The Utes Must Go!:
American Expansion and the Removal of a People.
by Peter R. Decker
Published in 2004 by Fulcrum
ISBN 1-55591-465-9
IF ANYONE HAS FAILED to learn the wonderful story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which set out 200 years ago this summer, it's not for absence of opportunities. Undaunted Courage, the book by Stephen Ambrose, is only the best known of a long list of feel-good books, films, and magazine stories celebrating this first U.S. articulation of a divine imperative to settle the North American continent, a concept later called Manifest Destiny.
But there's a dark, harsh interior to this perceived Christian mandate to conquer in the name of the Lord, and that story played out most spectacularly after the Civil War. As well as any other, perhaps better, this story can be illustrated by the history of the displacement of the Utes from Colorado.
Peter Decker could have called his book, "Unflinching Arrogance." But instead he used a phrase common in the wake of the U.S.-Ute confrontation, and titled it The Utes Must Go!
What that 1879 confrontation is called tells much about the bias of our version. It's the "Meeker Massacre" to most of us -- even now. But even though Indian agent Nathan Meeker was indeed shot and clubbed by Ute assassins, the more telling detail of his demise is that the Utes who killed him drove a stake through his mouth. To them, Meeker's series of lies during his brief tenure as the agent at the White River Reservation in northwest Colorado was capped by his summoning of the U.S. Calvary.
To put their story into contemporary terms, Meeker was a stubborn and arrogant (phrases even used by his contemporaries) religious fundamentalist, and the Utes' concerns were akin to homeland security. Thus, a more equitable reading of history might remember this as the "Battle of Milk Creek," or even the "Invasion of the White River Reservation."
The specific history of this 1879 confrontation has been told several times in books, most conspicuously in The Last War Trail, by Robert Emmitt, and by Marshal Sprague in Massacre: The Tragedy at White River. It's also told in a variety of more recent works.
Whether Decker's telling differs or improves upon those previous tellings, I cannot say. I haven't read those books. But I suspect any corrections are of a relatively minor nature. The value of Decker's book lies in its attempt to place the story of the Utes in Colorado within the broad and fundamentally racist context of Manifest Destiny.
THE CONCEPT OF Manifest Destiny was first formulated under President Thomas Jefferson and his successors, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, then embellished upon by Senator Thomas Hart Benton and others.
Guided by this philosophy, respected Massachusetts liberal Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican explained in 1869 that white Americans possessed a superior claim to the continent because God had gifted the earth to them for "its improvement and development." Hence, white settlers must say to Indians that "you are our ward, our child, the victim of our destiny, ours to displace, ours to protect," Bowles wrote.
From this sense of religious entitlement it was only one step further to what people today call "ethnic cleansing." Even as the U.S. emerged from a bloody, protracted civil war, which was ostensibly to give freedom to people of different skin colors, the dominant attitude was that Indians had no rights (not even the right to go on living).
If the U.S. hadn't already begun down-sizing its Army, argues Decker, the U.S. government's ultimate solution to the "Indian problem" might have been the same as Hitler's solution for Jews and Gypsies. This thinking was not radical, he says; it was near the center of political thought.
"The 'doom of extinction' so confidently prophesied by scores of Anglo-Saxons reflected a racism so pervasive, so harsh, and ultimately so violent that it was the rare individual who raised his or her voice in the West to defend the Indians," says Decker.
But is Decker overstepping the evidence? It would seem not. After one Ute raid of a mining camp that had intruded onto their territory, the Rocky Mountain News editorialized that the Utes are a "dissolute vaga bondish, brutal and ungrateful race and ought to be wiped from the face of the earth."
In The Utes Must Go!, Decker does not deny that the Utes were capable of transgressions of their own. But the overarching story he tells is one of "countless hateful, dishonest, and corrupt men and their insensitive and often brutal actions against an Indian tribe that wanted only to be left alone." In looking beyond the myths, historical investigation reveals "no heroes, only ones less evil than others," he says.
We continue to extol those hateful, dishonest, corrupt men. Nobody came out of this book looking very good -- not Otto Mears, nor General William Tecumseh Sherman, and most certainly not Governor Frederick Pitkin nor Senator Henry Teller, after whom our counties, streets, and schools were named.
What is the value of pinning down the truth of our past? Inasmuch as we seem to think that our episodes of "undaunted courage" are worth remembering, obviously the flip side must also be relevant. But there are other and more important reasons for sorting through this dirty laundry of our national experience, and Decker acknowledges that need. He argues that there was no inevitability to this particular clash of civilizations. People had choices.
And that may be true. But Decker's answer doesn't really answer his own question of why we should care now. This question makes me think about what Ed Quillen, the publisher of this magazine, said in an essay in The Denver Post. Ed wrote about dredging up the injustices of the past in the various global Hatfield vs. McCoy genocidal spats, and concluded that there should be a statue of limitations on such grudges, and he's right.
But my response to Decker's question is that, in ways we probably don't realize, we continue to embrace the assumptions of Manifest Destiny. It wasn't all that long ago that we finally acknowledged two truths in Montana with a new name, the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But those are my ill-shaped thoughts. I would have enjoyed an epilogue from Decker that details his thoughts on how this story from the past applies to the present and future.
MY SECOND WISH for this book -- and a great many other books, by the way -- is for footnotes instead of endnotes. One of the many virtues of The Utes Must Go! is that it is exhaustively researched. Decker read the easy stuff, the prior works on the Utes and the battle with Meeker, and then he went back to original sources, such as letters in the archives, and then he read extensively of books and other materials seemingly lateral to his story. All this is documented in his endnotes. But if something is important enough to document with a note, why not put it right there, on the same page, instead of forcing the reader to repeatedly fast-forward and rewind through the book?
Computers have made the task of formatting pages easier rather than more difficult, so why have book designers chosen to make readers labor? My beef here is not with Fulcrum Publishing, which handles its footnotes better than most, but with the academic style of recent decades.
My complaint, however, is also a left-handed way of saying that this book has few imperfections that I could discern. I would argue that the quality of the research, writing, and analysis all make it worthy of national attention. It is the sort of volume that, in a just world, would make it into the New York Times Book Review. But because it's a paperback published in Colorado, it probably won't be there.