The Meeker Massacre, as it is known in Colorado history, was the final straw for the U.S. Government in its territorial struggle with the Ute tribes, leading to expulsion from their Colorado homeland.
Famously, the “Meeker Incident” as it’s referred to by the Utes, culminated in a small band of rebels taking women and children captive, one of whom wrote about her experience after she was safely released, giving a rare glimpse into the perspective of the ultimately vanquished Ute band.
In the book, “We Shall Fall as the Leaves — A compilation of events that led to the banishment of the Uncompahgre and Northern Ute tribes from their ancestral Colorado homeland” by Howard E. Greager, Chapter 15 details Josephine Meeker’s story.
In a letter she sent to the Weekly Rocky Mountain News, published Nov. 5, 1879, is her account of the incident at the White River Indian Agency on Sept. 29, 1879, the day her father, Nathan Meeker, was killed, and what happened to her, her mother and Mrs. Price with her two children after they were taken captive.
Josephine wrote of her captor:
“Chief Douglass was considerably excited, and made a speech to me with many gestures and great emphasis. He recited his grievances and explained why the massacre began. He said Thornberg told the Indians that he was going to arrest the head chiefs, take them to Fort Steele and put them in the calaboose (jail) and perhaps hang them. He said my father [Nathan Meeker] had written all the letters to the Denver papers, and circulated wild reports about what the Indians would do … and he was responsible for all the hostility against the Indians among the whites in the west.”
It seems Josephine took what Chief Douglass said to heart as she wrote about the government response:
“At Denver, Governor Pitkin and his aide William Vickers fanned the attack into a full scale Ute uprising that threatened every community in Colorado. Pitkin telegraphed the Secretary of War that Colorado would furnish all the men required to permanently put an end to this Indian trouble. The Greeley Tribune also declared that the governor’s office was besieged by citizens offering their services to exterminate that savage horde.”
Far from being treated savagely, Josephine described her captors’ tenderness:
“One of the squaws put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Poor little girl, I feel so sorry, for you have not your father, and you are away off with the Utes, so far from home … When Mrs. Price came into camp, another squaw took her baby, Johnny, into her arms and said that she felt very sorry for the captives.”
Josephine appears to have been quickly adopted by the band, as she reported:
“No whites were admitted to the tents while the Utes sang their medicine songs over the sick, but I, being considered one of the family, was allowed to remain. When their child was sick they asked me to sing, which I did. The medicine man kneels close to the sufferer … while he sings in a series of high-keyed grunts, gradually reaching a lower and more solemn tone. The family joins [in the singing] then his voice dies away and only a gurgling sound is heard … The doctor presses his lips against the breast of the sufferer and repeats the gurgling sound. He sings a few minutes more, then all turn around and laugh and talk. Sometimes the ceremony is repeated all night. I assisted at two of these medicine festivals [which] were strange and weird and more interesting than anything I saw in all my captivity of 23 days.”
General Charles Adams was dispatched to recover the women and children and when he reached the encampment where the captives were being held, a council was convened. It was agreed the hostages would be released and transported to Chief Ouray’s house. Ouray was serving as an official negotiator during the period of conflict between the tribes and the U.S. government.
Josephine recounted her journey to the Los Pinos Indian Agency, south of where Montrose now lies:
“We rode on ponies, forty miles the first day, and reached Captain Kline’s wagon on a small tributary of the Grand [now the Colorado River]. Traveled next day to the Gunnison River and the next day … traveled 40 miles and reached the house of good Chief Ouray about sundown … Chief Ouray and his noble wife [Chipeta] did everything possible to make us comfortable … In closing this letter I want to thank Chief Ouray and his wife and General Adams. To them we owe our escape.”
Ouray allegedly said of the tribe’s future, “We shall fall as the leaves of a tree when winter comes.” That turned out to be true.
In 1881, the Utes were force-marched by the U.S. Army to desert reservations in Utah and southern Colorado. They suffered the attempted obliteration of their language and culture with the government practice of sending their children to boarding schools where they were forbidden to be Ute, or “Nuche” as they call themselves.
A hundred plus years had passed since the banishment of the Nuche from their ancestral hunting land in the Roaring Fork Valley, when in the mid-1990s Ute elders Clifford Duncan, Roland McCook and Kenny Frost began returning to share their knowledge, stories and vanishing culture with the people who replaced them.
Ute history came full circle in 2014, when Bull Pasture Park, a bald eagle sanctuary on Highway 133 south of Carbondale, was renamed Nuche Park to honor the first people of this land.