Land Disputes

Sorted here are documents and other material related to confrontations or disputes about land use between the Native peoples of this land and the settlers.

People labeled as “Weber Utes” lived in Salt Lake, Davis, Weber, Morgan, and Tooele county areas when the pioneers first arrived. Most of the incidents linked below are from Weber/Morgan areas.

In addition to the Weber Utes under Little Soldier, the people under Wanship and Goship lived in Salt Lake Valley up to at least Farmington, if not beyond. There may in fact be significant overlap between Little Soldier’s band and these people, if they indeed are not the same. They’re often grouped together as Weber Utes/Cumumbas, although whether this was a true association or one of Euro-American invention is currently uncertain (research is ongoing).

Since names of Native individuals were only occasionally noted in records, it is difficult to use them to track individual fates and interpersonal ties. Records typically distinguished groups by prominent individuals, like Wanship and Little Soldier, while ignoring the rest of the people. This does leave open the possibility that these groups were composed of the same people, with Little Soldier assuming prominence in Mormon observations after Wanship’s and Goship’s deaths in the years immediately following pioneer arrival. Little Soldier’s ties to Salt Lake Valley go back to his birth — he was born in Red Butte Canyon in approximately 1821. And one of his wives (Wango-bit-y) was born in Cottonwood Canyon, “near to where the rock [was] quarried for the Salt Lake Temple.”

Mormon documentation indicates that Wanship’s and Goship’s people were devastated by epidemics during the first years after pioneer arrival, and they are overlooked in Euro-American histories even more severely than Little Soldier’s band are. But they are not a footnote. These were real people, with lives and personal histories and human rights that extended well beyond brief Euro-American notations. And survivors of those epidemics lived on. From Ralph V. Chamberlin in 1908: “The few individuals that now survive from a once proud tribe [the ‘Goships’] have taken up their abode with neighboring tribes and bands.”

The epidemic deaths were tragically beneficial to the settlers, who coveted this land for themselves. To brush aside these very real lives for the sake of a glorified pioneer narrative is abhorrent.

According to some histories, Salt Lake and Davis counties were part of a neutral territory between the Shoshone in the north and west, and the Utes to the south. If this is true, it would possibly provide context for the presence of intermarried Ute and Shoshone families that many documents have alleged. Weber Utes were frequently described as being comprised of both Shoshones and Utes (accurately so or not — Euro-Americans may have misunderstood what they observed).

However, the perception of this land as being neutral is again all too convenient for the pioneers and descendants who sought legitimacy for their own claims to the area. A mixed Native land title has been eagerly interpreted as no title, thus making the land freely available for colonization. Even as recently as 1993, when the Uintah Utes of Utah filed suit against the United States to assert aboriginal title to lands, the United States tried to argue that NO Indigenous people lived in Salt Lake Valley at all.

In an earlier lawsuit by the Utes, in1957, Salt Lake Valley’s perceived shared status between Utes and Shoshones had also been a source of difficulty. The Utes’ legal counsel in this case ultimately chose not to pursue Salt Lake as part of the Ute aboriginal claim at all, for fear that it would serve as a distraction and possibly interfere with the Northwestern Shoshone’s claims. The Weber Utes — who were included as plaintiffs along with other sub-groups of Uintah Utes — were dropped from the suit because of this choice.

This decision had consequences for the 1993 case. Because of it, the court for the 1993 case was able to outright reject the Uintah Utes’ intention to re-argue that they did indeed hold title to the Salt Lake area. Nor were they allowed to allege within their suit that the Weber Utes formed a constituent part of the Uintah Ute Band. This was despite the Utes’ “considerable effort to present the court with historical evidence.” The court’s ability to dismiss them was due to issue preclusion — the prevention of relitigation of issues decided in a previous case.

If intermarried Utes and Shoshones did indeed populate this region, the dismissal of their land rights on the basis of mixed usage betrays a failure to recognize the legitimacy of intermarried families. It arrogantly asserts Euro-American authority over any agreement or unity that may have existed between the Ute and the Shoshone nations. It erases the hundreds-to-thousands of real people who lived here.

A collection of documents, excerpts, and photographs relevant to the so-called Weber Ute people of Northern Utah. Not a complete history — research aid only.