The Ute after 1500 AD

During the 1500's AD, the Utes had not yet seen any European invaders. They were still living in Utah and Colorado the way they had been living before. In the 1630's, a few Spanish explorers came to Ute territory and so people saw white men for the first time. The Utes were interested in these mens' horses and soon traded with Spanish towns to their south, in New Mexico, to get horses for themselves (or maybe they stole the horses).

Now that people had horses to ride, they made many changes in how they lived. The Ute people got together under one leader more often, instead of living in separate small bands of hunter-gatherers. They hunted buffalo on the plains. They traded with the Spanish to their south in ways which were good for both the Spanish and the Ute people - the Spanish got fresh buffalo meat, leather, baskets, and furs from the Ute, and the Ute got metal things like axes and knives, and bridles for their horses.

Ute people also fought more wars once they had horses, both with each other and with the Pueblo people living in New Mexico. They were generally the enemies of both the Spanish settlers and the Pueblo people who were under Spanish control. They also fought with Navajo and Apache people, sometimes on their own, and sometimes as allies of (on the side of) the United States government.

Ute people were upset when more and more white settlers began to move into their territory. They tried to fight off the settlers, but the United States Army came to help the settlers. The leader of these troops in 1854 was Kit Carson, who gave the Utes blankets full of smallpox viruses so that many Utes died of smallpox. Chief Ouray, who took over leadership of one group of Utes when his father died in 1860, tried to find a peaceful settlement with the white settlers, even going to Washington D.C. to meet with President Hayes there. But the fighting continued anyway.

By the 1890's, Ute people had lost a series of wars with the United States Army. They were forced to move onto reservations on bad land, in deserts or rocky areas. The state of Utah was named after the Ute people in 1896, but by then they didn't rule it anymore. They didn't have enough land to live by hunting and gathering anymore, and they couldn't travel around to trade anymore, so many Ute began to farm and raise cattle or sheep on the reservations.