In a few weeks, Mike Humiston, an attorney based in Heber City, will make his way to the Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver to plead a case of mistaken identity.
Humiston does not plan to ride up the courthouse steps on an old paint pony, but it might not be a bad idea to help him introduce his point . . . which is that the original inhabitants, and therefore heirs to subsequent native rights, of the state of Utah are not, as is customarily believed, the Utes, but the Shoshone.
The Timpanogos Tribe, Snake Band, of Shoshone Indians, to be exact.
If they're right, we shouldn't be Utah, we should be Shoshone-tah.
Humiston's problem — or rather, his clients' problem — is that they've let more than a little water run under the bridge in regard to this particular point of real estate law.
They might have brought this up in a more timely fashion — like during the 19th century, perhaps.
Still, what's fact is fact, and the chronology Humiston will lay in front of the Court of Appeals is essentially this:1776: Franciscan monk Silvestre Velez de Escalante, a k a "Father Escalante," made his way from Santa Fe to Monterey and first coined the name "Yutah" for a band of Indians (native name: Noochew) he encountered along the Uncompahgre Plateau in what is present-day southwest Colorado.
1847: Mormon pioneers began pouring into the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, the first white presence in the area then claimed by Mexico.
1848: The Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo ended the war with Mexico and established our southern boundary at the Rio Grande River, making what became Utah part of America again.
1849: Mormon pioneers created their proposed state of Deseret, including the land inhabited by the Yutahs, as well as a lot of other land (the territory of Deseret stretched from Colorado to Oregon and Southern California).
1850: Congress officially created Utah Territory, reducing the boundaries but leaving a still not-insignificant land mass stretching from the Continental Divide to the Sierra Nevadas. Still included was the Uncompahgre Plateau, which unwittingly (nobody asked the Indians) gave the newly configured territory its new name: Utah.
1857: The federal government chopped off the western portion of the territory of Utah and named it Nevada.
1860: The federal government chopped off the eastern portion of the territory of Utah and named it Colorado. This included the Uncompahgre Plateau, where Father Escalante's "Yutahs" still lived. Thus, there were now no Yutahs in Utah.
1861: President Abraham Lincoln (as if he didn't have enough to do) set aside the entire Uintah Basin in northeastern Utah as an Indian Reserve and encouraged all Utah Territory Indians to go there.
1880: After the killing of Indian Agent Nathan Meeker in Colorado (the "Meeker Massacre"), Colorado's Yutahs were ordered out of their homeland and forced into the reservation at Uintah Basin — where they joined their neighbors, the Timpanogos Shoshone.
So that's the Shoshone story, and they're sticking to it. The Timps have no beef with present-day Utes, insists Humiston, they just want the government to recognize them.
It was the Shoshone, says Humiston, that were cut down by federal troops at the Bear River Massacre in 1863. It was the Shoshone who settled Skull Valley and Spanish Fork and many other Utah places later occupied by white settlers. The Goshutes and the Paiutes and other native Utah Indian bands aren't Ute descendants at all; their roots are Shoshone.
"Shoshone are people of the Sun Dance; Utes are people of the Bear Dance," says Humiston. "There's a significant difference culturally, religiously and linguistically. They are two distinct people."
It's only American history that has bunched them together and called them all Indians, says Humiston.
Which, by the way , isn't correct either.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.