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 INDIAN SUMMERS     
   A Memoir of Fort Duchesne 1925-1935     

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By Virginia Parker     
List Price: $17.00    42 Photos 
 ISBN 1888106441 September 1998   
Soft Cover 6 x 9 182p  

About the Author    Excerpt   Table of Contents  Grandma Rose Daniels   Bear Dance  
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    In 1883, Fort Duchesne was converted from a military stockade to an Indian Reservation for the Uintah and Ouray Indians. Old Fort Duchesne, now gone, was located a mile south of U.S. Highway 40, hidden behind a large grove of Cottonwood trees. When the Indian lands in the Uintah Basin were opened to white settlement in 1905, it was Utah's last frontier. A growing network of roads and canals connected the small settlements of Ashley (now Vernal, Utah) in Uintah County and Roosevelt, in Duchesne County. This book recounts memories of a little girl's early childhood spent at Fort Duchesne between 1925 and 1935.
    Thought-provoking, sensitive, factual history by this retired professional librarian. She includes Native American Folklore stories and many of their photos. While her father supervised an experimental farm, the author lived at Fort Duchesne during 1925-1935. She gives a detailed physical, geographical, day-to-day, and emotional account of life there, and includes her observation of the plight of her friends, the Uintahs and Ourays, who were forced to live in the old Fort converted to an Indian Reservation. It changed her forever and in ways that were in conflict with the opinions of the adults around her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Virginia Carlson Parker, of Logan, Utah, obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University. She has Masters' Degrees in Library Science from the University of California at Berkeley and American Studies from Utah State University.
    

REVIEW
Parker is a fine writer, for one thing. Her keen eye and her memory for detail vividly evoke time and place. Parker explores the people and events of the Basin both as she experienced them and as she later came to understand them. Particularly poignant are her associations with the Utes, whom her parents treated equitably but regarded as inferiors, and her awakening to the truth of white-Indian relationships. The author has supplemented memory with significant research into sources that include interviews and primary documents. Utah Historical Quarterly.

EXCERPT

THE LAND IS HEAVY

"The streams, the land, and the timber upon
the mountains, you cannot take that away. These
things, they are a part of the earth and they are
heavy, you can’t move them or lift them, I don’t
care how big you are."

Thus spoke Chief Red Cap when he was informed of the Congressional Act making allotments to the Utes, and opening the surplus lands of the Uintah Reservation to White settlement in 1905.

  The Whole Gang. Click for full image

When my family went to live in the Basin in 1924, the early years of conflict had settled into an acceptance of the allotment system, resulting in a checkerboard pattern of White and Native American land use. The administration of Native American affairs was centered in the offices and facilities located at Fort Duchesne. The Uintah Basin Alfalfa Seed Experimental Farm was established on an allotment near Fort Duchesne in 1925. The land had been leased for ten years. The Farm was operated jointly by the Utah State Agricultural Experiment Station and the Farm Bureaus of Duchesne and Uintah counties. My family had spent the previous year in Roosevelt, where my father had taught in the High School. He had graduated from the Utah State Agricultural College with a degree in Agronomy, and planned to continue his graduate studies while he served as Superintendent of the Farm.
    I was a toddler, aged two years, when we moved into our house at the Fort, and my awareness of our surroundings grew gradually as I grew. My first conscious feeling about Indians, was anxiety for I was a curiosity to them. The genetic heritage of my Swedish and Danish ancestors was all too apparent in my blue eyes and snow white hair. Women wanted to touch it, to see if it were real. This made me shy of them, for their faces bending close to me were solemn and unsmiling. I could not see into their black eyes to judge their motives, and when they spoke in the Ute language, it did not reassure me for I did not understand what they said. Native Americans dressed differently, and often their long dresses and shawls smelled of wood smoke and campfires.
    My mother’s friends, who were Native Americans living at the fort, were sometimes hired as baby sitters and part-time household help. I did not see them as different from me, but as family friends. I became aware of Native Americans as individuals as I watched them walking past the four-foot wire fence my father erected temporarily one summer to enclose our play yard. My brother and I were quarantined, because we had whooping cough. A huge orange cardboard sign was hung on the outside of the fence. It carried a message printed in large black letters, "WARNING! WHOOPING COUGH!" The practice of quarantine for communicable diseases was common in the city, but at Fort Duchesne no one had practiced it. Many persons passed by our improvised corral during that summer, when my brother and I were shunned like victims of a plague. We were often too busy playing to notice, but still we felt ostracized.
    Native Americans came to the Fort in sober family groups, on solemn business. They rode in horse-drawn wagons, leaving them in the river bottom, and walking through our back yard on their way to the Administration building, or hospital. The men wore blue jeans with denim or black shirts. They wore the collar open with a brightly colored silk kerchief knotted round their neck. Northern Utes had broad flat faces, and the men wore their hair plaited in two braids that hung from beneath a broad-brimmed, black hat. The tall crown was ornamented with a brightly beaded hat band.
    The women always walked behind the men. They too, wore their hair braided, but usually uncovered. Their dresses had long full skirts and they wore a large plaid blanket wrapped around their shoulders. It was secured with a wide leather belt which formed a pouch in which they carried a small child or infant on their backs. The traditional cradle board used for very small babies, was seldom seen. They always wore moccasins, sometimes ornamented with beads. The children, who were smaller versions of their parents, tagged along in ragged lines.
    My upstairs bedroom overlooked the field between our house and the hospital. From there, I observed the Native Americans who occasionally came to the wailing tent located in the field beside the hospital. We children were forbidden to go inside the fenced hospital grounds, because of the contagious nature of the diseases of resident patients. We grew to fear the hospital as well as its patients, but from a distance we observed the shadowy figures who sat on the open porch which extended around two sides of the building. Many patients had tuberculosis, and some were in the last stages of syphilis, so they were thin and haggard looking.
    I did not learn much about the problems of Native Americans as a child. The attitude of adults in my family was generally one of tolerance without undue concern for them. My father always felt that we were guests of the Agency, and in no position to be critical of what he considered their business. Nevertheless, I received the unspoken message that Whites were superior to Native Americans. Supervising them was the Agency’s business. Benevolence was dispensed as if they were children needing direction. If I encountered hostility toward Native Americans, it was off the reservation and usually outside the Basin during the winters we spent in Logan.

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During our "long talks," Johnny Victor told me most of what I learned about Native Americans. He had been sent to a special school for Native Americans and had learned about many tribes. He told me they called themselves "The People." He told me the Creation Myth of the Utes, which explained how they got their name. He talked about their dances, explaining that the Sun Dance didn’t belong to the Utes. Their totem was the bear, whose characteristics they tried to emulate. The dance of the Utes was the Bear Dance. Johnny told me various myths about animals. In general, I listened to his stories much as I did the stories my Swedish grandfather told, as pastimes. I have rewritten them as I remember them, and as they pertain to my experience.
    In Logan, the year I was in the fourth grade, we built a whole pioneer wagon train in the large sand table. Most of my classmates were grandchildren of Scandinavian converts to Mormonism, so it was a Mormon wagon train. When it came time to discuss the Indians, I tried to tell about my experience on the reservation. I tried to say that they were not bad men who attacked the white pioneers, but that they believed in the Great Spirit and held wonderful dances to express their belief. I was trying to describe the Sun Dance as a healing ritual, not a pagan celebration. My classmates jeered, and I began to cry. But, I was determined not to be outdone by their ignorance, so I finished my report by reciting Longfellow’s poem "Hiawatha," which I had learned for my elocution lesson, and which they listened to, though it had nothing to do with Utes. I fled from the classroom, and took refuge in the furnace room with the custodian, Mr. Kennard, who was every child’s surrogate grandfather. I never again tried to "talk" about the Native Americans in Logan.
    In the general population of the Uintah Basin during the 1920’s, there was one White to four Native Americans. That population included the majority of Native Americans in Utah at that time. Northern Utes seldom left their reservation for the urban areas of Utah. Leaving meant traversing formidable mountains in any direction. The roads were primitive and automobiles were not yet commonplace. The means of transportation for most Native Americans was limited to horse-drawn wagons.
    At Fort Duchesne, Native Americans were always visible. But with the exception of the few families who lived within the Fort circle, Whites and Native Americans were separated by custom and residence. As a child, I was not aware of the distinctions Native Americans made among themselves. There were three distinct groups of Utes, of full-blood and mixed lineage. I did not know then that to be "full-blood" was a legal description, which determined an Indian’s rights to an allotment, to water rights, and to land. I did not know that blood rights determined whether an Indian could inherit the allotments provided by treaty.
    The opening of the Uintah reservation to White settlement in 1905, resulted in a pattern of ownership of the Northern Ute lands which inevitably led to conflict. Every aspect of Native American life was shattered by the reapportionment, distribution and readjustment of their vested rights to their homeland. The Agency at Ouray, which had been established for the Uncompahgre Utes, was consolidated with the Uintah Agency, and the headquarters were moved to the abandoned military post at Fort Duchesne, in 1912. There the Bureau of Indian Affairs administered justice and aid to all three bands of Utes–the White River Utes, the Uintah Utes, and the Uncompahgre Utes. A series of small towns grew up across the reservation, mostly as White settlements. This was followed by a period of canal building which made most of the reservation available for farming purposes.
    The three bands of Utes on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, spoke different dialects, and they had quite different customs and histories. The Uintah Utes were indigenous to the Uinta Mountains. The White River Utes had lived in the Colorado Rockies, and along the Yampa River. The Uncompahgre Utes had acquired the horse in Spanish times, and from their home in the southern Rockies and plains, they raided the trails to the Southwest. They had a tradition as great warriors. They were pushed into the Basin from their native lands in Colorado when silver was discovered on their lands. All lived under different treaty rights, resulting in friction among them, even before the white settlers arrived.
    I gradually lost my anxiety about Native Americans. I learned to see their visits to the administration building, the commissary, or the hospital as necessary and commonplace. Their camps along the native owned irrigation canals were a familiar sight. I came to recognize many of the families living in the primitive log houses scattered throughout the reservation lands. Those homesteads were unimproved by electricity or running water. They looked poor and wretched, but no more so than those of the Basin’s white settlers, who also lived in primitive log houses unadorned by paint, shade trees, flower gardens or curtained windows.

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    Whites criticized Native Americans as farmers, who did not care for their land. Many seemed to have no employment of any kind. No one bothered to explain to me that they lived on allotments granted in lieu of land. Many leased their land to white farmers to farm while they, themselves, worked as common laborers. It was unrecognized that the male Native American’s traditional role had been totally obliterated by confining them on the reservation. The fact that he had few tools, and little skill for farming was never mentioned along with the criticism.
    
    Like Chief Red Cap, I have known that we and the Native Americans are like the mountains, "part of the earth and they are heavy, you can’t move them or lift them."
    The land is heavy, very heavy it seems.

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