The Last of the Indian Wars

By Forbes Parkhill

Account of the threat of an Indian war in 1915, growing out of the alleged murder of a Mexican by a Ute Indian, Tse-ne-gat, also called Everett Hatch.

Headlines carrying news of the war in Europe took second place one day in 1915 when the Denver Rocky Mountain News carried this eight-column streamer: INDIAN BATTLE RAGES, 3 DEAD, TOWN IS IN PERIL. The battle was the "Ute War"—the last struggle of the American Indian to save his lands from range-hungry cattlemen. The murder of an obscure sheepherder and the indictment of a Ute Indian touched off the war, but its roots lay deep in history. In this fascinating book Forbes Parkhill tells how and why the Indian resisted the white man's civilization and the price he paid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839744631

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The Last of the Indian Wars

Forbes Parkhill

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 5

FOREWORD 6

The Last of the Indian Wars 7

Time Before Now 8

Man Never Cries 16

The Only Good Indian 22

Big Mouth Talk 27

White Father No Savvy 29

Bellies Heap Flat 33

Thunderdrums 39

Heart No Bad 43

Bullets Talk Now 51

Sing Death Song 55

Get Out, Utes! 63

Washington Heap Mad 65

Slim Woman Speaks 68

U.S.A. VS TSE-NE-GAT 74

Crooked Talk and Straight 79

War Drums Throb 85

BIBLIOGRAPHY 95

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 98

FOREWORD

DURING THE early settlement of the West the function of the military was to protect the whites against the Indians, but later, said General Hugh L. Scott, the mission of the soldiers was to protect the Indians against the whites.

The pattern followed by the whites in the so-called Ute War of 1915 already had been established at the time of the Sand Creek massacre, when men, women and children were slaughtered in a surprise dawn attack by the soldiers. Some have described it as a glorious victory by Col. John M. Chivington over bloodthirsty savages, while others believe it a brutal and senseless massacre of friendly Indians.

The Chivington affair remains a matter of controversy; not controversy between whites and Indians, since no Indian was called to present his viewpoint before three investigating committees, but controversy between two factions of the whites.

For weeks American newspapers carried accounts of the Ute War of 1915, all reflecting only the white man’s viewpoint. Months later the Indian Rights Association published a pamphlet giving the Indian version, but so far as this writer can learn, it was completely ignored by the press.

Years later, in his memoirs, General Scott branded the United States marshal’s posse of cattlemen and cowboys that had battled the Utes as gunmen, and did not hesitate to charge that one of the posse’s unarmed prisoners had been murdered. He felt his mission to be the prevention of the legal murder of the Indian leaders who had surrendered to him.

This book presents both sides of what has been described as the last Indian war, but the conclusions reached are those of the author.

Many Utes were known by from two to six or more names. The young Indian whose indictment on a charge of murder led to the war was called Tse-ne-gat, meaning Cry Baby; Pah-woo-tach, or No Paiute; and Everett Hatch. He called himself Tse-quit, or Man Who Never Cries. To avoid confusion the author has used the name Tse-ne-gat, even in quoted material where another of his names may have appeared. For the sake of clarity this policy has been followed in the use of certain other Ute names.

The Last of the Indian Wars could not have been written without the help, here gratefully acknowledged, of Omer C. Stewart, professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado; James F. Canan, superintendent of the Consolidated Ute Agency at Ignacio, Colorado; Harold H. Mundell and Emil H. Pubols of the Records Management Service, General Services Administration, Federal Center, Denver; Mrs. Alys Freeze and staff, Western History Collection, Denver Public Library; Mrs. Dolores C. Renze, Colorado State Archivist; and Mrs. Laura K. Ekstrom, Colorado State Historical Society Library.

F. P.

The Last of the Indian Wars

Time Before Now

ON A Sunday morning in February of 1915, Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells hurried from Washington to Fort Myer, Virginia, with an urgent appeal to Brig.-Gen. Hugh L. Scott, army chief of staff, to send troops to southeastern Utah, where the Paiutes were on the rampage.

Indians had been engaged in a bloody battle with a United States marshal’s posse of some thirty men. It was feared that what the newspapers described as an uprising might speedily develop into full-scale warfare between the whites and two major tribes, the Utes and Navajos. Secretary Lane pleaded with General Scott to take personal command of troops in the field.

The plea was carried to harried Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison and to Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren. Europe was torn by World War I and although as yet the United States had not become involved, Germany had just declared her submarine blockade of Britain and President Wilson had sent stiff notes to the belligerents. The British had just launched their assault on the Dardanelles. Mexico was in the throes of revolution and United States Marines had landed at Vera Cruz.

Considering the precarious condition of world affairs and the possibility that the United States might become involved in armed conflict, the Secretary of War questioned the advisability of sending his principal assistant, the chief of staff, into the western desert at a time when his presence in Washington might be urgently needed.

On the other hand, a major Indian war during the existing crisis in world affairs could prove disastrous. General Scott was ordered to put down the Indian uprising.

The immediate cause of the outbreak leading to the Washington conference conceivably could have been the fact that a Ute chief had fostered an inferiority complex in his son by naming the boy Cry Baby.

This papoose was born in 1888 somewhere in the vast cañon-gashed red desert between the Ute reservation in southwestern Colorado and 10,416-foot Navajo Mountain on the Arizona-Utah border, one hundred miles to the west. Soon after he was freed from his cradle-board and was learning to walk he fell into the tepee cooking fire, incurring painful burns on one hip.

Scoffing at the child’s screams of pain, his father, a sub-chief known to the whites as Old Polk, ridiculed him by calling him Tse-ne-gat, which means Cry Baby, and thus his name appears officially on the rolls of the Ute Mountain division of the Consolidated Ute reservation, along with his American name, Everett Hatch.

When he was twenty-eight years old, Tse-ne-gat was defend-ant in the most colorful and spectacular murder case ever tried in a United States district court. Said one of the battery of distinguished attorneys arrayed against the government, The world has never seen, and perhaps will never see again, a trial such as this. Upon the word of the jury will depend whether another, and perhaps the most serious, uprising of the Indians on the American continent shall take place.

From the witness stand the young Indian defendant indignantly repudiated his humiliating name as it appeared on the reservation rolls, stoutly maintaining that his name was Tse-quit, which in the Ute tongue means Man Who Never Cries.

It is well within the realm of possibility that, except for the abasing name of Cry Baby which led him to prove his man-hood by daring exploits, there might never have been the so-called Ute war of 1915, which for many weeks inspired boxcar headlines in the American press.

Ts-ne-gat was a member of the Weeminuche band of Ute Indians, one of the bands recognized by Uncle Sam in the Treaty of 1868 as making up the Ute tribe. Many family camps of this nomad band roamed through southwestern Colorado and the desert country slashed by the deep gorges of the San Juan River tributaries in southeastern Utah, without regard to reservation boundaries established by the government under this treaty and subsequent agreements.

Since they refused to recognize the authority of the Great White Father to settle them on reservations, these untamed, freedom-loving nomad family groups were called bronco Indians by most of their white neighbors.

Tse-ne-gat’s father, Polk Narraguinnep, probably was born in the neighborhood of Narraguinnep Creek, the largest cañon tributary of the Dolores River, and Narraguinnep Mountain in southwestern Colorado, near the Utah line. He was the leader, headman or chief of one of these family camps of bronco Indians.

In his early years he was known also as Billy Hatch, having taken the family name of General Edward Hatch, the white warrior who marched his soldiers into Ute country following the Meeker massacre and Thornburgh battle of 1879.

As he grew older and became the recognized headman of his camp, he was known generally as Old Polk. He was a born leader, an eloquent, spellbinding orator, a dashing horseman, very much of a dandy given to colorful beaded buckskin garments, a successful horse thief and an implacable enemy of the whites.

His sister became the first squaw of Posey, headman of another nomad family camp. Posey was born in House Rock Valley in northern Arizona. His father was one of twelve deserters from the Paiute tribe of south central Utah, ranging in the vicinity of Navajo Mountain, near what has been designated since as Rainbow Bridge National Monument. Posey was considerably older than Polk and was known to the whites as a mean Injun who hated all palefaces.

Following the alliance by marriage, the two groups roamed the Four Corners country together, their friendship further cemented in succeeding generations by additional intermarriages. (The Four Corners is the only point in the United States common to four state borders. These states are Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.)

In the beginning the Utes ranged the Rocky Mountains in western Colorado, northern New Mexico and eastern Utah. They were short, dark and muscular, frequently called black Indians by neighboring tribes. Possessing no formal tribal organization, they constituted merely a loose confederation of various bands with a common tongue and similar habits.

The Weeminuches, to which Old Polk’s family group belonged, were generally known to the whites—along with the Muache and Capote bands—as the Southern Utes. The Northern Utes, made up of the Grand River, Yampa and Uintah bands, ranged throughout north Central Colorado. Midway between Northern and Southern Utes lay the stamping grounds of the Tabeguache band.

The two main streams of the white man’s westward expansion, by way of the Santa Fe Trail to the south and the Oregon Trail to the north, bypassed the Ute country. Not until the discovery of gold in the Pikes Peak region in 1858 did the Mericats—Indian pronunciation of Americans—begin to covet the Ute lands. The Great White Father in Washington determined that these redskins should be placed on a reservation.

For the purpose of negotiating a treaty, Uncle Sam recognized Ouray, leader of the Tabeguaches, as chief of the combined bands. So it came about that, in the treaty of 1868, the whites and not the Utes set up the tribal organization, and it was the whites and not the Utes who named Ouray the tribal chief.

As then constituted, the reservation included nearly nineteen million acres, comprising all of Colorado west of the continental divide except for a narrow strip at the north. Under the terms of the treaty it was set aside for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupancy of the Utes.

Ouray became the most famous of the Ute chiefs. He was born in New Mexico, and spoke Spanish fluently and English understandably. He was short and stocky, and wore his hair in two long braids that hung on his chest. His second wife, Chipeta, whom he married in 1859, became almost as famous as her noted husband.

Sub-chief Ignacio had no use for Ouray, whom he considered a traitor who had sold out to the whites in return for a thousand-dollar pension. Ignacio