PIPE SPRING Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History

Utah and the Arizona Strip: Ethnographic and Historical Background

The Impact of Latter-day Saint Colonization on the Southern Paiute

Historian Leonard Arrington compared the early Latter-day Saints with this country's first colonists, the Puritans, whose religious dogma carried over into secular life. Arrington wrote,

[The Church's task] did not end with the conversion of individual souls. As the germ of the Kingdom of God, the church must gather God's people, settle them, organize them, and assist them in building an advanced social order. Ultimately, according to Mormon theology, the Church must usher in the literal and early Kingdom of God ('Zion') over which Christ would one day rule.... All individuals who participated in this divine and awesome task would be specially blessed and protected. One day, when the Kingdom was finally achieved, there would be no more wars or pestilence, no more poverty or contention. [60]

Brigham Young likened the process of teaching Indians the ways of white men and leading them toward Latter-day Saint conversion to the process of irrigation. Young stated, "[We must] cut channels" for water to run in "and gradually lead it where we want it to go.... Just so we must do with this people... by degrees we will control them." [61] With regard to contact between the white settlers and native peoples, Utah historian Charles S. Peterson observed:

Mormon relations with native Americans were at once an expression of faith and conquest. The Book of Mormon taught that Indians were a fallen people with whom God's spirit had ceased to contend but who were nevertheless united by blood and heritage to ancient Israel. In God's due time, the dark skin and 'loathsome' ways of the curse would be lifted and an inherited claim to the American continent be made valid. In the meantime the Saints watched closely for signs indicating that the curse was lifting and experimented with the means of redemption. [62]

Peterson refers to the strong cultural and religious overtones of Latter-day Saint colonization efforts: [63]

By the roads of the gathering the Mormons came to Utah. By colonization they distributed themselves and became a force in the West. By colonization they made a hostile land habitable and brought its discordant elements into a harmonious relationship with God's kingdom. Initiated in 1847, colonizing was repeated on successive frontiers during the next four decades. Responding in part to the Great Basin environment and in part to the teachings and experiences that made them a chosen people, Mormons developed their most distinctive institutions and practices in the process of colonizing. In other words, the climax of withdrawal from the larger society occurred not in arrival in Salt Lake City nor in the conflict that came to center there, but in the colonizing process - the call, the move, group control over land and water, and the farm village life. Developed to bring a raw environment into harmony with God's will on the one hand, and to protect the independence that its rawness permitted on the other, the practices of colonization proved impossible to perpetuate indefinitely, but until 1890 they distinguished Mormon culture and served as the vehicle of the church's geographic expansion. [64]

During the four decades of colonization that spanned from 1850 to 1890, Latter-day Saints established some 450 farm villages and towns. Even before the last watered lands in Utah were ferreted out during the 1870s and 1880s, the Saints extended their colonizing efforts to the neighboring states of Nevada, California, Idaho, Colorado, and Arizona. These settlements were a highly effective means of expanding the Church's area of the influence and economic power. By the 1890s, Latter-day Saint colonies were established as far as Canada and Mexico as a direct response to the U.S. government's crackdown on polygamists that began in 1885.

Several members of the Edwin D. Woolley, Jr., family recorded their recollections about Pipe Spring and the local Kaibab Paiute in the late 19th century. [65] Their observations included the following:

They are not a fighting tribe.... As a tribe they gave the white settlers little trouble. They seemed to have one need and that was food. They were always hungry. Their friendliness was the trusting friendliness of a child, and their pleasure and gratitude for kindness and a 'bees-kit' [biscuit] was of the same nature. We found them a most likeable people of many virtues, and fear never entered the relationships between the races when we were children. Indeed it seems that if they did not actually welcome the coming of the Mormons they were willing to settle for peaceful co-existence so long as the phrase meant Mormon food and clothing and a few of his utensils such as knives and guns.... Such an attitude on their part is understandable when the conditions of their life are appreciated. The lot of this handful of human beings was not a happy one even in good seasons but in bad seasons when nature forgot to send the rain life was cruelly hard. [66]

The narrative described the manner in which "wick-i-ups" were made by the Paiute, the use of various plants (particularly the squawbush), and various aspects of their material culture. "Clothing was scanty beyond belief," consisting of an apron made of strips of coyote and rabbit hide. Robes of rabbit skin were worn in winter. The pine nut "could be called the staff of life of these people... It became their first article of commerce when the white man invaded their land." [67] While the writer expressed admiration for the ability of the Paiute to survive in a harsh environment, it was obvious these Indians were viewed as extremely "lowly" in terms of cultural and social development. [68] This "backwardness" he attributed to the rigors of their way of life.

"They were always hungry." Some would argue that they had not always been hungry but that the deprivation witnessed by the Woolleys and their Latter-day Saint neighbors just prior to the turn of the century was caused by the indigenous people's loss of access to important resources. The impacts on native flora and fauna that accompanied Mormon settlement along Kanab Creek and other nearby locations, such as Short Creek, Pipe Spring, and Moccasin Spring, were disastrous, resulting in the loss to the Kaibab Paiute of their traditional means of subsistence. This in turn led to a rapid decline in population. [69] Stoffle and Evans cite starvation, rather than war or disease, as the primary cause of Indian deaths during the decade following the first arrival of Mormon settlers. From an estimated pre-contact population of 1,175, the Kaibab Paiute were reduced to 207 by 1873, representing an 82 percent decline in their numbers. [70] Although relations stabilized between Latter-day Saints and the Kaibab Paiute during the following three decades, the Indians found themselves in a desperate plight.

The immediate effects of colonization were apparent early on. Angus M. Woodbury, born in 1886 in St. George, Utah, of Latter-day Saint immigrant parents, wrote in A History of Southern Utah and its National Parks:

The coming of the Mormon pioneers gradually upset the Paiute government. The whites frequently settled on Indian campsites and occupied Indian farming lands. Their domestic livestock ate the grass that formerly supplied the Indians with seed, and crowded out deer and other game upon which they largely subsisted. This interference with their movements and the reduction in the food supply tended eventually to bring the Indians into partial dependence upon the whites.

Within a few years, farm crops and livestock brought the whites more food and clothing than the Indians had ever dreamed of. No wonder they became beggars in the towns and thieves of cattle and horses on the range. As long as the whites were in the minority, they used to feed the Indians.... As the whites increased and became strong enough to defy the Indians, the attitude changed from one of fear to that of domination.... In time, it became increasingly difficult for the Indians to maintain themselves. [71]

The Latter-day Saint's religion and charity proved to be woefully insufficient compensation for the Kaibab Paiute loss of traditional lands and other resources essential to their way of life.

In the 1860s, the federal government began establishing agencies (reservations) for Utah's native population. The Uintah Ute were attached to an Indian agency established in northeastern Utah in 1868. In an 1873 special commission report, John W. Powell and G. W. Ingalls recommended that the Kaibab Paiute also be placed under federal jurisdiction so that they might at least have food to eat and accessible farmland. No action was taken. In 1880 Jacob Hamblin wrote Powell, then director of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology,

The Kanab or Kaibab Indians are in very destitute circumstances; fertile places are now being occupied by the white population, thus cutting off all their means of subsistence except game, which you are aware is limited. They claim that you gave them some encouragement in regard to assisting them eak [sic] out an existence....

The foothills that yielded hundreds of acres of sunflowers which produced quantities of rich seed, the grass also that grew so luxuriantly when you were here, the seed of which was gathered with little labor, and many other plants that produced food for the natives is all eat out [sic] by stock.

As cold winter is now approaching and seeing them gathering around their campfires, and hearing them talk over their suffering, I felt that it is no more than humanity requires of me to communicate this to you.... I should esteem it a great favor if you could secure some surplus merchandise for the immediate relief of their utter destitution. [72]

President Ulysses S. Grant issued the order establishing a reservation in 1872 on the Upper Muddy River in Nevada. Few but the Moapa Paiute went there. Powell responded with the recommendation that the Kaibab Paiute, now consisting of about 40 families according to Hamblin, move to the Uintah or the Muddy Valley reservations, so that they might obtain federal assistance. It is hardly surprising that the Kaibab Paiute shunned resettlement at the Uintah Reservation, given the history of Ute slave raiding among them. In the late 1880s, a federal appropriation was obtained to remove the Shivwits Paiute from their land on the Arizona Strip to a reservation on the Santa Clara River, just west of St. George. No evidence indicates that any Kaibab Paiute were able or willing to relocate to these reservations, choosing to remain instead on their traditional lands. As native subsistence became increasingly precarious, many Kaibab Paiute moved into closer proximity to the Latter-day Saint settlements of Kanab, Fredonia, and Moccasin, while others sought out wilderness refuge away from Euroamerican settlements, such as Kanab Creek Canyon.

Stoffle and Evans point out that the situation the Kaibab Paiute found themselves in was, in a number of ways, atypical of the post-conquest experience of most other native peoples in the region:

Unlike most other Native Americans, the Kaibab Paiutes did not during these years (1) have a treaty agreement with the United States government, (2) have any territory officially recognized as a reservation, or (3) receive regular welfare subsidies from either the Mormon Church or the federal government. It was a time of hunger, disease, and rapid cultural change for the Kaibab Paiutes. Yet they were ignored by the peoples and institutions that had set these processes in motion. [73]

Not until the early 20th century would the federal government take action to alleviate the dire circumstances of the Kaibab Paiute.