he deserved because he had raised Leadville from infancy, and his child had grown so fast that it came to hold the balance of political power in the Republican party of Colorado.
In essence, a mining boom is a proliferation of confidence arising from the yearning of a host of people to get filthy rich in a hurry. Fryer Hill and Carbonate Hill were mere dots on the earth’s surface—a few thousand acres of ground which were soon staked out. Those who came too late to find a claim had perfect confidence that they would discover another Little Pittsburg elsewhere in the region. The results of their searches were dozens of boom camps across the Continental Divide including Aspen, Ashcroft, and White Pine, just outside the presumed position of the east boundary of the Ute Reservation. Those who arrived late at these new diggings kept right on going west into Ute country to stake ground that would become Crested Butte and Irwin, Ruby and Gothic.
The Utes objected to these trespassers—mildly at first, and then furiously. Their reaction delighted the main promoter of the “the Utes must go!” slogan, the Denver Tribune reporter William B. Vickers, who had been looking for reasons to exterminate the Utes for years. As the Leadville boom expanded, Vickers filled the columns of the Tribune with slanted tales of Ute misconduct—how they were stealing horses and burros and tools from the miners, starting forest fires near the diggings, and misrepresenting the whereabouts of the reservation boundary. He neglected to report that posses of armed miners were invading Ute camps without legal authority and that some posse members made sexual overtures to Ute women, whose reputation for chastity was a part of Ute tradition. Vickers did not explain, either, that lightning was a common cause of fires in times of summer drouth. The biggest boost to his “Utes must go!” propaganda occurred on September 3, 1878, when a Middle Park rancher Old Man Elliott was allegedly shot to death while chopping wood, by a White River subchief with Uncompahgre connections, Chief Piah.
In the meantime, tensions of an entirely different kind were mounting between Utes and whites elsewhere. Nathan Cook Meeker, that admirable advocate of high standards in the conduct of human affairs, had been deprived of his position as leader of Union Colony at Greeley. Some colony members objected to his temperance views, and some accused him of being an atheist. When he defended his old friend William Byers during the Hattie Sancomb scandal, Greeleyites charged Meeker with favoring free love. It was a bad time for him to lose his job. At the age of sixty he was deeply in debt to the estate of the late Horace Greeley, and he sank into despair during the months that he spent trying to find respectable work.
And then, out of the blue sky, word came that Senator Henry M. Teller had arranged his appointment by the Indian Bureau as agent at the White River Ute Agency. In an instant despair left him, and he was the Meeker of old—handsome, trim, authoritative, jauntily confident and bursting with good intentions. As he boarded the train on May 3, 1878, bound for White River by way of Rawlins, Wyoming, he was once again the romantic youth who had written novels about lifting savages out of their misery. His mind swirled with plans for a model Ute farm—the same sort of kindly plans that Europeans and Americans had pushed for three centuries—based on the belief that Indians could be made to think and behave like white men and thus achieve the white man’s spiritual joy and material benefits. It was as inconceivable to Meeker as to those before him that savages might prefer their own way of life—living in harmony with their environment—to the white man’s way of conquering, sometimes destroying, his environment with the help of those products of his ingenuity, steel plows, windmills, barbed wire, sawmills, proper homes with stoves, privies, bathtubs, and all the other marvels.
The White River Ute Agency was in a small meadow called Agency Park on the river just above the site of present Meeker, Colorado. It was some two hundred miles south of Rawlins and Fort Steele, which was the post set up by the army to protect the Union Pacific and the region around it from Indian attack. The main White River Ute village was twelve miles downstream from Agency Park in a broad and fertile bottom called Powell Park, honoring John Wesley Powell, who had studied the Ute language there in 1869 under the tutelage of the nominal leader of the band, the aging and wispy Chief Douglas.
Meeker brought to White River a devoted staff of young people from Greeley. His wife, Arvilla, now a frail, anxious woman of sixty-two, was the agency postmistress. Meeker’s daughter Josie, a gentle and beautiful girl of twenty-one, ran the Ute school and agency boardinghouse. Among those instructing the Utes in farming and ditch digging for irrigation was Shadrach Price. Shadrach’s wife, Flora Ellen, full blown at sixteen and the mother of two children, helped Josie with the boardinghouse. Another farming instructor was a sunny, curly-haired teenager named Frank Dresser, who was so homesick for Greeley at first that he wrote a letter to his mother every day.
The new agent decided at once to move his operation to Powell Park. It was far superior to Agency Park as a site for his model Ute farm. Through the months ahead he and his staff struggled against bewildering adversity to put into practice his elaborate program for Ute salvation. Many Utes refused to stop hunting for food and for elk hides, which they traded for guns and ammunition. Meeker could not deny that they had reason to hunt that winter of 1878–1879. Their annuity flour supplied by the Indian Bureau was spoiling in Rawlins because the contractor had left town without paying the Union Pacific freight bill and the railroad would not release it. Chief Douglas was inclined to co-operate with Meeker, but he was opposed by a much younger man Chief Jack, who was intriguing to replace him as head of the band.
Chief Douglas was opposed also by his medicine man Johnson, a superb horseman whose squaw was Chief Ouray’s sister, and by a big, blowzy subchief Colorow. This Colorow had two grievances against the whites: General Adams had thrown him out of Governor McCook’s office in Denver a decade back; and William Byers had banned him from taking his rheumatism cure in the hot sulphur springs in Middle Park, which Byers was improving for resort purposes. Meeker found germs of conflict even in his own family. Josie was smoking cigarettes and playing Spanish monte with the squaws. She seemed to be more interested in learning the ways of the Utes than in teaching the Utes the ways of the whites. And he wondered about her obvious affection for one of her pupils—not a child but a handsome twenty-six-year-old Indian named Persune, who had two squaws.
Added to these local symptoms of unrest was the general resentment of all the Utes in reaction to the “Utes must go!” campaign in the Denver Tribune, and the unsubtle editorials by William Vickers, hinting that it was wrong to teach Utes how to farm because they would then come in competition with white farmers. But Meeker’s biggest problem was the love of the Utes for their thousands of ponies. The most fertile bottomland for farming lay in the pastures where these ponies had always grazed. As the medicine man Johnson explained it, many ponies were bred for racing, and they needed rich grass to run well. If these racers ran badly, rival ponies from Chief Ouray’s Uncompahgre band would outrun them on the race track at Powell Park.
For months, Meeker treated Johnson with patience and courtesy, pointing out that the Utes could not become wealthy farmers, buy fine homes, and educate their children if they sacrificed their most productive croplands to feed all those useless ponies. But late in August 1879, Meeker’s patience ran out when he discovered that Johnson was stealing Josie’s schoolhouse water for his ponies. In a moment of frustration and rage, the agent ordered Shadrach Price to start plowing a new tract of pasture in Powell Park on which to plant two hundred acres of winter wheat. After some hours of plowing, Price heard bullets whining a few feet over his head. The warning bullets were being sent his way by several young Utes on the bench above the river. Price stopped plowing and reported the matter to Meeker.
Next morning, as Meeker was writing a long letter of complaint to the Indian Bureau in Washington, Johnson came into his office and asked the agent why Price was plowing up so much pony pasture. Meeker replied, “The trouble is this, Johnson. You have too many ponies. You had better kill some of them.” For a long moment, Johnson, a tall, powerful man, did not move. Then he charged forward, picked up Meeker like a shock of corn, carried him outside, flung him hard against the hitching rail, and walked away without a word. Meeker was bruised but not seriously hurt. After some hours of indecision, he sent a courier to the telegraph office at Rawlins with a message to Carl Schurz, the secretary of the Interior, asking for troops to protect the agency staff.5
This message would bring on the second great interracial tragedy to occur in Colorado in fifteen years. On September 22, three companies of cavalry from Fort Steele—153 soldiers and twenty-five civilians—left Rawlins for White River under the command of Major Thomas T. Thornburgh. The men were merry in the golden crispness of that early autumn. To them this was a picnic into the mountains away from their drab station in the Wyoming desert. They did not think of the Utes as hostile Indians like the Sioux or Cheyennes. During noon rest a few days later, Chief Jack called on Thornburgh to complain that no troops were needed at the agency and to ask that the soldiers return to Fort Steele. Thornburgh told Jack that the troops would go no farther than the Milk Creek boundary of the Ute reservation while the major and five of his officers rode on to Powell Park to see what was bothering Meeker.
But the long cavalry column did not stop at Milk Creek on the morning of September 29. A hundred or so of Jack’s followers watched from the ridge above as the troops began crossing the creek into the reservation. One of Thornburgh’s soldiers spotted the Indians, and then a rifle cracked somewhere—a Ute rifle, or a soldier’s. Major Thornburgh, a tall, lithe West Pointer in his thirty-fifth year, trotted forward calmly in the open to see what was up. In an instant he was dead and toppling from his horse as a hail of shots followed the first shot. During the next hour or so of battle, ten more soldiers were killed and twenty wounded before the troops could begin to barricade themselves behind wagons and dead mules. The ambush of Utes held them in that pastoral hollow until they were reinforced four days later by a company of Negro soldiers who had been on guard duty in Middle Park.
This black Company D was a unit of the Ninth Cavalry, one of six Negro regiments which the U. S. Army permitted itself reluctantly to recruit after the Civil War. Company D’s white officer, a New Englander named Captain Francis S. Dodge, had one ambition—to lead his blacks into the sort of crisis that would show their fighting skill and courage for the education of white Americans who denied that blacks could fight. The superb performance of Company D in its rapid march west from Middle Park and its rescue of Thornburgh’s white soldiers at Milk Creek was a triumph for Dodge and a turning point nationally along the rocky road to better relations between the two races.
Even before the battle between Thornburgh’s men and the Utes began at Milk Creek, Chief Jack had sent a courier galloping off twenty-five miles to tell Douglas at the agency that Thornburgh had broken his word about stopping the troops at the reservation boundary. The courier found Douglas outside his tepee early in the afternoon. Up to then, the tension at Powell Park had been subsiding since word had come that Thornburgh would ride in to see Meeker without his soldiers. Frank Dresser, Shadrach Price, and other white employees were throwing up dirt to roof a new storehouse. Meeker was in his office reading Samuel Pepys’s Diary. Arvilla Meeker, Josie, and the housegirl, Flora Ellen Price, were in the Meeker kitchen cleaning up after lunch.
Jack’s courier gave news of the battle to Douglas, who relayed it to several armed subchiefs gathered around him. There was no discussion. The Utes walked slowly toward the new storehouse, raised their guns, and began firing. Meeker ran out of his office and fell with a bullet in his head. Within an hour ten more male employees had been murdered—every white man except Frank Dresser, who slipped away, badly wounded, to try to reach Thornburgh’s troops. Burning and looting followed. By nightfall, the moonlit headquarters of Meeker’s model farm was a charred and deserted ruin dotted by corpses. Douglas’s men took Arvilla, Josie, Flora Ellen, and her children along with them as hostages as they fled south to a secret camp across Grand (Colorado) River on Grand Mesa. Eleven days later rescue troops hurrying to Powell Park from Rawlins noticed a trail of blood near the old Danforth coal mine. The trail led them to the mine entrance and the dead body of a curly-haired teenager, a coat folded under his head and rifle cocked and clasped in his hand. On a timber above his head he had managed to scrawl a message before he died: “Have been here twenty-one hours. All killed at the agency. Send my money to my mother at Greeley. Frank Dresser.” 6
And so the “Utes must go!” campaign reached its final phase as a smashing success in convincing a multitude of whites that this small tribe was a menace to society. After twenty-three days in custody of the Utes on Grand Mesa, the three white women were released to General Adams, who was led to their camp as a result of negotiations conducted by Chief Ouray of the Uncompahgres with the White River band. Arvilla, Flora Ellen Price, and Josie told Adams later that they had been “outraged” by Douglas, Johnson, and Persune respectively during their captivity but that they did not want to testify publicly about such indelicate experiences. Josie seemed inclined to forgive Persune, explaining to Adams that even his squaws had urged her to submit on the grounds that if he took her as his third squaw other Utes would not dare to molest her. The entire testimony of the women was suppressed by Secretary of the Interior Schurz, who feared their charges that they had been raped by their captors might bring another orgy of revenge—whites against Indians—such as had occurred at Sand Creek in 1864.
After long federal hearings to decide who killed whom at Powell Park, Chief Douglas alone was judged criminal enough to be sent to prison at Fort Leavenworth, from which he was released in a year because no word was received from higher authority as to what he had done wrong. In June 1880, the Senate passed a bill causing the removal of Ouray’s Uncompahgres and the White River bands to bleak lands nobody else wanted on the Green and Duchesne rivers in Utah. The Muache, Capote, and Weminuche bands fared better, having had no part in the White River massacre. They were assigned to acreages in southwestern Colorado where some two thousand of them remain—the Southern Utes (Muaches and Capotes) on farmlands around their headquarters town of Ignacio, and the Ute Mountain Utes (Weminuches) on grazing lands adjoining Mesa Verde National Park. Chief Ouray, who had struggled for twenty years to hold back the inexorable pressure of ever-increasing hordes of land-hungry whites, died at the age of forty-seven of Bright’s disease, and perhaps of a broken heart, soon after the removal bill passed the Senate. Since then, as if in penitence for shabby tactics to drive the Utes to misbehavior, Coloradans have made Ouray a state hero, applying his name to the shapely peak just south of Monarch Pass, and the name of his wife Chipeta to a lesser summit near it. His portrait in stained glass is among those in the dome of the capitol in Denver.
Though Congress did not open the more than eleven million acres of vacated Ute lands to settlement until June 1882, homesteaders followed hard on the Utes as they withdrew to Utah in September 1881. From Gunnison town, hundreds of settlers rushed along Gunnison River and over Blue Mesa Summit (They called it “Son of a Bitch Hill.”) and Cerro Summit just as Captain Gunnison had done in 1853 to get around the impassable Black Canyon of the Gunnison. As had happened in the gold rush of 1859, this new rush of settlers to the western slope included the usual American mix plus many immigrants from Europe—Swedes, Poles, Italians, Norwegians. And this time many of them brought their wives and children, since the civilization of the Front Range was not far away.
Before that year ended, some of these pioneers platted the town of Delta on the Gunnison at the mouth of the Uncompahgre. Others started a village at the junction of the Grand and Gunnison rivers that they would call Grand Junction in 1882. A group led by Joseph Selig laid out a town on the Uncompahgre near the site of what had been Chief Ouray’s farm, calling it Ouray Junction at first and then Pomona, to suggest that it was the kind of place the Italian goddess of fruit and gardens would love. Selig disliked that name and persuaded his settlers to call it Montrose in tribute to Walter Scott’s The Legend of Montrose, which he was reading at the time.
Samuel Wade and his friends moved around the north side of Black Canyon by way of Black Mesa to homestead the orchard country on the north fork of the Gunnison. Wade had brought some peony roots with him, and so his village was called Paonia. Meanwhile, ranchers flocked to the Yampa River valley just north of the old reservation boundary, and to the grasslands and dinosaur graveyards of the Little Snake River that Fremont had explored in 1844. The homestead of James Crawford became the town of Steamboat Springs, which had a gassy pool then that blew spray at ten-second intervals in the manner of the exhaust of a Mississippi stern-wheeler. The town of Meeker began in the fall of 1883 when the army removed the garrison that it had placed there soon after the Meeker massacre.
As the settlers rushed west, so did the railroads, whose builders had been held up by hard times and by the closed Ute reservation. Funds were easy to come by now. General Palmer’s Denver and Rio Grande moved on from the railhead town of Alamosa (1878) in San Luis Valley over Cumbres Pass to his new supply town of Durango (1880), and on up the canyon of Animas River to Silverton. Here it connected to cliff-hanging stage roads built across the crest of the Rockies from Lake City and the mining camp of Ouray by the mighty midget of the San Juans, Otto Mears. Other Palmer branches got to Leadville (1880) through the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas and to Grand Junction (1882) by way of Marshall Pass and a dozen incredible miles through Black Canyon before Palmer’s railroad masterpiece was snatched from him by the refined piracy of Jay Gould. In this period, the narrow-gauge that W. A. H. Loveland had begun was serving Central City and Georgetown. John Evans, a reluctant associate of Jay Gould, built his Denver and South Park line across South Park and the Upper Arkansas Valley to reach Gunnison through the Alpine Tunnel under Altman’s Pass.
All this expansion into what had been the secret wonderland of the Utes was not just a Colorado phenomenon. Its explosive dynamics derived primarily from the confidence and fascination of the whole world in the treasures of Leadville, with Horace Tabor and his Little Pittsburg mine as its glittering focus.
1. Franklin Rhoda, “Report on the Topography of the San Juan Country” in U. S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, Annual Report 1874 (Washington: Government Printing Office), pp. 451–96.
2. Clarence S. Jackson, Picture Maker of the Old West (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), p. 189.
3. Robert M. Ormes, Guide to the Colorado Mountains (Denver: Sage Books, 1952), p. 26.
4. Duane A. Smith, Horace Tabor (Boulder, Colorado: Colorado Associated University Press, 1973), p. 61.
5. Robert Emmitt, The Last War Trail (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), pp. 151–156. See also the account of the Milk Creek massacre in Marshall Sprague, Massacre (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1957), pp. 229–238.
6. Thomas F. Dawson and F. J. V. Skiff, The Ute War (Denver: Tribune Publishing House, 1879), pp. 54–55.