AGRICULTURE AND THE NORTHERN UTES
In 1847, the first wave of Mormon settlers entered Ute territory and began to build their Kingdom of God on earth--a kingdom that did not include the native residents of Utah. Utes were slowly removed from the best lands and subjected to a series of policies designed to transform them into settled and self-sufficient agrarians. Reservation farming and ranching represented a fundamental change in their social and subsistence organization. Utes responded on both individual and group levels to this cultural assault, selectively adopting, adapting, and reproducing Ute ways within an ever-changing environment. Ultimately Ute resistance, both passive and active, and the economic and physical realities of agriculture in a tenuous environment left them economically dependent and incorporated on the periphery of American society.
When members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, they appropriated land lying in a buffer occupancy zone between Ute and Shoshone peoples. Having dealt with transient trappers and traders before, Tumpanuwac Utes worried little about allowing Mormons into that contested region. The Mormons, hard-pressed and almost destitute, discarded earlier church policy of purchasing or renting land from Indian owners and claimed the area based on divine donation and their own "beneficial use." Settlers plowed and planted crops that first short season but had to rely on stored foods and what they could hunt and gather in the surrounding area to see them through the winter. As more settlers entered the
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