Living Along the Historic Old Spanish Trail

 

         

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Here is something interesting I found when doing research for my Utah's Heritage Sulphur Horse Proposal:

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Confined on reservations, no longer free to range over the mountains and deserts of their lands in their quest for food, the hard-pressed Utes never completely forgot how they were supposed to live, who they were and where they came from. The elders handed this knowledge down to them. They knew that once their lands had stretched as far east to what is now the city of Denver, as far west to the Great Salt Lake Desert, from northern Colorado and northern Utah, south to New Mexico. In these lands of mountains and deserts, the Utes were assured of ample food.

Situation is the same, only the names of the victims have been changed.

Confined on reservations, no longer free to range over the mountains and deserts of their lands in the quest for food, the Spanish Mustangs never completely forgot how they were supposed to live, who they were and where they came from. The elders handed this knowledge down to them. They knew that once their lands had stretched as far and wide, to what is now Wyoming, as far west to California and Nevada, from northern Colorado and northern Utah, south to Arizona and New Mexico. In these lands of mountains and deserts, the Mustangs were assured of ample food.

The Ute–Southern Paiute Connection

http://www.crowcanyon.org/EducationProducts/peoples_mesa_verde/post_pueblo_who_southern_utes.asp

 
The Ute and Southern Paiute Indians are descended from the same group of Numic-speaking, hunter, gatherers that began migrating east from southern California around A.D. 1000. Their once-shared language eventually diverged into the modern Ute and Southern Paiute languages. The fact that the two languages are mutually intelligible suggests that the split might have occurred, hundreds of years ago, rather than thousands of years.

Historically, the two groups shared similar, but not identical, hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The Southern Paiutes were more adapted to the desert environment of Nevada, Southern Utah and northern Arizona, while their Ute cousins' seasonal rounds took them from the canyons of eastern Utah to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and beyond—all the way to the Great Plains, where they adopted selected traits from the Plains Indians.  Only the easternmost reach of traditional Southern Paiute territory extended east of the Colorado River, into the Mesa Verde region.   Today, a relatively small number of Southern Paiutes live in the region, many at White Mesa, Utah, which is part of the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation.

     
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