Gaza has been much in the news lately. The Israeli government has decided to turn some territory over to the Palestinians. However, there are Israelis who have settled in Gaza, and some of them do not want to leave. Thus soldiers were dispatched to force their evacuation.
Something like that almost happened in Colorado once.
In 1868, Territorial Gov. Alexander C. Hunt and frontiersman Kit Carson, then superintendent of Indian Affairs for Colorado Territory, negotiated a treaty with the leaders of seven Ute bands. The result was the Consolidated Ute Reservation.
It covered much of the Western Slope. Its southern boundary was the New Mexico line, and the Utah border formed its western boundary. The eastern border was the 107th meridian, which runs about 5 miles west of Gunnison. The northern border was not the Wyoming line, but was 15 miles north of the 40th parallel (Baseline Road in Boulder). Phippsburg in Routt County is about as close as any modern post office to the northeast corner of that 20 million-acre reservation.
At the time, this was well west of Colorado’s mining excitement, with one exception. In 1860, a prospector named Charles Baker found placer gold where Silverton sits today, in a valley sometimes called Baker’s Park. But it was incredibly remote then, and the rich stuff was quickly scooped up anyway.
By 1870, technology had improved. Miners were able to recover gold and silver that was bound in the rocks – lode mining. That inspired more prospecting trips into the San Juan Mountains: Ute territory, where whites were forbidden.
So a confrontation was building, similar to the one that would play out in the Black Hills in 1874-76. Whites were moving into an area guaranteed by treaty to Indians, and the federal government was supposed to enforce the treaty. That meant sending American soldiers to shoot American citizens, and it’s not something that most American politicians want to order if there’s any way around it.
The easy political solution was to persuade the Utes to give up the land. As historian Virginia McConnell Simmons recounts, “At the four-day council at Los Pinos in 1872, Ouray flatly asserted that the Utes did not wish to sell any of their land and that it was the government’s responsibility to remove the intruders.”
So early in 1873, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano asked the War Department to send troops to southwestern Colorado to evict the miners, and Gen. John Pope began planning the campaign.
But the San Juan miners would not go gently. As Simmons writes, they had organized a Miners’ Cooperative and Protective Association, which provided “a united voice, and with it they promised to use gunfire to resist expulsion.”
Tensions were building in the spring of 1873, when President Ulysses S. Grant came to Denver and met with his new appointee, Territorial Gov. Samuel H. Elbert. After their meeting, Grant rescinded the orders to Gen. Pope. Instead, the U.S. pressured the Utes into agreeing to the Brunot Treaty, which opened the San Juans to mining.
Coloradans gave Elbert credit for persuading Grant. Miners in Twin Lakes were so pleased with the governor that in June of 1873, half a dozen of them gathered, took a shiny new tin dinner plate, and wrote on it: “ELBERT PEAK, Named and dedicated to our governor for the interest which he has manifested in our behalf in having the San Juan order rescinded.” They then climbed a nearby peak and put the tin plate in a summit cairn.
Thus was Colorado’s highest mountain named (although at the time, nearby Mount Massive was considered taller), and thus was a Gaza-type military operation avoided in Colorado.
And perhaps it’s just as well it happened that way, even though the Utes got shafted. Our history is violent enough without a San Juan war between the miners and the Army.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
