Review
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Title: Mapping the Four Corners: narrating the Hayden Survey of 1875
Authors: McPherson, Robert S; Neel, Susan Rhoades
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Genre: History
Year Published: 2016
Number of pages: xvii, 284
Binding: Hardback
ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 978-0-8061-5385-8
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
This is a book which, I fear, will not be widely read. That’s a shame. It should find an audience in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico among people interested in their own history, both indigenous and Euro-American, and in the history of the westward expansion of the United States. It has a very clear bearing on current affairs, particularly on the question of a Bears’ Ears National Monument presently under discussion, and in its wider implication for such disputes as that now occurring over the Dakota Access Pipeline. And, for an even wider audience, it provides a sad instance of the United States government’s unwillingness to abide by its treaties with indigenous peoples, and the ways in which extractive and other economic activities undermine those treaties. Its relevance to these matters is what makes this narrative compelling.
The “survey” is the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, informally known by its director’s name as the Hayden Survey, conducted under the auspices of the Department of the Interior. Its first task was to survey Nebraska after it achieved statehood, then the Yellowstone area. In this labor it was at times refining the work of “[m]en like John W. Gunnison (1853), John C. Frémont (1853-54), John S. Newberry (1857-59), and John N. Macomb (1859)” (pp. 7-8), whose work preceded and was interrupted by the War Between the States. After the war, Ferdinand V. Hayden was competing for both funds and work against two surveys conducted “under military auspices for the purpose of identifying sites for military installations in the West” and Powell’s survey of the Green and Grand Rivers, and, below their confluence, the Colorado River (8). McPherson and Neel explain clearly and in enough detail the politics behind these different surveys, which eventually were all combined under a single agency within the Department of the Interior, the U. S. Geological Survey. But all that is peripheral to the story told in this volume.
The book depicts the state of the Four Corners area shortly before Mormon pioneers crossed the Grand River to settle Moab, and descended down Hole-in-the-Rock to settle Bluff, and before the miners and ranchers pushed into western Colorado Territory in large numbers. There was thus pressure on the Ute, Apache and Navajo peoples to yield land and allow settlement from both the east and the west, and into this pressure-cooker atmosphere Hayden’s surveyors rode. The narrative of their journey was written by various participants in the Hayden Survey of 1875, so it unfolds from the Euro-American perspective, with the editors supplying corrective notes from an indigenous point of view. The “narrating” part of the subtitle refers to the reports sent to newspapers in the east from the several small groups of surveyors working under Hayden’s direction, mostly written by the scientists themselves, to letters and journal entries by various participants, and to excerpts from one book co-written by the Survey’s photographer, William Henry Jackson. Most of the narrative is thus contemporary with the events.
Their narrative was edited and assembled as a documentary history by the editors, McPherson and Neel — a documentary history like William P. MacKinnon’s *At Sword’s Point* about the Utah War. And like MacKinnon, these editors link the excerpts with clearly-written transitional paragraphs, and enhance them with reproductions of photographs and paintings by the participants. The amount of work represented by this slender book is staggering, and of the highest quality. As the editors note:
“The implication of this [Hayden’s] vision for the region’s American Indians was obvious. What had for centuries been Native space was to be reconceptualized according to notions of Western science and reorganized according to Western economic and cultural practices. Hayden’s crews … marched into territory that belonged to the Utes, whether by aboriginal claim and occupancy or through constantly shifting recognition given by treaties” (pp. 20-21).
It was also obvious *to* the Utes, and the tensions between Native- and Euro-Americans erupted during the summer of 1875 into a running battle between a group of Natives and one of the Survey crews in the area between the La Sal Mountains to the north and the Abajos to the south, in what is now southeastern Utah. The editors skillfully present the narratives of the participants, mostly from accounts published in newspapers in Chicago and New York, as a mosiac of reports of what was a rather minor skirmish, when compared to such battles as Little Bighorn (or Greasy Grass, as it was known by Natives), or the Wounded Knee Massacre. But the repercussions of this skirmish were to shake, rattle and roll the Hayden Survey to its tripod feet.
That comes later, in chapter 6. The narrative begins with the various crews of the Survey leaving Denver and traveling across the Continental Divide by several routes to the rendezvous at Parrot City in southwestern Colorado Territory, which was to be their base camp. There is one map covering all this, and it’s a little hard to follow. Several smaller maps, like the excellent ones showing the skirmish, would make this first section less confusing, but the narrators’ descriptions make it worth the slog. I’m primarily a poet, so I find the language as fascinating as the narrative. For example, in Charles Aldrich’s report to the *Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean* of being lost near Tierra Amarilla, we read of his accosting some Mexican shepherds, asking them to guide him to that town. “Neither of the boys, muchachos, knew the way and so the adult greaser offered to pilot me through for a trifling reward” (81). He here uses “greaser” as a parallel to “muchacho,” as if it were established vocabulary for his audience. After relating a restless night spent worrying that his guide might cut his throat and rob him, he wakes in the morning: “A couple of magpies were holding an animated discussion in the branches of the tall pine above my head and that terrible “greaser man” was snoring heavily a dozen feet away! My throat had not been cut, and I smiled at my ridiculous fears….” (82). Here he puts “greaser man” in quotes, as if to mark it as slang, or informal usage, rather than established vocabulary. I know the word from my youth in Utah, and it had then the pejorative connotations with which Aldrich invests it here. He actually finishes that sentence thus: “My throat had not been cut, and I smiled at my ridiculous fears, as the reader may if he chooses. But it is one thing to have such an adventure and quite another to laugh at the absurd fancies of somebody else” (82-83), a sentiment echoed by those who reported on the skirmish at the heart of this book, only to find their narratives doubted and minimized, almost as fake news. But still his vocabulary grates on my ear. And, when the subject is the indigenous peoples, it gets worse.
I keep writing “indigenous peoples” because, although the territory had been set apart as a reservation for the Mountain Utes, it was territory also used by the Jicarilla Apache, the Navajo, the Pah Utes and others for hunting and gathering. The leader recognized by the government for the Utes, Ouray, “was born to a Jicarilla Apache (not Navajo) father and a Tabeguache (band) mother. He spoke Ute, Spanish, and English fluently and eventually ascended to positions of leadership that were recognized by the U. S. Government for treaty negotiation purposes” (p. 264, n. 10). Ouray was unable to stop the miners, ranchers and settlers, and kept being summoned to the Los Pinos Ute Agency for treaty revisions which would take more land from the Utes. Many of his people “thought he was working for the enemy” (212, caption), and the government held him accountable for the Meeker Massacre of 1878, (briefly described in this book).
Cuthbert Mills, one of the crew later attacked, described the natives who came “[e]very ten days” to the agency at Los Pinos to “draw rations, which is served out on the same scale as army rations” in terms that sound rather current:
“I confess it gave me a little surprise to find that hundreds of able-bodied men were daily fed and clothed by the government without doing a stroke of work in return…. It would appear, however, that they have to do a little sometimes. We have been wondering what the constant bang banging of guns which we heard all round the valley was for; the problem was solved by morning by the sight of an Indian on the hunt for prairie dogs with which, it seems, they extend their supplies of food until ration day” (107).
Since he is describing conditions after the third time the Ute lands had been diminished, it is not surprising to me that, with the high mountains being mined and the lower valleys being settled, the Utes should expect the terms of the treaty, which included the food, to be honored. Earlier in this dispatch to the *New York Times*, Mills says “The doctor here told us that for a few days there was quite an excitement among the Utes, who usually feel sore about something which the government has or has not done and it appeared for a time that the survey of the reservation would have to be given up” (106-7). It is not surprising to me that the Utes felt sore.
With the attitudes of the surveyors towards the Utes, and with Ouray disowning, and warning against (but still held responsible for) a band of renegade Utes, Paiutes, Jicarilla Apaches and Navajos, known collectively as the Sierra La Sal band, camped near where one of the survey crews was to work, the stage was set for conflict. That it was no worse than a skirmish, and involved only one survey crew, is a minor miracle. That crew, after they had finished in the La Sal mountains (east of present-day Moab), started to the south and west for Abajo Mountain (west of present-day Monticello) 60 miles away. They chose to travel through a desert valley called Dry Valley to avoid the Sierra La Sal band, who had seemed unaware of their work in the La Sal Mountains. But the survey crew soon became aware that they were being shadowed by members of that group. On August 15th the Indians began firing at them, from a distance, in small bands. Mills wrote, again in a dispatch to the *New York Times,* that the crew had “seven breech-loading rifles, more or less good, and four large revolvers, which it was quite obvious, were of no use against those long range loving cowards” (163). I detect in this complaint and sneer some of the comment voiced a hundred years earlier by British Redcoats about the Continental irregulars in the battle of Concord.
The survey party were armed with modern long-range rifles; the Utes, apparently, with muzzle-loaders. It is little wonder that they stayed out of range as much as they could. The skirmish as described by Mills and others sounds much like guerilla warfare. The La Sal band could not but be aware what a survey crew was doing in the land they claimed as theirs. Ouray might disown them, but the bands were not constituted as a federal republic, as the government seemed to think. They did not acknowledge Ouray as their leader. It is no wonder that they disliked the American intruders.
The fighting lasted from the afternoon of August 15th through the night and to around 1:30 the next afternoon, the survey crew being without water and riding tired mules, the Indians on fast ponies and apparently having access to water; they knew this ground, and the desert valley where the survey crew was trapped — the best route out and up to Abajo Mountain lying through a canyon which was ideal for an ambush. The editors did not include any account of this skirmish from the Indian side — perhaps none exists. The crew escaped up a side canyon by means of a deer trail through the rimrock, the kind of trail anyone who has hiked through this area is familiar with. They fled east, headed back to Parrott City.
The accounts of the skirmish, most written for Chicago and New York papers, portray the crew as in peril. With only those accounts as a guide, I would agree. And once the survey crew reached Parrott City in safety, they sent out a rescue party to bring in two men from a resupply station on the Dolores River, near the Sierra La Sal band. The party was well-armed and well-provisioned, even with indignation. The strength of feeling against the Indians amongst members of the survey is exhibited strongly in the account of James Gardner, written for the *Rocky Mountain News*:
“Suddenly, in a turning point in the canyon down whose grassy bottom we were traveling, I saw a horse feeding in the meadows about a mile ahead. Conjecturing that an Indian camp was hidden by the bushes of a stream near the animal, I ordered the pack train tied up to trees and down we went on the full run with rifles ready, intending, if Indians were there, to surround them in camp, cut them off from their ponies, and kill them among their lodges. Each man strove to be foremost in their charge, but much to our disappointment no camp was there. It is needless for me to say that the peace policy is not now popular with us” (195-6).
The horse turned out to belong to one of the supply-depot attendants.
I have left out of this review the report Jackson (the photographer) made of his trip to Third Mesa to photograph Hopi pueblos and Anasazi, or Pre-Puebloan, ruins. In their notes, the editors report that the former term, Anasazi, is “a Navajo word glossed as ‘ancestral aliens or enemies,’ but also ‘those who live among us but not beside us'” (268, n. 7) — another example of the linguistic minefield that McPherson and Neel navigate with grace. Like the word “squaw,” many Indians find “Anasazi” offensive; some do not. McPherson and Neel ultimately refer the question to McPherson’s 2014 volume, *Viewing the Ancestors*.
As in that instance, the level of scholarship in this book is very high. The care of the editors in constructing the narrative is evident in every transition. My review distorts their work in that I dwell more on the Indian side of things than they do, lacking any contemporary accounts from the Indians themselves. But, as I mentioned above, there were others who claimed to be champions of the Utes and disputed, in eastern papers, the veracity of the Hayden Survey crew. Still, the tenor of most of the press reports is represented by this excerpt from an editorial in the *New York Times* of 9 September 1875, less than a month after the skirmish:
“The Utes and Paiutes are known to plainsmen as the meanest and most rascally of all red men. They are only a few removes above the miserable Diggers, found further West. They are thieving, but cowardly; they will steal anything and everything they can carry away, even while professing friendship and honesty. They will fly before any well-organized, well-armed force, however small; and they do not hesitate to shoot a white man from an ambush, provided they can snatch his mule, rifle, or clothing, and be off before overhauled by an avenger. They are the true Arabs of the American desert. They can subsist on roots and insects, hide in the sagebrush, and scale the rocky cliffs of the region with the agility of the tiger-cat. No wonder the frontiersmen call these creatures ‘vermin'” (225). Actually, to me, “they will steal anything and everything they can carry away, even while professing friendship and honesty,” sounds more like the Euro-Americans, especially as regards minerals and grasslands.
There is no clearer explanation in the book of how the Utes eventually lost their reservation, with most of the “Northern” Utes moved to Utah, and a small sliver of land allocated to the “Southern” Utes, than the attitude portrayed in this editorial. It’s a wonder, given the outcome of this skirmish, reinforced by the Meeker massacre, that the Navajo have a nation today that they can govern.
We hear a lot about how “political correctness” is destroying free speech in the U. S. My parents taught me that it is polite to speak in a manner that does not seek to give offense, but rather to avoid it — that we should call a people by the collective terms they prefer. Reading these narrative excerpts reminds me of how willingly we participate in putting down the weak and powerless. I wonder, for example, if some people object to the term “indigenous” because it sounds like “indigent.” The native peoples portrayed in this book were not indigent, but the indignant tone of that *New York Times* editorial indicates that many Euro-Americans did not understand that. This book illuminates the problems of identity amongst the Natives; it also shows how unwilling we of European stock have been to recognize the complexity of the identities of those we have shunted aside. Among its many other virtues, *Mapping the Four Corners* does not shunt that question aside.