Grace McClure

The Bassett Women


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problem of food became less pressing. Then in late September of 1879, just as they believed the worst was over, news reached the Park of the Meeker Massacre at the White River Agency station only seventy-five miles away.

      This uprising of the Utes resulted in the cancellation of the trust fund set up by treaty and the loss of hunting privileges in their traditional territory in western Colorado. The massacre was used as proof by both the white settlers and the government back in Washington that the Indians could not be trusted to keep the peace. Yet in truth the tragedy was the direct result of what could be described as acts of war by a white man, the Indian agent Nathan Meeker, who had almost life-and-death control over the reservation.

      Nathan Meeker was an author and journalist who, under the sponsorship of Horace Greeley (owner of the New York Tribune and coiner of the phrase, “Go west, young man, go west!”), had founded Union Colony on the plains of northeastern Colorado, now the prosperous city of Greeley. His colony was to be run on idealistic principles based to a certain extent on the ideas of the French socialist Fourier, who advocated communal endeavor and equal sharing of communal income. A visionary and a romantic, Meeker turned out to be a very poor businessman.

      At the end of five years, Union Colony was on the verge of collapse from drought and devastating grasshopper plagues, as well as from Meeker’s inexperience and mismanagement. Moreover, his excessive moralism was splitting the Colony apart. According to Marshall Sprague, author of Massacre, a definitive book on Meeker, he not only opposed tobacco, liquor, gambling, billiards, dancing and the theatre, but also believed that fishing was cruel to trout and picking wildflowers was childish. His self-righteousness was abrasive as he imperiously insisted upon imposing his extreme ideas.

      Meeker personally was ruined financially, and was being sued by Horace Greeley’s estate for repayment of loans. (Greeley had died not long after the Colony was founded.) To rescue himself, he applied for the job of Indian agent and was appointed in May 1878. Meeker believed that the only solution to the “Indian problem” was to “civilize” them. He was determined to turn the Utes into farmers as quickly as possible.

      The Ute Nation had been getting along quite well with the white men. The principal chieftain, Ouray, realizing the folly of resisting iron cannon, had generally kept the tribal hotheads under control. The Utes continued to wander freely in their old hunting grounds, supplementing the dwindling game supply with the rations distributed by the Agency. Their principal occupation was still hunting, and their hunting was profitable to them, for there was a great demand for their beautifully tanned buckskin, which, according to Dr. Meeker’s own statement, sold for $1000 a ton at the railhead. Yet in the report that Meeker sent to Washington (in August 1879, just prior to his murder), he showed no desire to build on the Utes’ traditional talents. Instead, he complains of their refusal to plow, to plant, to send their children to school, to forsake their customary hunting expeditions, even as he comments that farm equipment is inadequate and out-of-date, that the schoolroom is rude and ill-equipped, and that the seed furnished by the government had been full of cockleweeds. He suggested a solution to his strongest complaint, that the Utes went hunting:

      If government would take away all the horses in the vicinity, except such as could be useful, the Indians would not go abroad; and if cattle were given instead they would, or could, or should engage in a profitable industry, and one to which they take readily and naturally. To permit any class of human being to do as they please, and, at the same time to be supplied with food, inevitably leads to demoralization. After I get hold of these Indians I can tell a great deal better what can be made of them. I should like to have plenty of land in cultivation, with tools all ready; take away their horses; then give the word that if they would not work they should have no rations. As to how much they would work and produce in such a case, and as to how fast they would adopt a civilized life, is merely to speculate, but my impression is they would not starve.

      One of Meeker’s early acts had been to plow forty acres and plant it in potatoes although there had been “opposition from the Indians to the occupancy of this valley, since its use to them had been for winter grazing of their horses.” Moreover, contemporary accounts say that he ordered their race track plowed up—the track for the displays of horsemanship that were so important to their culture—because they ran races on the Sabbath. Then the well-meaning tyrant ordered that only heads of families could collect the rations on which they depended so heavily, meaning that if the men went hunting, their wives at home would go hungry.

      During the summer of 1879 there was increasing petty vandalism against the white settlers throughout the Ute territory. In August the older and wiser heads of the tribe went to Denver to discuss their grievances with the knowledgeable and sympathetic Governor Pitkin. The governor understood the gravity of their complaints and the possible consequences, but he was helpless in the face of the chains of command in the federal bureaucracy. By September the Utes were disillusioned by the lack of response to their peaceful complaints and wild with anger at the man who had so sanctimoniously trampled on their traditions.

      The final straw was the news that soldiers were being sent to the reservation to keep order. On hearing this, a radical group of Utes attacked and killed all nine white men stationed at the White River Agency. When outside help arrived, Meeker was found about two hundred yards from his house with a log chain around his neck, one side of his head smashed, and part of a barrel-stave driven through his body. His wife and daughter were nowhere to be found. They had been carried off by the Ute attackers.

      The horror of Meeker’s death and the resulting fear for their own skins left the whites throughout the area in a state of panic. While the soldiers were out chasing down the captors of the Meeker women, settlers from outlying areas were leaving their homes in droves. Those near the Rocky Mountains headed for Steamboat Springs, a new cattle town at the foot of the Rockies, or its older neighbor, the mining community up at Hahn’s Peak. South of Brown’s Park in Ashley Valley (later to become Vernal, Utah) the Mormons built a fort for their protection.

      Although Brown’s Park was in the center of Ute country, its own permanent community of Utes seemed little affected by the happenings at White River. Still, the Brown’s Park people felt themselves naked against the threat of an uprising among their heretofore peaceful neighbors. All ranchers of this period lived with the threat, however obscure, of being the victims of some maverick Indian; the present situation was much more dangerous since a whole powerful tribe might unite to drive the white men out of their territory. Most of Brown’s Park’s population fled, although Indian-wise Uncle Sam Bassett trusted the good will of his Ute friends and stayed where he was. A good number stopped at the ranch of Charley Crouse’s brother-in-law, Billy Tittsworth, who lived halfway between the Park and Green River City. They stayed the winter with Billy, living on his supplies and keeping a sharp lookout for the red men with their scalping knives.

      According to Josie, her mother was not afraid of the Indians but her father was. When Herb decided that he would take his family to the safety of Green River City, Elizabeth could not argue with the prudence of leaving. Abandoning their cattle and leaving most of their possessions in Sam’s keeping, they pushed hastily in a lightly loaded wagon down the valley and through the pass at Irish Canyon toward the security of town.

      Homesteading had not been Herb’s first choice, and it is very possible that he was happy to leave Brown’s Park and had no real intention of ever returning. But Elizabeth had grown to love the valley, with the red bluffs of its foothills giving way to the green expanses of meadows along the river, and the high mountain ranges that seemed to shelter the valley whichever way she looked. She could have almost enjoyed the hardships of their first months, which demanded so much creativity and which challenged her capacities. It may have been the first time in Elizabeth’s life she had been given a chance to live up to her full potential, and it is difficult to believe that she was not heartbroken at their defeat.

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