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UINTAH COUNTY -- The government is still at war with the Ute Tribe over land.
City, county, state, and federal government agencies no longer fight with weapons of war, yet the battle rages on through more civilized means with each side striking blows to other through newspaper articles, acts of governmental agencies, and very heated court cases.
So when a 1998 agreement between the Ute Tribe and Duchesne and Uintah Counties expired the Tribal Business committee drafted a new one and added Roosevelt City to the agreement.
According to the Uintah Basin Standard, when the Ute Tribe issued a statement in July 2011 airing its disappointment with Roosevelt City for not signing the new agreement on law enforcement and jurisdictional issues the old battle was resurrected once again.
The big questions are where the boundary lines to the Uintah- Ouray Indian Reservation really are and who really owns the land in the Uintah Basin?
Once upon a time the boundary lines were clear, however, the 1800s and 1900s gave birth to massive confusion that has literally grown year after year.
After the Mexican Revolution in 1821 the Comanche and Utes in Utah and northwestern Colorado participated heavily in a highly illegal trading operation with traders from the Spanish and Mexican territories. As high society’s demands for furs and pelts for the latest fashion trends grew, the trapping and trading operations exploded. Corn, horses, firearms, liquor, roses, and other manufactured items were traded with the natives for furs, pelts, and Piute slaves.
All though there were many benefits to the indians because of the trading, the cost outweighed them significantly. Infectious diseases such as small pox and measles wiped out entire tribal communities. Alcoholism was encouraged. By the early 1840s the Rocky Mountain Bison was annihilated and the beaver was on the verge of extinction.
As the big and small game communities were shrinking in number there was somewhat of an economic shift in that trapping became more difficult and many former trappers built forts and trading posts. Antoine Robidoux built several forts in Utah.
Fort Uinta was built near the Ute village at Whiterocks and was on one of the principle trade routes between the Uintah Basin and the Utah Valley. About 1838 Antoine built Fort Uncomprahgre on the Gunnison River in western Colorado. The mountain men and Utes lived quite peacefully until a group of French trappers murdered some tribal members (Thomas G. Alexander, "Utah's Early Forts." n.d. July 2011).
In 1844, a justifiably upset group of Utes met with the Mexican governor in Santa Fe, N.M., to seek compensation for its tribal member’s deaths. In the natives' world the price for this action was a life for a life. The offer made by the governor was not acceptable to the Utes. In an act of retribution the Utes attacked Fort Uncompahgre killing several of Robidoux’s employees and destroying the fort (Alexander, "Utah's Early Forts." n.d. July 2011). p>
By the time the Mormons arrived in the Utah Territory in 1847 there were 10 different Ute Tribes already living there. In 1861 the federal government asked President Brigham Young of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to send a survey team to the Uintah Basin to see if it could support a settlement (Non-Commercial, Uintah Basin Teaching American History Education Material. Utah History and American Indian Experience, 2006).
According to the report sent to President Abraham Lincoln it "was entirely unsuitable for farming purposes"...and it was "one vast contiguity of waste and measurable valueless excepting for nomadic purposes...hunting grounds for indians." So on Oct. 3, 1861, Lincoln issued an executive order setting aside the Uintah Valley as an indian reservation.
This reservation later became known as the Uintah-Ouray Reservation, the permanent home to the Uintah and White River Utes. Congress stripped all indian titles to agricultural and mineral lands in Utah except for those on the Uintah reservation.
The federal government had another survey done and found that the reservation contained two million acres of land. Illegal mines on reservation land where kept outside the boundaries of the reservation because miners had put pressure on the survey team to move the boundary lines by at least a mile. By this time the indians were in pretty bad shape over most of Utah, which spurred the beginning of the Black Hawk Wars of Utah.
Although the official date of these wars was April 9, 1865, the pioneers and the Utes had been having run-ins with each other that were escalating. One of those instances occurred in the Manti area in Sanpete County. What started as a disagreement between some Mormon frontiersmen about some dead cattle that starving indians had used for food ended up leading to a group of Utes being insulted. The insulted Utes were then lead on a series of raids by Black Hawk.
The Black Hawk Wars united several factions of Utes and included some Navajos as well. Black Hawk's success and power were increasing and over the course of the year he ended up killing roughly 25 more whites and stealing over 2,000 head of cattle.
Because of the conflicts between the Mormons and the federal government over polygamy, their pleas to have the Utes moved to the Uintah Valley Reservation went virtually unheard. It wasn't until June 8, 1865, that a treaty between the U.S. and the Ute Tribes was reached. By the year 1867 most of the Utah Utes were removed to the reservation (Non-Commercial, Uintah Basin Teaching American History Education Material. Utah History and American Indian Experience. 2006).
In 1898, Uintah and Whiteriver Utes sell some of their land to the Uncompahgre Utes. The Uncompahgre Utes had been moved from Colorado to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation. With allotments being made on the reservation Mormon settlers began to move into the area. By 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt created the Uinta National Forest by taking 1,100,000 acres from the Utes. Congress also opened the reservation for homesteading. These actions reduced the reservation to a quarter of its original size (Robert E. Covington, "A Brief History of Early Mineral Exploritation in the Uinta Basin." Intermouuntain Association of Petroleum Geologists, 1964).
The giving and taking back of land on this reservation has created such a checkerboard of land ownership and laws that it is very difficult to follow who actually owns the land.
Over the course of the years following 1905 there have been several court cases whose rulings have conflicted with one another.
In 1993 Hagen vs. Utah was one such case.
So the effects of the changes in the reservations have created not only land ownership issue but jurisdictional issues as well. Which courts have jurisdiction over criminal cases that are committed by tribal members on non-tribal land and who prosecutes the non- tribal person when he or she commits a crime on tribal land?
If the question of who owns the land could be answered and accepted by all parties all of the other issues would be a moot point.
Angel McRae is a full-time USU student and mother of five.
