Marv Sundstrom: In early September of 1879, a federal Indian agent named Nathan Meeker gave an order. There was a field at the White River Agency that the Ute people used to graze and race horses. Meeker ordered it plowed. That is the whole of it. A man told another man to run a plow across a field. Three weeks later, Meeker was dead, a US Army major and thirteen of his soldiers were dead, an unknown number of Ute fighters were dead, and the state of Colorado had the argument it had been waiting for.

Marv Sundstrom: This is Back in the Boat. We tell the history of Steamboat Springs and the Yampa Valley — what happened here, who it happened to, and how much of what we repeat about this place is actually true. A word before we start, and we will keep saying it: this show is made with AI. We use it to research and to produce. We say so because you deserve to know, and because pretending otherwise would be the first dishonest thing in a show about getting the record straight. And the same disclosure we made last episode still stands, because this hour is about Ute people too. This is a pilot, and part of it is a placeholder. Everything you're about to hear was assembled from written sources — agency correspondence, army reports, acts of Congress, Colorado newspapers. That's a deep record and we'll show our work. It is also, without exception, the record kept by the side that won. The people who hold the other account are the **Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation** in northeastern Utah — the Northern Ute Tribe. Three bands: Uintah, Uncompahgre, Whiteriver. The last two are the exact people this episode is about, and they are where they are because of what this episode describes. We have not spoken with them yet. We're going to, and when we do this episode gets remade rather than amended. So: what follows is documented, and it is one-sided by construction, and we would rather tell you that at minute two than have you work it out on your own at minute twenty.

Marv Sundstrom: Last time, we spent an episode on the valley before any of this — the Nuche, the springs, the seasons, a place that had been lived in for a very long time before anyone wrote it down. This time, we cover the years those two worlds overlapped. Roughly the 1830s to 1881. Trappers, prospectors, one settler family, and a federal government working out what it wanted. And why it matters: because the town's own story starts right after this. The ranch families, the homesteads, the founding — all of it begins in a valley that had just been emptied. You cannot honestly tell the founding without telling this. So we are going to tell it plainly, in order, and we are not going to flinch.

Marv Sundstrom: Start with the overlap, because it was longer and stranger than the tidy version suggests. The first non-Native people through this valley were not settlers. They were passing through. Trappers working the rivers. In 1839 a German doctor named Frederick Wislizenus came through with a fur-trading caravan and wrote down what he saw at the spring by the river — that it was active, that it spouted, and that the sound of it put him in mind of a steamboat. That is the earliest written account we can point to of the thing this town is named after. Note what that is and what it is not. It is the earliest written account. The Nuche had known that spring for centuries. Wislizenus did not find anything. He wrote something down, and writing it down is what our records preserve. That distinction is going to come up again, so hold onto it. Then the prospectors. Gold at Hahns Peak in the 1860s pulled the first real outside interest into what is now Routt County. And here is the contrast that makes the period legible: while this valley stayed remote and stayed Ute, the rest of Colorado Territory was going off like a firework. The Pikes Peak rush in '58 and '59. Denver turning into a boomtown. Silver at Leadville and Aspen in the seventies and eighties. Statehood in 1876. Everywhere else, boom. Here, quiet. That quiet is not an accident and it is not emptiness. It is a place that was already occupied, already used, already seasonal — and not yet worth enough to anyone with an army.

Marv Sundstrom: Before we get to the family everyone knows, one more thing about the name, because it doesn't belong to them. The story that comes down to us is that a French Canadian trapper, working the route between Breckenridge and Hahns Peak, told James Crawford about the country near the Steamboat Spring — and told him the spring already had that name. That trappers had called it that, for the chug-chug-chugging. Said if he were settling anywhere, that's where he'd stake his claim. If that's right, then the name predates the founder by some unknown stretch of years, and the town is named by men whose names we do not have. We can only find that in one retelling, so treat it as the story goes rather than as established. But it points the same direction as Wislizenus in 1839: the naming happened in the contact era, among people passing through, and the town inherited it rather than invented it. When we can date it properly we'll say so.

Marv Sundstrom: In 1874 a man named James Harvey Crawford rode into this valley for the first time and staked a hundred-and-sixty-acre homestead claim centered on the Steamboat Spring. He had come by way of Hot Sulphur Springs, over in Middle Park — and he'd driven the first wagon across the Continental Divide on the new Rollins Pass road to get there. His daughter Lulie was thirteen. She wrote down the family's first sight of this valley: the river below them like a wide golden road dividing the dusk, ducks coming up out of the grass. And her father looking at it and saying one word. Ours. That's a first-person account, written by a child, in the moment. It is close to the only one we have from that side of the arrival, and it is worth hearing exactly as she put it rather than paraphrased into pioneer language. They moved here permanently in 1876. Three small children. Margaret Crawford brought a yellow Harrison rose with her from Missouri and planted it. Clusters of it still come up in yards and alleyways in this town. It is, as far as we can tell, the oldest living thing here that somebody deliberately put in the ground. For roughly the next five years, the Crawfords were the only permanent settler family in this valley. Only permanent settler family. Not the only people. Here is the detail that ought to be in every retelling of the founding and mostly is not. When the Crawfords settled in near Iron Spring, the neighborhood was something on the order of a hundred Ute teepees on the sagebrush mesa. James Crawford did not homestead a wilderness. He moved into the middle of an active Ute community, in their season, on their ground. And what we can say about how that went is complicated, which is the honest answer. We know Crawford built relationships. The record names a chief called Yamonite whose friendship and trust he gained. That is a named relationship, not a vague gesture at coexistence. We also know the record holds a different kind of story. A well-known Ute leader called Colorow came to the cabin when Margaret Crawford and the children were there alone and pressed her to trade money for a pony. Two Ute women rode into camp asking for biscuit.

Marv Sundstrom: Warmth and unease, in the same valley, in the same years. Anyone who tells you this period was one or the other is selling you something. We can say both happened. What we cannot say — and will not perform — is what any of it felt like from the other side of it. Nobody wrote that down for us. Somebody could still tell us. That is a different episode and it requires asking. One more thing about the Crawfords, because it says more about this valley than any amount of pioneer mythology. They left in the winters. The permanent settlers made long, frequent trips to Boulder in the hard months. So the real picture of the late 1870s here: in summer, one settler family and a large seasonal Ute presence. In winter, the valley largely to itself. Which — and we will come back to this in a later episode — is close to the exact shape this town would take a hundred years later. A place people come to for a season.

Marv Sundstrom: Now the part that ends it. And it does not start with Meeker. That is the single most important correction to make about this whole period, so we will make it before we tell the story that everybody remembers. By the time Nathan Meeker arrives, the Ute land base in Colorado has already been cut, and cut again, by agreement. There is an 1868 treaty. There is the Brunot Agreement in 1873, which takes the San Juans — mineral country, and mineral country is what this entire century is about in Colorado. Each one is negotiated. Each one is signed. And each one leaves less. So the pattern is established well before 1879: find something valuable on Ute land, and the boundary moves. What 1879 changes is not the direction of travel. It is the speed, and the excuse. Hold that, because at the end of this episode we are going to have to decide whether Meeker caused what happened next or merely supplied the reason — and the 1868 and 1873 agreements are the evidence that leans it.

Marv Sundstrom: Nathan Meeker was appointed agent at the White River Agency in 1878. The agency administered this valley. Meeker came out of the Greeley colony — a man with a conviction about agriculture and moral improvement, handed authority over people who had not asked for either. His program was straightforward and it was a program of erasure. Farm this land. Give up your horses. Become something else. The horses matter more than they sound. Horses were wealth, mobility, status, hunting, and the entire physical basis of how the Nuche lived across a seasonal range. Telling a people to give up horses is not agricultural advice. In early September 1879, Meeker ordered the horse pasture and racing ground plowed. A leader the records call Johnson confronted him and struck him. Meeker wrote to request troops — and the record is clear that **he exaggerated what had happened to him** when he did. On the 21st of September, Major Thomas T. Thornburgh left Fort Steele in Wyoming with 153 soldiers and 25 militiamen. On the 29th of September, two things happened at once. Thornburgh's column crossed onto the reservation at Milk Creek, about eighteen miles from the agency. Ute warriors ambushed them there. Within minutes, Thornburgh was dead and thirteen of his men with him. Twenty-eight more were wounded. The survivors dug in behind dead horses and held out under siege for days. On the second of October, thirty-five Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry rode into that siege to reinforce them. Colonel Wesley Merritt arrived on the fifth with three hundred and fifty troops. By then the Ute fighters had gone. And that same day, the 29th, at the agency itself: Meeker was killed, along with the men who worked for him. Some sources say eight men. Some say ten. **We could not resolve that, and we are not going to pick the number that sounds better.** Five women and children were taken, and were held for twenty-three days. They were released through negotiation, and the people who did that negotiating were Ute. Ouray. His wife Chipeta. His sister, recorded as Shawsheen, who the record says argued for the captives' safety.

Marv Sundstrom: That fact tends to fall out of the retelling, so we will leave it standing on its own for a second.

Marv Sundstrom: Here is where the episode stops being about an incident and starts being about a decision. Because what happened next was not a consequence. It was a campaign, and it was already underway. Frederick Pitkin was governor of Colorado. He had made a slogan of it — "The Utes must go" — and he held publicly that Indians found off the reservation could be shot by citizens. On the 31st of January 1880, the Leadville Weekly Democrat put it in print: the Indians will be driven from a state which they have desecrated with the blood of innocent whites. The Utes must go. That is a newspaper, four months after Milk Creek, saying the quiet part in seventy-two point type. Now — the honest version of the causation, marked as what it is. What we know: the slogan existed and Pitkin was identified with it. What we know: a decade and more of pressure preceded 1879 — the 1868 treaty, the Brunot Agreement in 1873, the San Juan land grab, agreements made and then narrowed. What we can reasonably conclude from those two things together is that the removal was already being argued for, and that Meeker gave it a justification it had been missing. What we have not nailed down is whether Pitkin was saying those exact words before September of 1879. That is a checkable fact and we have not checked it. It matters, because it is the difference between Meeker causing the removal and Meeker excusing it. We lean toward excusing. We are telling you that is a lean. In 1880 Congress reached an agreement. The Colorado legislature passed a resolution demanding expulsion. And it was carried out. The White River Utes — the bands whose agency administered this valley — were forced to the Uintah Reservation in Utah. The Uncompahgre Utes had been told they could remain in Colorado on reduced land. On the 28th of August 1881, they were removed anyway, under Colonel Ranald MacKenzie. Two clarifications, and we make them to keep this bulletproof rather than to soften it. Meeker was the spark and not the whole fire. And the Southern Utes did remain in southwest Colorado — so "the Utes were pushed out of Colorado" is true of the northern bands from this valley, and is not true of every Ute. Say the

Marv Sundstrom: accurate thing. The accurate thing is bad enough.

Marv Sundstrom: Responsibility here is not only federal, and this is the part a local show has an obligation to say. Washington supplied the machinery — the Bureau, the Army, the treaties, and the appointment of Meeker himself. But Denver supplied the will and the noise. A Colorado governor. Colorado newspapers. A resolution of the Colorado legislature. The people who wanted this land were not an abstraction in another state. They were the future neighbors of the people who built this town. And what came next here is a matter of record. The Steamboat Springs Chamber's own history of the town says that after the 1879 removal, ranch families started to flock to the recently vacated Yampa Valley. Recently vacated. Sit with that phrase for a second, because it is not ours. It is the town's, in the town's own telling of its own founding. Two words doing an enormous amount of work. Vacated the way a room is vacated. As though the valley had simply come free. The families who came were not villains. Most of them were people looking for land who arrived after a decision was made far above them. But the opening they walked into had a cause, and the cause has a date, and the town's growth story begins on the other side of it. That is not a lecture. That is the sequence.

Marv Sundstrom: And it did not finish in 1881, which is the part that gets left off. Six years later, in 1887, there was still trouble — Ute people crossing back into Colorado on hunting parties they had every treaty right to be on, and a Colorado that had decided they were gone and intended to keep it that way. It came to armed confrontation. It gets called the Colorow War, after the same leader who turned up at Margaret Crawford's cabin asking about a pony a decade earlier. Same man. Both stories. That is what a real person looks like in a historical record instead of a character. The removal was not a moment. It was a policy that had to be enforced repeatedly against people who kept trying to come home.

Marv Sundstrom: So where does that leave the story. By 1881 the valley that had been used seasonally for centuries was, for the first time, available in the way the word "available" was being used in Denver. What happens next is the part this town knows how to tell — ranch families, the homesteads, the cabin at Twelfth and Lincoln that was the post office and the school and the church and the newspaper all at once. The founding. We will tell that. It is a genuinely good story and it deserves telling well. But it starts in 1881, in a valley that had just been emptied by a decision, and you now know how that decision got made and who made it. Here is the thing that is still here. The springs. The same springs the Nuche came up for — sacred medicine springs, physical and spiritual healing, not a tourist amenity with a bathhouse over it. They were here before the Nuche, they were here through all of this, and they are still running now under a town named after the sound one of them used to make. And the Nuche are still here. Not "were." Are. In 2020 the City of Steamboat Springs issued a proclamation recognizing the Indigenous people of this valley by name — the Nuche, and the Yamparika band who used this valley. It was drafted by Dr. Enrique Maestas and reviewed by members of the Ute Tribe. The city manager called it a small first step and long overdue, and both halves of that are right. There is a version of this episode that ends with a moral. We are not going to do that. We are going to end with what is unfinished. We told you this hour from the written record, and the written record of these years was made almost entirely by the people who wanted the land. There is another account of everything you just heard, and it is not in our sources because nobody in our sources asked. We intend to ask. That is a long road and it starts west of here, over the divide, in the next valley system — which is exactly where these bands were sent.

Marv Sundstrom: One more thing before we go, and it is the reason this show exists. We are looking for the stories that capture the history of this valley — the ones that are in people's heads and not in any archive. If you have one, or if you heard something in this episode that you know more about than we do, we want to hear from you. Especially if we got it wrong. A correction is the most useful thing you can send us. Come find us at backintheboat.com/stories. We read every one.