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Dominguez and Escalante Map


Utah Indian Reservations
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Crossing Dinosaur National Monument and Blue Mountain
Lecture: The Meeker Massacre (Dr. Moris)
 

September 9, 1776: We set out from the campsite of Santa Delfina down the same canyon, went half a league northwest, then swung north-northwest. Having traveled in the canyon nine leagues in all in this direction, over a very well beaten trail with only one bad stretch which can be avoided by crossing the arroyo a little sooner, and traversing a grove of tall chamise and jara [rockrose] of the kind they call latilla, we emerged from the canyon. Half way down this canyon toward the south there is a very high cliff on which we saw crudely painted three shields or chimales and the blade of a lance. Farther down on the north side we saw another painting which crudely represented two men fighting. For this reason we called this valley Cañon Pintado. It is the only way by which one can go from the summit mentioned to the nearest river, because the rest of the intervening country is very broken and stony. On the same side of this canyon near the exit a vein of metal can be seen, but we did not know the kind or quality, although one companion took one of the stones which roll down from the vein, and when he showed it to us Don Bernardo Miera said it was one of those which the miners call tepustete, and that it was an indication of gold ore. On this matter we assert nothing, nor will we assert anything, because we are not experienced in mines, and because a more detailed examination than the one we were able to make on this occasion is always necessary. Having crossed the canyon we traveled half a league to the northnorthwest, arrived at a river which we called Rio de San Clemente (White River), crossed it and camped on its north bank where there is a fairsized meadow of good pasturage. This river is medium-sized, along here runs to the west, and the region adjacent to it does not have advantages for settlement. - Today ten leagues.

September 10, 1776: Because, according to the interpreter, the guide declared the next watering place was far distant, and that even if we started early we could not reach it today, we decided to split the journey. And so, after noon we set out from Rio de San Clemente (White River) toward the northwest, over hills without stones and small plains without pasturage or trees and of very loose earth, and having traveled a league we swung west-northwest for two leagues, over terrain almost level but with many dry arroyos and ravines. Because night was now coming on, and in the darkness the terrain was impassable and dangerous, we camped in the bed of an arroyo which we called El Barranco. In it there was neither water nor pasturage and so it was necessary to watch the animals and keep them corraled all night. From the river to this place we traveled in a straight line and without a trail, because although there are several, they are trails of the buffalo which come down to winter in this region. - Today three leagues.

September 11, 1776: As soon as it was daylight we set out from El Barranco toward the west-northwest, and having traveled a league and a half through arroyos and ravines, some of them deeper than those of yesterday, we found in one of them a small spring of water from which the animals were unable to drink. We continued west-northwest for a league, climbing to a ridge by a good and not very high ascent, and from it traveled three leagues over good country with fair pasturage. In the distance we saw a cottonwood grove and asked Silvestre if the watering place to which he was leading us was there. He said "No," that this was an arroyo, not a river, but that it might have water now. Thereupon we went toward it and found plenty of running water for ourselves and for the animals, which were now very much fatigued from thirst and hunger, and a pack mule was so worn out that it was necessary to remove the pack which it carried. To reach the arroyo we swung half a league to the north. - Today six leagues."
Source: Dominguez and Escalante Journal
 

Dominguez and Escalante Journal
September 9, 1776: "Half way down this canyon toward the south there is a very high cliff on which we saw crudely painted three shields or chimales and the blade of a lance. Farther down on the north side we saw another painting which crudely represented two men fighting. For this reason we called this valley Cañon Pintado."
Source: Dominguez and Escalante Journal
 

Christopher "Kit" Carson: "Enshrined in popular mythology even in his own lifetime, Kit Carson was a trapper, scout, Indian agent, soldier and authentic legend of the West.

Born on Christmas eve in 1809, Carson spent most of his early childhood in Boone's Lick, Missouri. His father died when he was only nine years old, and the need to work prevented Kit from ever receiving an education. He was apprenticed to a saddle-maker when he turned fourteen, but left home for the Santa Fe, New Mexico area in 1826.

From about 1828 to 1831, Carson used Taos, New Mexico, as a base camp for repeated fur-trapping expeditions that often took him as far West as California. Later in the 1830's his trapping took him up the Rocky Mountains and throughout the West. For a time in the early 1840's, he was employed by William Bent as a hunter at Bent's Fort.

As was the case with many white trappers, Carson became somewhat integrated into the Indian world; he travelled and lived extensively among Indians, and his first two wives were Arapahoe and Cheyenne women. Carson was evidently unusual among trappers, however, for his self-restraint and temperate lifestyle. "Clean as a hound's tooth," according to one acquaintance, and a man whose "word was as sure as the sun comin' up," he was noted for an unassuming manner and implacable courage.

In 1842, while returning to Missouri to visit his family, Carson happened to meet John C. Fremont, who soon hired him as a guide. Over the next several years, Carson helped guide Fremont to Oregon and California, and through much of the Central Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin. His service with Fremont, celebrated in Fremont's widely-read reports of his expeditions, quickly made Kit Carson a national hero, presented in popular fiction as a rugged mountain man capable of superhuman feats.

Carson's notoriety grew as his name became associated with several key events in the United States' westward expansion. He was still serving as Fremont's guide when Fremont joined California's short-lived Bear-Flag rebellion just before the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846, and it was Carson who led the forces of U.S. General Stephen Kearney from New Mexico into California when a Californio band led by Andrés Pico mounted a challenge to American occupation of Los Angeles later that year.

At the end of the war, Carson returned to New Mexico and took up ranching. By 1853, he and his partner were able to drive a large flock of sheep to California, where gold rush prices paid them a handsome profit. This same year Carson was appointed federal Indian agent for Northern New Mexico, a post he held until the Civil War imposed new duties on him in 1861.

Carson played a prominent and memorable role in the Civil War in New Mexico. He helped organize the New Mexico volunteer infantry, which saw action at Valverde in 1862. Most of his military actions, however, were directed against the Navajo Indians, many of whom had refused to be confined upon a distant reservation set up by the government. Beginning in 1863 Carson waged a brutal economic war against the Navajo, marching through the heart of their territory to destroy their crops, orchards and livestock. When Utes, Pueblos, Hopis and Zunis, who for centuries had been prey to Navajo raiders, took advantage of their traditional enemy's weakness by following the Americans onto the warpath, the Navajo were unable to defend themselves. In 1864 most surrendered to Carson, who forced nearly 8,000 Navajo men, women and children to take what came to be called the "Long Walk" of 300 miles from Arizona to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where they remained in disease-ridden confinement until 1868.

After the Civil War, Carson moved to Colorado in the hope of expanding his ranching business. He died there in 1868, and the following year his remains were moved to a small cemetery near his old home in Taos.
Source: The West PBS Website

John W. Fremont: He is "one of the United States’ leading western explorers in the 1830s and 1840s, was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1813. He joined the U.S. Topographical Engineers in 1838 and earned a national reputation for his reports on the American West. In early 1846, Captain Frémont and a small mapping expedition arrived along the border of Mexican California.

Whether by accident or design, Frémont soon plunged into local political intrigue. After several dustups with locals, Frémont encountered a force of Anglo immigrants and disgruntled Californios who advocated a Texas style insurgency to force California into American hands. These agitators declared California as the Bear Flag Republic in June 1846 and Frémont declared himself the U.S. commander in California and led the insurgents and his regulars in a campaign to neutralize all Mexican resistance. The arrival of U.S. Commodore John D. Sloat and a naval expedition added momentum to the campaign, and, by the end of the summer, all of California had fallen to U.S. forces.

Frémont then declared himself military governor of the conquered province. When Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny arrived later in the year, the men feuded and Kearny had Frémont arrested and hauled before a court martial. The sensational trial made an even greater celebrity out of Frémont, but he resigned his commission in the army in protest.

After the U.S-Mexican War, Frémont served as U.S. senator from California and, in 1856, became the first Republican candidate for president of the United States. He served in the Union army during the Civil War, and afterward was territorial governor of Arizona. He died in New York City in 1890, one of the most celebrated personalities of the Nineteenth Century."
Source: PBS Website

John W. Gunnison: He was born in Goshen, New Hampshire in 1812; he graduated from West Point in 1837, second in his class of fifty cadets. After he had served one year in the Florida campaign against the Seminole Indians, his health led him to ask for a reassignment to the Corps of Topographical Engineers, where he spent the rest of his military career. But his new appointment did not take him out of the Florida swamps for another year; in 1839 he helped to build a road in Florida until his superiors were forced to send him to Saratoga Springs in order that he could recover his health. He then finished his southern tour of duty in supervising the construction of a canal in Georgia. While there, he married Martha A. Delony on 15 April 1841.

For the next eight years, 1841 to 1849, he was engaged in survey work in the Great Lakes region. He helped plot the boundary between Wisconsin and Michigan, the western coast of Lake Michigan, the coasts of Lake Erie, and the marshy areas of northern Ohio. He was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant on 9 May 1846 but did not serve in the Mexican War, continuing with his duties as an engineer in the Great Lakes area.

In the spring of 1849 he was assigned as second in command of the Howard Stansbury Expedition to explore and survey the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. During the trip across the plains in the spring and summer of that year, Gunnison was so ill that he was forced to ride in a closed carriage until, at Fort Bridger, he had recovered sufficiently to take charge of the party the rest of the way to the Mormon capital while Stansbury reconnoitered a new road to Salt Lake City. Lieutenant Gunnison spent the fall of 1849 in a survey of Utah Lake and the Jordan River, with the help of Mormon scientist Albert Carrington. During the winter spent in the city of the Saints, Gunnison made a study of the religion and culture of his hosts which later found publication as a book, The Mormons, a remarkably fair and balanced view for the time.

After the spring and summer of 1850 spent in the survey and mapping of the Great Salt Lake, the Stansbury party retraced its route back across the continent to St. Louis and, by the first part of January 1851, Captain Stansbury, Lieutenant Gunnison, and Albert Carrington were in Washington, D.C., where they spent the next five months preparing the maps and records for the publication of the Stansbury Report. Following this assignment, Gunnison was returned to the Great Lakes survey team where he spent the next two years, 1852 and 1853, in mapping the Green Bay area. He was promoted to captain on 3 March 1853.

Two months later, on 3 May, he received orders to take charge of one of the expeditions for the survey of a Pacific railroad route. He was to direct his party across the Rocky Mountains via the Herfano River, through Cochetopa Pass, and by way of the present Gunnison and Green rivers to the Sevier River. With Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith as assistant commander, the party left St. Louis on 9 June 1853 and, after an uneventful trip, by 18 October was at Manti, Utah Territory.

Then, in what was to become a tragic and controversial incident in western history, Captain Gunnison and eleven of his party encamped near the Sevier River were attacked by a band of Pahvant Indians on 26 October 1853. Only four of the men escaped, the bodies of Gunnison and the other six men being horribly mutilated by the Indians. Despite cries of outrage by some easterners that the Mormons had instigated the attack, Lieutenant Beckwith concluded, as a result of his investigation, that the Mormons were not involved and that the Pahvant Indians had acted in revenge for an earlier attack upon their people by a party of white emigrants. In extolling the career of Captain Gunnison, the Secretary of War especially emphasized his professional skill and sound judgment. Lieutenant Beckwith completed the survey that Captain Gunnison had begun.
Source: Utah History Encyclopedia
 

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Colorado Map

Chief Ouray: He was a man of peace at a time of war between Indians and whites. Chief Ouray of the Tabeguache band led the Southern Ute Tribe during the mid 1800's - a time of great social and political change, a time when a proud people were uprooted and forced to accept resettlement.

Yet, he is revered today as one of the Ute's greatest leaders - patient, diplomatic and unwavering in his friendship toward the whites.

Ouray, perhaps one of the greatest chiefs of the Uncompahgre band of Utes, was born in Taos, New Mexico, in 1833. His mother was a member of the Uncompahgre band and his father, Guera Murah, was half Jicarilla Apache. While a youngster near Taos pueblo, he learned to speak both Spanish and English, but preferred Spanish as it was dominant in that area. Only later did he learn Ute and Apache.

At the age of 18 he gave up his work as a sheepherder and came to Colorado to become a full-fledged member of the Tabeguache band of Utes in which his father, in spite of his Apache blood, had become a leader. From then until 1860 he lived like all Utes, hunting, fighting the Plains Indians, and visiting with other Ute bands.

Ouray lived until August 24, 1880, and was considered an eminently great leader. He directed his powers and energies to the task of solving the many problems arising from the coming of the white men. Illness overcame him on a visit to the Southern Utes and he died on the east bank of the Pine River near the present agency. He was secretly buried in the rocks two miles south of the town of Ignacio. Forty-five years later, most of his bones were recovered and re-interred in the cemetery southeast of the agency and the grave appropriately marked.

Ouray is noted mostly for his unwavering friendship for the whites with whom he always kept faith and whose interests he protected even on trying occasions. When he visited Washington. D.C. in 1880, President Hayes called him "the most intellectual man I've ever conversed with." He was about five feet seven inches tall, and as he grew older he became quite portly. His manner was refined and polished, his face stern and dignified in repose but lighting up pleasantly when he talked. He ordinarily wore the white man's broadcloth and boots, but he never cut off his long hair which he wore in two braids that hung on his chest in the Ute fashion.
Source: Southern Ute Indian Tribe Website

Chipeta: Born in 1843, Chipeta grew up near present day Conejos, Colorado. She was a member of the Uncompahgre (also known as the Tabeguache) tribe, one of seven Ute tribes. At sixteen she married Chief Ouray, the main treaty negotiator for the Uncompahgre Utes. Ouray was a skilled negotiator, and both he and Chipeta befriended white settlers.

In 1879, a group of White River Utes killed eleven men, including Indian agent Nathan Meeker, at the White River agency in northwestern Colorado. Several women and children were taken hostage and held for twenty-three days. Oral history suggests that Chipeta had a role in rescuing and housing the hostages.

While Chipeta and Ouray were not part of the Ute band involved in the Meeker Massacre, they traveled to Washington, DC, to help negotiate a treaty with the United States government. The Utes ratified the treaty but the U.S. government did not agree to allow the tribes to stay in Colorado. Instead, the tribes were moved to the Uintah Reservation in Utah. Ouray died there in 1880. Three years later, Chipeta remarried and later adopted four children. She died in 1924 on the reservation in Utah. Her body and Ouray's were re-buried in 1925, in Montrose, Colorado.

The experience of Chipeta's Ute tribe mirrors the experience of Native Americans in the West. By the 1850s the U.S. government's policy increasingly became one of displacement of Native Americans to specific locations or reservations, often far away from their ancestral lands.
Source: Women of the West Museum Website
 

Antoine Robidoux was born in 1794, one of five sons of Joseph Robidoux, Sr., French-Canadian owner of a St. Louis--based fur trading company. One or another of the Robidoux men are mentioned in many an explorer and immigrant journal of the 1840s and 50s.

For the Robidoux family was a prolific clan. In business with Joseph, Sr., were at least two brothers with their sons; one or more had several Indian wives. The men were not quite the cultured scions of St. Louis society that some writers have made them out to be. Most of them maintained rustic, nomadic lifestyles into old age. But they did become wealthy in the fur trade. Antoine the elder (as distinguished from a nephew Antoine) spoke English, French, and Spanish and as a young man worked for his father, helping to extend their trade farther and farther west.

By the early 1830s Antoine was developing his own trade route along the Spanish intermountain corridor between Santa Fe and the Uinta Basin. He even became a Mexican citizen to facilitate licensing and partnerships, and he built Fort Uncompahgre on the Gunnison River. Another of his posts was the Fort Uintah referred to in the Westwater inscription. Kit Carson mentioned encountering Antoine in the Uinta Basin in 1833.

The Westwater inscription reveals that, probably in 1837, instead of ascending the Tavaputs Plateau by way of western Colorado, Robidoux took an alternate route down the Colorado into the Grand Valley and north along Westwater Creek. Upon reaching the Green, speculates one historian, he commandeered Carson's abandoned adobe fort, used it for one season and got flooded out, and then moved 20 miles north to Whiterocks where he built Fort Uintah or Fort Robidoux as it is named on some early maps. He established an almost exclusive trade with the Utes.

By 1841 Antoine, approaching age 50, began wintering in the Midwest. His speech on California delivered in Weston, Missouri, inspired John Bidwell to mount the first covered wagon expedition to the Pacific. Perhaps Antoine helped his father--then age 70--found St. Joseph in 1844. Within five years it had a population of 1,800 and for a decade was the main jumping-off point for the Oregon Trail.

In 1844 Fort Uncompahgre was destroyed by Indians, and the trapping business declined. Antoine spent the next decade as an immigrant guide and army interpreter. In 1846 he was so badly wounded in a Mexican War battle that he applied for a government pension.
Source: Utah History To Go Website
 

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Fort Uncompahgree

Colorado Indian Reservations
Map

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Region Map

Colorado Map

Region Map

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Colorado Map

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