Today in History - Sep 29 - The Meeker Incident

September 29 is the anniversary of The Meeker Incident in 1879. In this incident, an Indian Agent and his men were killed by the Ute people. The US then used this incident as an excuse to remove all the Ute people from their ancestral land in Colorado.

The problem arose because of the US policy of annihalating native culture and replacing their traditional style of life with one that matched their own. The Indian agent that they sent was a man named Nathan Meeker, a zealous Christian farmer, who took up the task eagerly. He set up shop on Ute land, and quickly began attempting to convert the tribe to Christianity and to teach them how to farm.

The Utes tolerated him for the most part, and even threw him a bone by half-heartedly doing some farming and listening to his preaching. But Meeker insisted upon total compliance, even going so far as to withhold supplies guaranteed by their treaty. The Ute people petitioned the US regime to please take him back, but to no avail.

Things eventually reached their boiling point when one of Meeker's attempted to plow a field that was used for feeding the tribe's horses. They drove him off with gunfire. Meeker called in the military, and on September 29, the ninth cavalry arrived. The battle was lost fairly quickly, with a loss of 23 Ute warriors, and 17 US soldiers.

When word got back to the village near Meeker's outpost, the Ute decided rid themselves of the hated man forever. They killed him and his men, set fire to his outpost, and kept his family as hostage, which they put to good use by using them to negotiate an end to the violence.

The media reported it as an unprovoked massacre of white people, and the racist governor used it as further evidence that "The Utes must go". The US unilaterally tore up their treaty, and forced the Utes away from their homelands into Utah, where they were given a significantly smaller reservation on worse land.