Utahs Native Horses
UTE and SOUTHERN PAIUTE INDIANS
Confined on reservations, no longer free to range over the mountains and deserts of their lands in their quest for food, the hard-pressed Utes never completely forgot how they were supposed to live, who they were and where they came from. The elders handed this knowledge down to them. They knew that once their lands had stretched as far east to what is now the city of Denver, as far west to the Great Salt Lake Desert, from northern Colorado and northern Utah, south to New Mexico. In these lands of mountains and deserts, the Utes were assured of ample food.
Confined on reservations, no longer free to range over the mountains and deserts of their lands in the quest for food, the American Mustangs never completely forgot how they were supposed to live, who they were and where they came from. The elders handed this knowledge down to them. They knew that once their lands had stretched as far and wide, to what is now Wyoming, as far west to California and Nevada, from northern Colorado and northern Utah, south to Arizona and New Mexico. In these lands of mountains and deserts, the Mustangs were assured of ample food.
Indian Horses before Columbus: According to most leading scholars in history, anthropology and geography, none of the Native Tribes had horses until after Columbus. “On the contrary,” say elders of the Plains Indian Tribes, “our ancestors always had horses.”
Political, religious, and economic motives were behind the emergence of theories that the New World was “isolated” from the Old World and that Indians didn’t have any horses until after Columbus. Earlier reports of Indian horses were dismissed by academic leaders as being groundless “fables.” Claims by elders of the Sioux, Nez Perce, Chippewa, and Pawnee Tribes that their ancestors “always had horses” were cast aside by the academic authorities as being “wishful thinking.”
Indians were already well-known in these Northern areas for having horses, and being skilled in horsemanship. As early as there are records of Native Americans in the Southwest escaping from Spanish oppression, taking their horses with them.
The Ute and Southern Paiute Connection Peoples of the Mesa Verde are descended from the same group of Numic-speaking, hunter, A.D. 1000, Numic peoples moved into southeastern Utah from south and joined the Fremont people. The two groups shared similar, not identical, hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The Southern Paiutes were more adapted to the desert environment of Nevada, Southern Utah and northern Arizona, while their Ute cousins' seasonal rounds took them from the canyons of eastern Utah to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and beyond—all the way to the Great Plains, where they adopted selected traits from the Plains Indians. Traditional Southern Paiute territory extended east of the Colorado River, into the Mesa Verde region. Today, a relatively small number of Southern Paiutes live in the region, many at White Mesa, Utah, which is part of the Ute Mountain Reservation.
Site owners photo - Indians forced to earn money for their needs, pose for photos with tourists along the side of the road. I had a big buffalo head dress on.