I have learned to appreciate better than hitherto, and to make more allowance for the dislike, aversion, and contempt wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white neighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. It needs but little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines, to convince anyone that the poetical Indian—the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow—is only visible to the poet's eye.
The Utes seldom visited Colorado City and the region round about in the early days, except in the winter, which was the only time they could do so with a fair degree of safety. A majority of the tribe had been on friendly terms with the English-speaking people from the time of their earliest contact with that race. It is true that straggling bands of Utes occasionally committed acts of depredation, and such bands on one or two occasions killed white people, but these acts were not approved by the majority of the tribe.
One of these exceptions occurred on Christmas day, 1854, at Fort Napesta, on the present site of the city of Pueblo. It is said that the men who occupied the fort were celebrating the day with the liquid that both cheers and inebriates, and in the midst of their jollity, a band of wandering Utes came by and was invited to join in the revelry. The Indians, nothing loath, partook of the white man's Taos lightning, the product of a distillery at Taos, New Mexico, and the natural consequence was an attack upon the whites which resulted in all the latter being killed.
In 1866, a small band of Utes began a raid upon the settlers on Huerfano Creek, but when the news reached Ouray, the head chief of the tribe, he sent runners out at once to warn the settlers and then went to the scene of action with a band of his faithful warriors. He soon afterwards took the hostile Indians prisoners and compelled them to go to Fort Garland and remain there, in this manner quickly ending the trouble. Ouray was always the friend of the whites, and is entitled to the very greatest credit for the able manner in which he held the Utes under control up to the time of his death, in 1881.
Ouray was born at Taos, New Mexico, in 1833. His father was a Tabeguache Ute and his mother a Jicarilla Apache. His boyhood was passed among the better class of Mexicans, chiefly as a herder of sheep. He learned Spanish and always preferred it to his native tongue. When eighteen years of age, he joined the band of Utes of which his father was leader, then located in southwestern Colorado. From that time until about 1860, he led the life of a wild Indian, passing his time hunting in the mountains and on the plains, varied by an occasional battle with the hereditary enemies of his people, the Kiowas, Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes of the plains, in which he acquired the reputation of a courageous and skillful warrior. In 1859, he chose a wife, named Chipeta, from among the Tabaguache maidens, to whom he was always devotedly attached, and who bore him a son. This child was captured by the Cheyennes in 1863, they having surprised a hunting camp of Utes under Ouray's command, near the present site of Fort Lupton on the Platte River. The boy was never recovered and, indeed, was never heard of afterwards.