Naming the Indian group of the Sawatch Range

Article by Virginia McConnell Simmons

Geography - June 2005 - Colorado Central Magazine - No. 136 - Page 32
Copyright © 2005 by Virginia McConnell Simmons and Central Colorado Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
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THE SAWATCH RANGE on the west side of Chaffee County is a visual knock-out, and the names of some of its peaks offer a reminder of the area's past history. Among alien labels like Princeton and Harvard, a handful of mountains in the range bear names that honor the Ute Indians, who occupied this region for roughly six centuries before white folks moved in.

In fact, as only seems fair, the name of the Sawatch Range itself derives from a Ute word, saguguachipa, meaning "blue earth." In the Utes' cosmology the mountains and valleys where they lived in Colorado were part of the Blue Earth, or Middle Earth, in contrast to the Lower Earth of deep canyons and the Upper Earth of peak tops. Among their favorite places in Middle Earth was the Upper Arkansas region, where they frequently camped.

The first recorded use of the phrase "Sahwatch Range" came from the report of Capt. John Gunnison's expedition in the 1850s. It was written by Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith, who was actually referring to the mountains on the west side of the San Luis Valley. But the name was later applied instead to the northern chain with its glorious fourteeners.

In the Sawatch Range, a group of three magnificent mountains north of Poncha Springs, and another, slightly lower trio of mountains just south of Highway 50, all bear names commemorating Ute Indians. The lower peaks are named for Chief Ouray, Chipeta and Pahlone (and were featured in the December, 2004 Colorado Central).

The more southerly peaks, which have been popularly called the Indian Group, are Mount Shavano, Tabeguache Peak, and Mount Antero. They can most easily be separated visually and identified from around Centerville, near the entrance to Mesa Antero -- because south and north of there the views tend to conflate. Along with sightseers who sometimes have trouble keeping their eyes on the highway and off of this breath-taking trio, these mountains command the attention of waffle-shod peak-grabbers, folklore aficionados looking for the Angel of Shavano before she melts, mineral hunters, 4x4-ers, ghost-town haunters, painters, photographers, campers, and birdwatchers. And people with an interest in the history of Colorado's Indians should be included, too.

To put this trio in historical context, it is easiest to begin in the middle of the group with Tabeguache Peak. In its official description by the U.S. Geological Survey, the elevation is 14,155 feet, and its located on four quad maps--Saint Elmo, Mount Antero, Garfield, and Cooper Mountain. Because of a relatively easy route between Tabeguache and Shavano to the south, these two peaks are often climbed on the same outing.

THE NAME TABEGUACHE first appeared in print in 1925 in the Colorado Mountain Club's periodical Trail or Timberline, according to John L. Jerome Hart's book, Fourteen Thousand Feet: A History of the Naming and Early Ascents of the High Colorado Peaks (1931, 1977). Although Tabeguache has earned many spellings over the years, based on phonetics, the word itself seems to have been derived from a descriptive Ute term, Mogwatavungwantsingwu, which means roughly "cedar-bark, sunny slope people." The Ute Tribe had several bands in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, and the Tabeguache Band was the largest, consisting of 500 to 1,000 or more who came and went in extended family groups with leaders of their own lodges.

To name this peak "Tabeguache" was appropriate. Being nomadic hunters and gatherers like other Utes, Tabeguaches traversed a territory that historically included the Gunnison Valley, the Uncompahgre Valley, San Luis Valley, the Upper Arkansas, and South Park. The Upper Arkansas area was a crossroads where they hunted, gathered food, and warred occasionally when they and Plains tribes or militias met. The natural resources of this region made it an especially popular place to camp, with plenty of grass for their horses, plus timber, pinyon nuts, berries, seeds, and game, not to mention delightful hot springs, a relatively temperate climate, and extraordinary scenery.

When pioneers first arrived in this region, the Utes they met were generally Tabeguaches. The band sometimes wandered as far north as southern Wyoming or east to the Texas Panhandle to fight or hunt, but those places were not in their normal territory. Even after the Treaty of 1868 had consigned them to land west of the Continental Divide, the Tabegauche Band continued to travel through the Upper Arkansas Valley and South Park to Denver and elsewhere for another decade.

[Shavano, Tabeguache and Antero from the Centerville Cemetery]

WITH THE TREATY OF 1868, the Utes had a new agency called Los Piños, northwest of Cochetopa Pass and south of Gunnison. Because the location was unsatisfactory, for numerous reasons including its position outside the reservation boundary, the agency was moved to a site south of present-day Montrose in the Uncompahgre Valley. There, the Tabeguaches became more commonly known as Uncompahgre Utes. While living in that area, some farmed as they were instructed to do, but they still hunted and wandered at will.

Soon, the presence of white miners, who were looking to get rich in the San Juan Mountains within the reservation, exacerbated problems. In the aftermath of the Meeker Massacre in northwestern Colorado, all of the Uncompahgres, which included Tabeguaches with familiar names like Chipeta and McCook and Shavano, were moved to a reservation in Utah, even though they had not been involved in the Meeker event.

In Utah, the newcomers were not well received by the resident Uintah Band, who felt they were treated unfairly when Utes of the White River and Tabeguache Bands were sent there from Colorado. But in time, the Uncompahgres/Tabeguaches became leaders in the consolidated Uintah and Ouray Reservation.

Mount Shavano, south of Tabeguache Peak, is named for the respected Tabeguache war chief and medicine man, who in the 1860s was considered by some to be more powerful than Chief Ouray. Ouray's rise to chief of all of Colorado's Utes, contrary to tribal custom, came about as a result of his being so designated by United States Government officials, thanks to his friendliness to white people, his compliance with the policies and will of the government, and the manipulations of his friend Otto Mears.

In contrast to Ouray, Shavano tended to be independent and uncooperative, although he did put his "X" on the Bruneau Agreement of 1873, which allowed certain lands on the Ute reservation to be turned over for mining by whites. On this document, an official spelled his name Chavanaux, and similar orthographic variations sometimes appear in the spelling of Mount Chavanaux and other namesakes.

George C. Everett and Wendell F. Hutchinson's book Under the Angel of Shavano includes a short "Life of Shavano" by Una Hogue, who reported that Antoine Robidoux's trappers gave the chief's name its French spelling, "Chaveneaux." Otherwise, many details in Hogue's story do not tally with most accounts. She portrayed him as a gratuitously cruel individual. But in other reports, one can find a more objective picture of his activities, such as his being sent to quell Muache Ute Indians, who were harassing ranchers in the Huerfano area in 1867, and his participation in the rescue of the women who were taken captive at White River in 1879.

AFTER THE TABEGUACHE Utes moved to the Un com pahgre region, Shavano and his group lived in the Shavano Valley, which lies southwest of present-day Montrose, and, bowing to inevitable change, he even planted a garden, though his unyielding streak still existed.

After 1881, when Chief Shavano was herded off with his six children and his officially recorded wife Chito (Chipeta's foster sister) to a barren reservation in Utah, he continued to be bypassed by the government as one of its hand-picked leaders for the Uncompahgres. (In Utah, accounts of the administration of the Utes can get confusing because the Uncompahgres were assigned to the new Ouray Reservation, though they were later consolidated with the Uintah and White River Utes on the Uintah and Ouray Ute Indian Reservation. Now, all are usually called Northern Utes, to simplify things.)

While living near the first agency at Ouray in Utah, Shavano still functioned as a medicine man. But in 1886, Shavano was shot by the father of a boy who died after one of his cures failed. Such were the hazards faced by a medicine man, who was deemed to be a holy man or an evil one, or even a witch, on the basis of whether his treatments worked.

MOUNT SHAVANO, elevation 14,229, is on the Maysville quad map. Its name first appeared on Thayer's map of 1875, according to Hart, and a mining camp in the area also was named Shavano by 1879. Hart says for a time the peak bore the name of J. P. Usher, chief counsel for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad and Secretary of the Interior in the Lincoln administration. At any rate, Usher's name did not stick and Shavano's did.

The highest peak in the Indian Group is Mount Antero, (elevation 14,269, on USGS Mount Antero quad map, north of Tabeguache Peak). Unanswered questions remain about the name for this summit, as well as for Antero Junction and Antero Reservoir in South Park and for the similarly named Antora Peak (13,266 elevation, on the USGS Bonanza quad map) and Antora Creek and Antora Mine near Bonanza. Virginia Sutherland, a longtime rancher and historian in Saguache County, went to considerable trouble to help me find a provenance for these Antora names, but she came up with an empty sack, just as I had.

In his book, Hart conjectured that the peak in Saguache County might have been named before the one in Chaffee County and that members of the Wheeler expedition of 1873-1874 did the naming. This idea is at least possible, because Wheeler men were known to have crossed and named nearby Marshall Pass. But Hart, scratching his head figuratively, also suggested that maybe the word Antora had it roots in Spanish, an avenue of investigation that has led to another dead end.

I think it's safe to assume that Mount Antero was named for Chief Antero, though. And the Antoras may well have been named for him, too -- since his name had its fair share of spelling problems (and was even occasionally designated as "Anthro"). Adding to the mix, he was sometimes called Graceful Walker or Chief White Eye due to blindness in one eye. More significant, though, is the well-established fact that Antero belonged to the Uintah Indian Band, whose normal stomping grounds were far away in northeastern Utah. There is the possibility, of course, that he traveled into Central Colorado on occasion, for all Utes roamed widely. But the best explanation I can think of for his name to appear in Central Colorado, is that he was a peaceful Indian who received special attention from John Wesley Powell and thereby became a symbol for "good Indians."

Powell used Antero as a source for ethnological studies in Utah, which included photographs made by Jack Hillers in 1873 or 1874. Images of Chief Antero reveal a man who appeared confident, agreeable, and strong as he approached old age. One of the most intriguing of Hillers' views shows Antero's tepee near the Wasatch Mountains with a shade house that has a log leaning against it. The log has steps hacked into it to allow him to reach his topside sundeck, sleeping porch, lookout, or food-drying racks, as the case may be.

ALTHOUGH ANTERO'S OWN LODGES included less than 200 members, which was less than half of the Uintah Band, he had the important asset of being friendly and cooperative with Indian agents and other white men. Thus, he enjoyed a fair amount of influence in affairs on the Uintah Reservation. But not in the Upper Arkansas River Valley.

If it seems odd to have a chief from Utah honored in the Saguache Range, the anomaly is a minor one when compared to the next peaks to the north, the Collegiates. Much as I admire their beauty, their names smack of --well--arrogance. The dust of Indian ponies had scarcely settled before Ivy Leaguers were scampering up and down the mountains in heady enthusiasm, bestowing the names of their alma maters on them. We can be grateful that Utes at least received the token recognition they did in the Indian Group.

Virginia Simmons of Del Norte wrote about Pahlone and the mountain named after him, along with Mount Chipeta and Mount Ouray, in the December 2004 Colorado Central. She is the author of The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico and many other books of regional history.

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