The Last War Trail: The Utes and the Settlement of Colorado (The Civilization of the American Indian Series)

339 pp. With drawings by Bettina Steinke. "In a narrative which progresses with the tenseness and excitement ordinarily associated with the novel, Robert Emmitt gives us in this book a classic account of Indian-white conflict, laid in the mountains of Colorado, three years after the disaster on the Little Bighorn. It is the story of the Meeker Massacre and the Ute War of 1979, told movingly and with a wealth of detail. The stage was set for trouble in the spring of 1878 with the arrival of the new agent, Nathan C. Meeker, at the White River Indian Agency on the Ute Reservation. At first there was little excitement among the Utes, who had seen agents come and go without bringing any great change to life on 'Smoking Earth River.' Meeker, however, had a plan for civilizing the Indians, and his efforts to carry it out provided the impetus for the fateful outbreak. From Saponise Cuch, the White River Ute chief, who was a young warrior at the time of the war, Mr. Emmitt heard the whole story of the Utes' antagonism to Meeker's plan to teach them to farm, their version of the battle at Milk River with Major Thornburgh's troops, and their attitude toward the removal. In addition, he talked with other Utes, some of them descendants of principals, in the Ute War, and with whites who had lived near the reservation; he consulted the Congressional documents containing the testimony taken at the hearings following the incident and examined critically other accounts of the war. Readers will find The Last War Trail a richly rewarding volume, reflecting the atmosphere and motivation of early Indian life in the Utes' magnificent homeland, the 'Shining Earth' Mountains, the Rockies, three-quarters of a century ago."