Environmental Degradation and Agricultural Resistance among the Utes - Excerpts from David Rich Lewis' "Neither Wolf Nor Dog - American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change" Chapter 3 - Agriculture among the Northern Utes

When the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, they appropriated land lying in a buffer occupancy zone between Ute and Shoshone peoples.

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As more settlers entered the valley in 1848, competition with Utes for relatively scarce natural resources increased.

In the spring of 1849, Mormon president Brigham Young sent "missionary" settlers south into Utah Valley, a crossroads for Indian trade and a crucial Ute resource area. The settlers constructed Fort Utah with its adjacent fields on an annual Tumpanuwac campsite - a strategic location with fresh water, abundant grass, and forage for Ute horses.

Indian agent John Wilson reported that the settlement "has not only greatly diminished their formerly very great resource of obtaining fish out of Utah Lake and its sources," but "has already driven away all the game." As the settlers appropriated the grass and game, plowed and fenced the land, and deprived Utes of access to their rich valley, the Tumpanuwac turned to an alternate yet categorically parallel food resource -- Mormon livestock. Unwilling to compensate the Utes or lose their livestock, the settlers retaliated and drove the Tumpanuwacs from the valley in February 1850.

...as Mormon settlers expanded south into Millard and San Pete counties, they disrupted the finely balanced Tumpanuwac, San Pitch, and Pahvant subsistence strategies and precipitate the recurring patterns of Ute starvation, begging, and depredation on Mormon livestock and fields. In 1851, Untah Indian superintendent J. H. Holeman warned that Mormons and settled "on all the most valuable lands." "The Indians have been driven from their lands and their hunting grounds destroyed without compensation wherefore they are in many instances reduced to a state of suffering, bordering on starvation," he wrote. "In this situation some of the most daring and desperate approach the settlements and demand compensation for their lands, where upon the slightest pretexts, they are shot down or driven to the mountains."

Brigham Young ... reiterated his stance that it was "cheaper to feed the Indians than to fight them."

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in 1851, Young called several church members to serve as "indian farmers," and set aside three farm reserves in Millard, San Pete, and Iron counties. Young's aim was to "institute among them the means of procuring the subsistence necessary to prolong life" as the "fast diminishing" products of their "kilsmome chase" proved insufficient. The farms became mere feeding stations, providing food but little instruction. Utes continued to compete with expansive Mormon settlers for valley and foothil resources. As settlers changed the ecology of the region by plowing up native plants, planting domesticates, and killing wildlife "pests" to protect their crops and livestock, Utes found themselves forced to beg or raid for the transformed floral and faunal resources.

... Tumpanuwac chief Wakara led a series of effective but unsystematic raids on isolated Mormon communities to procure food and livestock...

At the treaty meeting in 1854, Agent Edward A. Bedell asked Wakara "if he or his men desired to raised wheat and potatoes etc." Wakara answered as a Ute leader would, without binding others by his word -- that "he would much prefer to trade and hunt himself, but he would be glad to have the Indians work and raise wheat and corn." He held out the hope that *other* Indians *might* agree to farm and that the produce of that labor would be welcome, but that *he* would not participate.

By 1855 the Tumpanuwac subsistence complex was in disarray. Mormon fields and pastures completely blocked Ute access to gathering grounds in Utah valley, and game became scarce. Seining had already depleted the once prodigious fishery of Utah Lake...

All along the line of Mormon settlement, similar instance of competition, displacement, and environmental change occurred. "The fertile valleys along the base of the mountains, from which they ever derive their subsistence are now usurped by the whites," wrote Agent Garland Hurt, "and they are left to starve or steal, or to infringe upon the Territories of other bands." Epidemic diseases ravaged Ute populations. Grasshoppers and drought reduced Mormon crops and their willingness to continue sharing their hard-won produce. As fear of renewed raiding increased, Indian agents revived the idea of agrarian self-sufficiency and Indian farms.

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Brigham Young seconded Hurt's efforts but defined the problems. "The idea of cultivating the earth for a subsistence gains slowly among them, for it is very adverse to there habit of idleness." Young reported that Pahvants under Kanosh were perhaps the most willing, but "many of the Old warriors of his tribe do not like the idea of labor, hence he meets with more or less difficulty." Arapeen, a Tumpanuwac leader, desired livestock that could "travel with him in his meanderings" but was "careless about Agriculture." Like his brother Wakara, Arapeen preferred to have local whites farm for him. In council, Ute leaders did not openly oppose the farms but uinversally questioned Hurt as to how they would survive, saying that "they were very poor, and had to hunt most all the time to keep from starving, and if they laid down their bows to work in the fields they would soon be obliged to pick them up again." Believing that to remain in one place too long meant death, they refused to abandon their mobile and diversified subsistence strategy -- as weak as it was becoming -- for the vagaries of a single, sedentary mode of production like farming.

... Most Utes continued their seasonal rounds. Those unable to keep up remained near the farms, drawing rations until band members returned to claim what white farmers had produced.Many lingered through the fall and winter, camping and hunting in the nearby foothills as they had before Mormon occupation. Overall farm production was erratic, forcing agents to purchase rations and encourage Utes to leave the farms to hunt...

Hurt blamed consistently poor farm yields on short growing seasons, drought, grasshoppers, and inadequate farm equipment. He also complained that those who did not work in the fields were "lavished profusely" with farm produce by those who did -- likely part of a reciprocal exchange of foodstuffs that he interpreted as wasteful and uncivilized.

... In the aftermath [of the Utah War], Allred Cummings replaced Brigham Young as governor, and Jacob Forney became Indian superintendent. Forney insisted that Utes "perform all the work" on the farms. He explained, "Indians are proverbially lazy, and only the pinchings of hunger will drive them to work; so much white labor has heretofore been employed to do the work for them, and they have not been sufficiently taught that their subsistence depends upon their own labor." Despite his expectations, white farmers continued to operate the farms. In 1859, farm labor costs and subsistence provisions necessitated by widespread crop failures exceeded federal appropriations. Governor Cummings dismissed Forney and closed the farms, convinced that Utes would never be farmers.

... The Black Hawk war (1863 - 68) was little more than an intensification of Ute raiding that had been going on for years. During this period of increasing subsistence deprivation and resistance to removal, a war leader named Autenquer ("Black Hawk") emerged among the San Pitch. He formed alliances between Utah and Colorado Ute bands, Southern Paiutes, and even Navajos, leading some one hundred followers in deadly raids to obtain supplies from Mormon communities. Warriors interviewed in 1872 stated that "hunger often caused them to go on raids to get cattle to eat" because agents stole what Washington had sent them. They blamed the Mormons who "had stolen their country and fenced it up. They lands that their fathers had given them had been taken for wheat fields. When they asked the Mormons for some of the bread raised on their lands and beef fed on their grass, the Mormons insulted them, calling them dogs and other bad names."

At a peace council in 1865, Brigham Young and Utah Indian superintendent O. H. Irish tried to convince Ute leaders to cease raiding and move to their reservation. Irish explained that the "Great Spirit" and "the great Father at Washington" wanted their lands to produce "grain, corn and such things as go to make his children comfortable, happy and prosperous." Irish continued, "We want to make little farms for them all. We do not want to make a great big farm and have the Government work it, but to make little farms and have you work them and that the produce and everything on them will then be yours, and you will have it." If they would remove to the Uintah Reservation, Irish promised, they would receive farms and cattle, schools for their children, gifts of clothing, food, and implements amounting to $1.2 million over sixty years. All they had to do was sign the treaty ceding their "possessory right" to all other lands and move within one year.

In their speeches, Ute leaders like San-pitch told Irish that "I do not want to trade the land nor the title to the land." Tabby-to-kwana added that "they never thought of such a thing." Kanosh challenged the government's plans and offers of assistance with is own experience. "I have worked at Corn Creek a long time and I have got nothing. President Young gave me five cows, and when the grasshoppers came and eat up my grain I had to sell them to get something to eat." They generally opposed removal, saying that "they wanted to live around the graves of their fathers," but realized that option was disappearing in the wake of settlers' plows. Assured that they could continue to hunt and gather on all public lands, all but one of the Ute leaders present signed the Spanish Fork Treaty. Little did they know as they moved toward the reservation that the Senate would reject the treaty and its promised benefits would never materialize.

...Superintendent F. H. Head admitted that there existed a "great antipathy to work on the part of the men, the greater part of what was done being by the squaws and children" while the men went hunting. White laborers performed nearly all of the plowing and planting, trying to illustrate to Ute males "the dignity of labor," but the reproduction of cultural patterns dividing labor along gender lines precluded male farming -- digging in the earth was the subsistence province of women. Government surveyor Almon H. Thompson likewise observed that "the employees at the Agency plough the land, furnish seed, dig the irrigating ditches, cut the grains; in fact do all the work that requires the use of tools. The Indians irrigate a little," he admitted, but "the 'bucks' make the squaws do the work while they race horses or loaf around the Agency." "The Indians do not make good agriculturalists," he wrote; their grain crops were a failure, and "something ought to be done in the way of stock raising." As conducted, the agency was "a cheat, a swindle," and "the white man could better afford to board him in Illionis than to keep up a reservation here."

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Between 1873 and 1875, [Agent John J.] Critchlow estimated fifty to eighty families had small fields or gardens, providing up to three-eighths of their subsistence. "of course," he wrote in 1873, "their farming was not done in the most approved manner." Agency laborers plowed, planted, cultivated, cut, and threshed Indian hay and grains. When Ute families returned from their summer travels, the women harvested what garden produce managed to grow during their absence. A majority of families refused to settle near the agency and continued this kind of modified subsistence round, incorporation traditional resources with crops and rations. While hunting in Colorado, Uintahs would pass themselves of as White River Utes in order to collect additional rations, reciprocating when White Rivers visited Utah.

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Critchlow's biggest problem was a passive but persistent resistance to farming. He reported a telling incident in 1872:

"Douglas, the White River chief, with quite a number of his band, came to the agency and succeeded in persuading our Indians, who had up to that time intended to farm, to give it up and let the white men farm for the Indians, telling them that Washington did not intend that they should work; also ridiculing those that farmed, calling them squaws, and finally succeeded, toward the later part of April, in inducing our Indians to leave with him for a visit and council at some point south. Thus it has occurred that all the farming operations have been performed by the employees."

Utes used this formulaic explanation repeatedly to justify their reluctance to farm, until, over the years, it became myth-like in its retelling. Joseph Jorgensen traces this formula from a 1867 Southern Ute explanation:

"... the Great Spirit created the first man an Indian... when the Indian tribes increased, they made a ladder to get to the place where the Great Spirit was, and the Great Spirit scattered them, and made them speak several languages; and some of them became white from fear, and the Great Spirit then said that it was now the wish of the Great Spirit to have the white man work and plant for the Indian."

While biblically influenced, the story was told for strictly Ute purposes. "Washington" replaced the "Great Spirit" in a 1872 White River Ute version, which was retold in two variations by Colorado Utes in 1877 and 1878. As late as 1908, Utes related the same story, "and were rather literally adhering to its doctrine, that is, they refused to work." In this way, Ute men symbolically relegated whites to the status of useful food providers, reinforcing their own cultural categories concerning the proper type and division of labor.

... Even those who tried farming did not change their lifestyle overnight. In the aftermath of the Little Big Horn, Critchlow lamented that twenty to thirty Utes left to fight Lakotas, or perhaps just to hunt. "Most of those that went were our best farmers, he reported -- farmers who were still Ute warriors.

... After a particularly bad winter of subsistence shortfalls, federal officials tried to get Colorado Utes to agree to a limited reservation. In that council, Ouray of the Taviwac Ute explained the problems his people faced:

"Long time ago, Utes always had plenty. On the prairie, antelope and buffalo, so many Ooray can't count. In the mountains, deer and bear, everywhere. In the streams, trout, duck, beaver, everything. Good Manitou gave all to red man; Utes happy all the year. White man came, and now Utes go hungry a heap. Game much go every year -- hard to shoot now. Old man often weak for want of food. Squaw and papoose cry. Only strong brave live. White man grow a heap; Red man no grow -- soon die all."

He rejected reservation talk, saying, "Utes stop not in one place, and Comanches no find. But Utes settle down; then Comanches come and kill. Tell Great Father, Cheyennes and Comanches go on Reservation *first*, then Utes will." Experience taught them that they must remain mobile to elude their enemies and to maintain a diversified subsistence strategy, but this fundamental cultural logic was lost on council commissioner General William Sherman, who gave up, saying, "They will have to freeze and starve a little more, I reckon, before they will listen to common sense."

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Ute insistence on hunting rights did not pass unnoticed by the government. John Wesley Powell reported that Utes still had an abundance of game "and can live by hunting, and as long as that condition of affairs exists they will never desire to cultivate the soil, and no substantial progress can be made in their civilization." Only nineteen families out of 2,900 White River and Uncompahgre Utes made any attempt to farm by 1875. The rest help "superstitious prejudices against the performance of manual labor." Powell's answer was not to remove them to Utah as some suggested, but to open more land for settlement. "The sooner this country is entered by white people and the game destroyed so that the Indians will be compelled to gain a subsistence by some other means than hunting, the better it will be for them."

...a Ute delegation complained to Colorado Governor Frederick W. Pitkin about [Colorado Agent] Meeker's plowing [of their sacred race track and dancing grounds] and threats, telling him "they thought their civilization much superior to that of the white man, and said that they much preferred that the Agent would give them their food and leave them to live their own lives." Upon returning from a trip to Washington, D.C., Piah, a Taviwac/Parianuc leader, was reputed to have said, "White father at Washington said Indian must make potato, cabbage, and work. I tell white father no make potato, cabbage, no work; Indian hunt, fish. No hunt, no fish, Indian fight and die. Me great warrior. Warriors no plow."

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Through the rest of the nineteenth century, Utes passively resisted wholesale agrarian settlement, incorporating farming as only one of several subsistence alternatives. Special Agent Paris H. Folsom gives the best description of the type of farming conducted on the Uintah Reservation throughout this period:

"Dotted here and there are their little farms and homes, blending so quietly with nature itself, that the line of separation seems really blurred and lost. Here 'a farm' as they call it -- a few acres fenced, right in the open meadow, closely surrounded and heamed in by a rich green sward -- the whole family at work or play in the corn, potatoes, peas and beans, children, babies and all ... their greatest happiness is in the complete domestic circle that is their greatest comfort -- often the only one -- their ambition is limited to, and satisfied with a low order of livelihood and united, undisturbed families."

...in 1885, the agency admitted that Utes raised only one-third of their subsistence, with rations and hunting each accounting for one-third. As for ranching, two Uintahs owned nearly half of the 1,600 cattle. Optimistic estimates in 1888 put the number of individuals farming or ranching at 70 out of a population of over 1000, and even then white laborers did the majority of the work.

... While the statistics of Northern Ute farming improved in the 1890s, Ute cultural practices and attitudes towards agricultural labor remained little changed. Agent Robert Waugh reported their "dogged pertinacity" in horse racing, dancing, and mortuary customs resulting in the destruction of cabins and valuable personal property. They complied with orders for their "civilization" but returned to their old habits once officials were out of sight. Waugh candidly noted that Ute males were "the most practical and least theoretical of any beings I ever came across. He wants the least and enjoys the most with the least care or effort. He views with a jealous eye any and all efforts to intrude the White Mans ways and wants upon him, and would resist them by force only that he thinks that would be harder." Part of that passive resistance took the form of complaints that agency farmers were not doing enough of the work for them -- plowing, fencing, building houses, and digging irrigation ditches -- and should therefore be "sent away," suspending farm progress. By continuing to equate white farmers with personal laborers, the product of a culturally constructed race-role hierarchy, Utes attempted to deflect directed agrarian change.

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[After the discovery of asphaltum deposits on reservation land] Congress caved in to mining lobbyists and created a commission to allot Uncompahgres and open the Ouray Reservation. Ute agent James F. Randlett protested the plan, charging that the reservation had never contained enough farmland and had been a fraud from the beginning. As Randlett expected, the commission confirmed that there was insufficient agricultural land for allotment, but Congress forged ahead, ordering Uncompahgres allotted on either the Ouray or Uintah reservations by 1 April 1898, with or without the consent of any of the three bands. Uintah and White River Utes would simply be reimbursed $1.25 per acre for lands assigned to Uncompahgres.

In council, White River leaders Sowawick, Maricisco, and Catoomp realized they would be next and voiced their opposition to allotment and to selling land to the Uncompahgres. They understood the connection between severalty and farming and in their speeches rejected allotment through metaphorical attacks on the things that would separate their lands (fences), that would tie them to a specific plot (log houses), make their land agriculturally viable (irrigation), and undercut their land use patterns and resistance to farming. They opposed opening the reservations to whites whom they feared would settle among them. All of these things threatened a more collective lifestyle and identity that developed out of the deprivation of the reservation experience as Ute elders died, as paths to leadership evolved, and as individual families found fewer opportunities to live without help from the larger group. Having witnessed the disastrous consequences of individualistic action when dealing with the federal government, these White River leaders voice the collective opposition of all three bands. For their actions, Agent William Beck requested that these "incendiary" leaders be imprisoned in Florida.

Uncompahgres likewise opposed allotment, but, realizing they could not halt it, they attempted to sabotage the plant. [...] By 1904, 384 Uncompahgres held allotments, including 101 on the Ouray Reservation that were judged "entirely valueless, even for grazing purposes." One Utah attorney claimed that the Indians made their selections knowing "absolutely nothing about the value of land," when in fact they chose them specifically to avoid being removed to Uintah and to reproduce a hunting and herding lifestyle, thus subverting the settled agrarian intent of allotment. Allotting agents reported their failure to get even a single Uncompahgre to accept or visit allotments on the Uintah Reservation, while those without allotments "roam at will over a vast extent of 'bad land' territory, like the deer or coytoe, totally without the reach of civilizing influences."

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Led by Tim Johnson, a White River spokesmen, individual Utes explained their connection with the land and adamantly denied the government's right to open their reservation. Captain Joe of the White River told McLaughlin:

"The Indian reservation was not put down for nothing. It is held down by something heavy... There is only one land here and that is the Indian's land and it belongs to the Indians... Here are the Uncompahgre Indians and here the White River Indians, and the Uinta Indians and we want to hold our reservation. There is a line from here on the top of these mountains where the Indians living on the reservation can go any place, and that is good. We have these mountains and streams and don't want anybody coming on this reservation."

Red Cap, another White River, reiterated, "This reservation is heavy. The Indians have grown here and their bones are under the ground, covered over with earth. That is the reason it is so heavy." John Star told McLaughlin, "You see me and I see you. My flesh is black: you have good flesh, you are white like this paper here. My flesh looks like the ground. That's the reason I like this land: my flesh is like the ground. That's the reason I am going to keep it."

Warren, a Uintah, argued simply, "It is not buckskin or deer's hide, and I do not want to sell it."

Other Utes took different approaches calculated to raise legitimate questions. Sowsonocutt (White River) said, "The Indians have lots of cattle and horses. When we take the Government's little pieces of land, how are we to run our horses on little pieces of land?" Grant (Uintah) added, "What are my horses going to do when I have only a little piece of land? Must I tie my horses in that little field?" Appah (White River) agreed, summarizing that "when you tell us that we must take farms, we do not like that on account of our horses."

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