Great Basin Indians: An Encyclopedic History

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354 U Ute. If, according to Alan Reed, the “question of Ute origins remains unresolved” (1994, 189), the earliest historical mention of any Great Basin Indian group referencing these Southern Numic speakers called Nutc (see Uto-Aztecan) was in 1598, the year Juan de Onate traveled north from Mexico to their territory, which he claimed as the northern frontier of Spain’s empire in the New World. Coronado’s failed adventure trekking through Ute territory from 1539 to 1542 in search of the fabled “Seven Lost Cities of Cibola” (see El Gran Teguayo) notwithstanding, Juan de Onate would also encounter the Ute in 1604 during his subsequent search for mineral wealth and the mythic river believed to cross the Great Basin (see Buenaventura River). By 1605 Spanish sources reported the “Yutan” visiting Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico ; indeed, it was the people of Jemez Pueblo who first identified these Great Basin Indians for Spaniards as “Yutas.” Then, 21 years later, documentation came to light for Ute living on the San Juan River in Utah. Moreover, the first reference to “Indian slavery” in the Great Basin, which dates from 1640, mentions Ute captives sold in Santa Fe (see Slavery), a veritable human-flesh market that 150 years later inspired an opportunistic Ute to emulate New Mexican slave traders by capturing closely related Southern Paiute women and children and selling them as indentured servants to hacienda owners in New Mexico for horses and arms (see Wakara). The extraordinary cultural transformation of the Ute resulted from their acquisition of Spanish horses. Already by 1686, and partially because of the famous Pueblo revolt led by Pope, Ute runaway slaves from northern New Mexico began plying equestrian skills acquired as indentured servants or slaves as buffalo hunters on horseback. Shifting alliances then followed with other Native Americans over the next two centuries (with the Athabascan-speaking Jicarilla Apache and Navajo, for example, and an Eastern Shoshone band that had permanently moved from the Great Basin onto the southern plains following their own acquisition of horses and historically became the Comanche)—enmity-amity relations conducted within the international context of Spain’s New Mexican hegemony (Blackhawk 2006). The first recorded Spanish conflict with any Ute group occurred as early as 1639, when Governor Luis de Rosas launched a war against the “Utaca nation,” which, Shoshone historian Ned Blackhawk (ibid., 25) has written, resulted in eighty captured “Utikahs” being sentenced to forced labor in Santa Fe during Rosa’s quest to “tame” the northern frontier. It was “an appropriate and inauspicious beginning to SpanishIndian relations in the Great Basin,” as he characterized it (ibid.). Hostilities apparently continued because of the violation of a treaty between them in 1670, followed by the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when Ute slaves escaped northward with horses and became equestrian buffalo hunters. But with the succeeding reconquest of the Southwest under Vargas in 1692, colonial Spain was forced by political exigencies to u t e 355 forge an alliance with the Ute against the other Native American sovereignties in the general area. Although peace would reign from 1703 to 1752, open warfare again flared up between the Ute and Comanche, an on-again, off-again relationship between them that had much to do with trading privileges with colonial New Mexico. Indeed, Spanish colonial authorities at different times attempted to forge treaties with all the socalled wild tribes on their northern frontier out of self-interest throughout the eighteenth century, as the Ute (and Comanche and others), in turn, similarly sought to play off other Indians as well as European players against each other.1 Then, in 1749, after Ute warriors had caused the abandonment of the genizaro population at Abiquiu in northern New Mexico—because they felt cheated in trade for tanned deerskins and other pelts, but especially in horses and ammunition, which as a rule were exchanged for Indian slaves—they forged an alliance with a new imperial force in this part of North America, France. Opportunistic Ute Indian slavers, meanwhile, were quick to take advantage of these economic practices by emulating New Mexicans. Within two years of the famous Dominguez and Escalante expedition in 1776 that was sent north to confirm the mythical sea route from Santa Fe to Monterey, California (see Buenaventura River), Ute proficiency in raiding related Capote, Weeminuch, Tumpanawah, and Pahvant peoples (see Southern Paiute) was such as to prompt Spain’s prohibition against all trade with them—a bando that technically remained in effect until...