Free-for-all in the Uinta Basin
In 1861, a Mormon scout reported that the Uinta Basin, east of the Wasatch, was "one vast contiguity of waste, and measurably valueless, except for nomadic purposes, hunting grounds for Indians and to hold the world together." Following the Walker War and the failure of the Indian Farms by the end of the 1850s, Mormon and US leaders began to look toward displacing Utes to a permanent reservation. Brigham Young successfully petitioned President Lincoln to establish a reservation in the Uinta Basin--picked out for Indians because Mormon settlers considered it worthless.
In 1905, more than a thousand eager, would-be homesteaders gathered in Provo to draw lots for their chance to claim a piece of that "vast contiguity of waste." The allotment of the Uintah Ouray Reservation would result in less than a tenth of its original four million acres remaining in Indigenous hands, with large chunks withdrawn for a national forest and a reservoir. How did the Uinta Basin go from valueless to highly coveted in 40 years?
Part of the reason is the original Mormon assessment, which was unduly critical. The Uinta Basin is not a "waste," but it was rather forbidding for the purposes of the settlers. The high elevation meant long, cold winters, and while it was shared hunting territory among Ute and Shoshone bands, only one band of Utes, the Uinta-Ats, made their home there year-round. At the time, even the comparably frigid Cache Valley seemed a better site for colonization. By the turn of the century, unsettled lands were increasingly scarce, the Western beef industry was expanding, and settlers and government agencies began carving up what they had previously discarded: Indian reservations. And, crucially, the Uinta Basin had water.
Mormon settlers' expansion into Utah Valley in 1849 led to the Timpanogos War and a new settlement in what is now Provo. Mormons subsequently settled the Sanpete Valley, Cache Valley to the north, and the eastern "back" of the Wasatch mountains. The LDS church accelerated efforts to settle church members from as far as Europe into Utah Territory, establishing the Perpetual Emigration Fund and handcart companies to facilitate the crossing of the plains for members who were too poor for horse-drawn wagons. Brigham Young also began coordinating "missions" in Paiute territory to the southwest that, with limited success, attempted to develop sources of raw materials like iron and coal and even to grow cotton in southern Utah along the Virgin River. By 1860, the population of Utah Territory was more than 40,000, nearly four times more than in 1850. As Brigham Young told Ute leaders in 1865, "As for the land, it is the Lord's and we shall occupy it, and spread abroad until we occupy the whole of it."
As Mormons settled new territory, especially for grazing livestock, discontent and desparation grew among many Utes. Brigham Young convinced reluctant Ute leaders to sign a treaty in 1865, which required voluntary relocation to the reservation in the Uinta Basin. Those Utes who traveled to the reservation found the agency in shambles, with little of the promised food and supplies; the US had been embroiled in the Civil War, and Congress's contempt for Mormon territorial leadership meant that it never ratified the treaty. It was the latest in a series of betrayals that Utes had endured from both Mormons and US agents, who had both been helping themselves to Indian aid funds. That same year, Utes resorted to warfare in an attempt to halt Mormon colonization, and the series of skirmishes and atrocities known as the Black Hawk War began. Historian Sondra Jones attributes the beginning of hostilities to starvation, as there was precious little hunting ground left, and hungry Utes resorted to cattle raids. Even Brigham Young, who tried during this period to restrain the most bloodthirsty settlers, blamed the outbreak of the war on "greed for land and stock." But violence continued for seven years, fed by Utes' long-simmering resentments. In 1872, around two thousand Utes from multiple bands gathered in the Sanpete Valley for the Ghost Dance, a religious movement that began among Great Basin Paiutes in Nevada. A somewhat similar gathering, also for the Ghost Dance, occurred at Wounded Knee in 1890, though fortunately the Sanpete event ended without a massacre. Still, it marked the end of militant Ute resistance. The Black Hawk War concluded, and Western Utes from the Wasatch Front joined Uintah Utes on the reservation.
By this time, settlers hungry for land were not just radiating out from Salt Lake City. Miners and ranchers were claiming and using Indian land in Colorado, and cattle operations were pushing up into Utah from the south. Competition for land would only accelerate in the coming decades, as livestock operations grew and Utah Territory began to integrate into the national market. There were more than 350,000 head of cattle in Utah by 1895, outnumbering the human population by almost 100,000. Sheep populations grew rapidly in the 1890s, with 3.8 million sheep in the territory by 1900. Mormon farmers, originally geared toward keeping the territory fed, had begun planting cash crops and growing hay for livestock.
Over the eastern border, Colorado's government was eager to dispossess the White River and Uncompaghre Utes. In 1879, the hot-headed Indian agent, Nathan Meeker, aggressively pushed farming onto the White River Utes. He wrote, "If you [Utes] don’t use it and won’t work, white men away off will come in and by and by you will have nothing.” He hated their horses, and when he plowed a piece of land that a respected leader used for horse-racing, the Utes attacked him. Meeker called for reinforcements, and in the ensuing battle Ute warriors killed Meeker and the troops. Coloradoans had been looking for a reason to expel the Utes for years, and the incident provided the pretext. Colorado's first governor, Frederick Pitkin, ran on the slogan, "Get the Utes out of Colorado." Journalist William Vickers wrote in 1879 before the Meeker incident, "The Utes are actual, practical Communists and the government should be ashamed to foster and encourage them in their idleness and wanton waste of property." The White River and Uncompaghre Utes from Colorado were forcibly removed to the Uintah Reservation in Utah where the different bands faced starvation as they competed with each other for insufficient resources.
That same year a group of farmers in the Heber Valley, on the Wasatch Back, began looking to the Uinta Basin for a new source of water. The town of Daniel lay at the mouth of Daniels Canyon. Just over the ridge to the east were the headwaters of the Strawberry River, which flowed down into the Uinta Basin in the Colorado River Basin. Within a few years, a group of fifty farmers had formed a mutual irrigation company, pooled resources, and dug miles of canals with which to divert water from the far side of the ridge, including from Hobble Creek to the south. The Strawberry Canal, completed in 1882, was the first transmontane, or interbasin, water transfer in Utah--transfering water from one major watershed to another. The fact that they had no rights to the water did not stop them.
In 1892, the Strawberry Canal and Willow Creek Companies, representing farmers in the Heber Valley, hired an attorney to try to acquire rights to the water that they had been diverting for years. They initially attempted to pass a special act in Congress, which failed. By that time, US Indian policy had embraced allotment, with the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. In an effort to assimilate Native Americans, reservations were carved up into private allotments rather than being left as communally owned tribal land. As Congress began discussing the policy of alloting the Uintah Ouray Reservation, the irrigation companies based in Heber Valley decided to lobby for it, seeing allotment as the best chance to legitimize their canals.
By 1905, three interventions on the reservation, that would occur in tandem, were underway. (The Ouray or Uncompaghre Reservation, created in 1881, was combined with the Uintah Reservation in 1888). The reservation would be alloted, and at the same time the Strawberry Valley Project, through the newly created Reclamation Service, gained approval and began construction. These were for the benefit of settlers. Additionally, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA or Indian Office) would construct the Uintah Indian Irrigation Project, ostensibly for the Ute Indians on the reservation. In 1899, the BIA surveyed the reservation for an irrigation project. Indian agents had dug a three-mile canal in 1891, though it was poorly planned and of little use. Mormon missionaries had dug a more effective canal on the reservation in 1883, in addition to initial irrigation efforts in 1866. The Uintah Irrigation Project was supposed to provide infrastructure for Utes to begin farming, though it would end up mostly benefiting settlers.
First, the federal government had to sort out the illegal Daniels Canyon diversion. The 1899 irrigation survey relayed information about the diversion to the US Geological Survey (USGS). One USGS official decided that, "Such diversion is probably without any authority, but at the present time is not injurious to any rights of the Indians," because "the supply of water on the reservation is enormously in excess of the uses by the Indians." While this commentary noted that eventually such a diversion might interfere with the future needs of the Utes, the director of the USGS determined that a proposal similar to the existing diversion was acceptable since "the amount of water to be used for this enterprise will not interfere materially with the irrigation of lands within the reservation." In 1905, an Army unit set out to destroy the diversion, but the Secretary of the Interior stopped them. His reasoning was that farmers had been using the water "for many years, and that the diversion of the water... [had] not been in any manner detrimental to the Indians."
The legal and rhetorical arguments used to dispossess the Northern Utes (the bands who were displaced to the Uintah Ouray Reservation) of reservation land and water drew upon the principle of beneficial use, often summarized as "use it or lose it." This was convenient, since farming required irrigation, and irrigation required investment; Indian irrigation efforts were half-hearted and quickly appropriated by settlers. Many settler farmers, even with the benefit of government resources, failed in the arid conditions at high elevation.
As the Reclamation Service began its plans for the Strawberry Valley Project, which would build a reservoir on the Strawberry to deliver water to Utah Valley through the Spanish Fork River, Congress tried to get consent from a majority of Northern Utes to allot the reservation. This effort was a failure, though a Supreme Court ruling in 1903, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, gave Congress plenary power over Native American nations. The allotment plan proceeded without needing consent from the Tribe, and Reclamation coordinated to make sure that land was set aside for the Strawberry Reservoir. In 1910, in addition to the "surplus" lands auctioned to settlers during allotment, the federal government extinguished Utes' title to the land irrigated by the Strawberry Valley Plan, and forced compensation to the Tribe at $1.25 per acre--the same price that the Homestead Act held out to settlers as a great value nearly half a century prior. This money, along with the sale of allotted land, went into a fund to pay for the construction of the Indian irrigation project.
As historians Craig Fuller, Gregory Kendrick, and Robert Righter write, "Mormon farmers benefited most from the irrigation system designed and built to promote agricultural self-sufficiency within the Uintah Indian Reservation. The Utes, on the other hand, became the unwilling financiers of an expensive irrigation system which few Indians wanted or ultimately used." Construction jobs building the irrigation works were supposed to provide an additional benefit to the Utes, though 98% of the construction money went to settlers. In fact, this source of cash, along with the "gratuitous use of surplus irrgiation waters," made the difference between success and failure for many homesteaders. This was just one way that Utes funded their own dispossession.
As construction costs mounted and eventually surpassed available Tribal funds, the Indian Office needed to pay back its debts. Money came directly out of the Tribal account, in contrast to settler farmers using Reclamation water, who had years to pay back construction costs, dependent on ability to pay. In 1921, the BIA faced an additional setback due to a poorly written contract for the sale of allotted lands. White landowners who had purchased land prior to 1920 could never be held responsible for construction costs, an error that cost the BIA almost $250,000.
While Reclamation and the Indian Office operated separately on the Uintah Ouray Reservation, in 1907 Reclamation actually assumed control of the three largest Indian irrigation projects for a time--all in Montana. The decision made a certain logistical sense, as some irrigation plans were overlapping, but Reclamation also needed money and additional land. As the new director of the Reclamation Service, Frederick Newell, said:
"In every part of the arid region of the United States certain land and water rights have already been acquired, which, if not relinquished, prohibit the construction of reclamation works. Excepting in the cases of Indian reservations which may be opened, and in which is a free field, practically every irrigable project has been examined or filed upon in part by some individual or corporation."
Indian irrigation projects, then, became a source of land and money for Reclamation--important to the fledgling service as opening new arid lands proved more difficult and costly than expected. By 1918, after opening an Indian irrigation project to settlers, Natives on Montana's Blackfeet Reservation cultivated only about one percent of irrigated land. While that project represents the extreme end of the spectrum, the reality was that settlers used the vast majority of irrigated Indian land. In 1914, Natives farmed only 100,000 acres of the 600,000 acres that the Indian Irrigation Service had watered. According to one observer, "[The Utes] know that every dollar received from the sale of the ceded lands has been expended to conserve the water of the former reservation, which will in all probability be appropriated by their white neighbors."
Irrigation made reservation lands more attractive to settlers, and the rapidity with which settlers were making claims on the water threatened to leave those on the reservation with some land but without water rights. Very few Utes had taken up farming, for rather good reasons. The Uinta Basin was not well-suited for cash crops due to a short growing season, and it was far from transportation routes. The establishment of profitable settler farms tended to happen over the course of two or three attempts, with many farmers failing and moving on after a few years. For Utes, developing a profitable farm meant an increased threat of losing it to an interested white buyer. One Indian Office official noted the supposed ignorance of Ute men in choosing marginal allotments, though certainly the reason had more to do with the fact that a good plot of land might only be lost more quickly.
The BIA's dilemma was that water law was "use it or lose it," and the Utes were not "using" it, leaving it susceptible to be claimed by some other interested party and used far from the reservation. The BIA managed to get an extension on Utah's normal five-year limit for proving up a water claim and began advertising leases on Indian lands with attractive offers in the hopes of putting Indian water to beneficial use on reservation land. The BIA was generally wary of leasing agreements, partly because leases often led to outright purchases, and partly because of a paternalistic desire to assimilate Native Americans through the hard work of farming. But at the same time, the hope was that leasing could expose Natives to white farming practices, a hope which gave too little credit to Natives and too much credit to settlers.
As the Uintah Irrigation Project began to make progress, settlers availed themselves of Indian water regardless of legality. Brazen theft and vandalism was common, including the destruction of headgates and ditches and the digging of illegal ditches across Ute land. There was little hope of redress. The Assistant Inspector of Irrigation reported that "the Whites of this country are 'against the government,'" and, "The inadequateness of employing Indian police to enforce laws among whites is apparent to any one familiar with the West."
By 1918, the Strawberry Valley Project was delivering water to the south of Utah Valley, and the project was completed in 1922, by which point farmers had forty years to repay Reclamation's construction costs. Around 69,000 acre-feet of water traveled through the system to benchlands lacking irrigation, providing a boost to Utah's sugar beet industry. The population of Utah Valley grew. The Strawberry Valley Project would go on to form the basis of the Central Utah Project's Bonneville Unit.
This episode demonstrates that federal reclamation efforts in Utah, from the beginning, relied on overcoming the region's hydrology with engineering. More importantly, technical engineering went hand in hand with political and legal maneuvering that left Indigenous people at the mercy of settlers and government agencies alike. The Strawberry Valley Project, at considerable expense to the federal government, constructed a tunnel through the mountains that was only possible through an accompanying breach of Indigenous sovereignty.
References:
Kendrick, Gregory D.; Peterson, Charles S.; National Park Service; and Bureau of Reclamation, "Beyond the Wasatch: The History of Irrigation in the Uinta Basin and Upper Provo River Area of Utah" (Washington DC: National Park Service and Bureau of Reclamation, 1991). Paper 551.
Sondra Jones, Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019).
Kathryn L. MacKay, “The Strawberry Valley Reclamation Project and the Opening of the Uintah Indian Reservation,” in John S. McCormick and John R. Sillito, ed., A World We Thought We Knew: Readings in Utah History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995).
"House Committee on Irrigation of Arid Lands, Relating to Projects for the Irrigation of Arid Lands Under the National Irrigation Act and the Work of the Division of Irrigation Investigations of the Agricultural Department in Connection With Irrigation of Arid Lands," 58th Cong., 2d sess., 1905, H. Hrg. 381, 17-18, cited in "The Strawberry Valley Project: A History" by Garn LeBaron Jr.
David Rich Lewis, Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
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