Whose Valley

New-chew. That's the Ute people's name for themselves, and it means the People. The Parianuche, Yampa and Sabuagan bands often wintered in Middle Park, and there's evidence of a Ute winter camp at Hot Sulphur Springs. They sheltered in stick houses, covered with hide in winter and leafy branches in summer. The Ute tell what came next plainly. Treaties in the eighteen sixties stripped them of central Colorado, this valley included. The government coerced them and forcibly removed them, and the land they ceded became national parks and other public lands. That's the ground under this car. Yampa families still camped and hunted in this valley as late as eighteen seventy-five, more than a decade after they'd been pushed onto reservations. Governor Fred Pitkin ran a campaign called The Utes Must Go, and the slogan turned up even in a Denver grocery store advertisement. Agent Nathan Meeker refused the Utes rations and treated them horribly. Fighting broke out at the White River Agency in eighteen seventy-nine, and the bands nearest the park were pushed onto a reservation in Utah. People came back to hunt and gather anyway, even after the park was established, though leaving the reservation without an agent's permission was illegal. Law enforcement expelled the last hunting parties, by the Ute account in the early nineteen hundreds. The park names ten Tribal nations whose homeland this is, and every visitor center has exhibits built on the work of its Indigenous Connections team. Arapaho students, teachers and elders come from Wind River nearly every year, Sherman Sage's great-grandson among them. The Ute today are three nations, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and they bring their young people to this park, so the next generation keeps its ties to these homelands.