Encounters in the American Mountain West by Ian R Mitchell

Author:Ian R Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906000103
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2012-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

THE INDIAN TRAIL

On my first visit to Utah, as previously mentioned, I was slowly recovering my strength from a hip-replacement operation. I was not looking for very testing walking, and did some of the waymarked trails in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains around Ogden. My host in Ogden, Mikel, was a great devotee of these trails, getting up most mornings at dawn for a walk on one of them with Janis his wife, and he had taken a big part in helping to get them initially established and subsequently maintained. One of these was called Indian Trail. We were driven round to Ogden Canyon and dropped there to make our way back over the contour line of the mountains, to Ogden itself. I asked Mikel about the trail, and he told me it was an old hunting route into the mountain interior, used by the Ute Indians, the tribe which had given the state of Utah its name. It was an easy trail of about five miles, moving in and out of the timber line, and with grand views away over the Great Salt Lake. The Ute no longer inhabit the area hereabouts, though Mikel showed me a couple of sites where they had carved their pictographs. Unlike the Anasazi though, the Ute did not disappear completely from Utah.

The first white man to encounter the Ute was Escalante, the pioneering Spanish priest who explored the region of the Colorado Plateau in the 1770s, and the tribesmen were helpful to him as guides. By this time the Ute, who had originally hailed from further east, had been in the area for about 250 years, and they were the dominant tribe in the region that was later to become known as Utah. They were hunter-gatherers, who moved around the area, following the buffalo and living off the land. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to say how many Ute there were when the first Mormon settlers started to arrive in the 1840s, but estimates vary from 10-25,000 spread widely throughout the region. Smallpox, brought by the white man, did as much as alcohol or the wiping out of the buffalo, to weaken the Native Americans and to reduce the population, though the disease is not often mentioned as a contribution to how the West was won. Now there are only 3500 Northern Ute left (there is another group, the Southern Ute, located in Colorado) almost all of whom are living in the Uinta-Ouray Reservation in north-east Utah. And even that low number is an increase from about 2000 in the 1970s.

The Ute had had their scuffles with the Mountain Men, the trappers who came in from about 1820 in pursuit of the beaver. But the trappers were so few that these scuffles didn’t amount to much, and many Mountain Men themselves went native, taking Indian wives. With the coming of the Mormons, and later other white men, things gradually changed and larger-scale conflicts emerged. Initially though there was much less hostility towards the Indians from the Mormon settlers than there was generally from white westward-bound migrants.

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