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Show 82 Nuwuvi: A Southern Paiute History The Nuwuvi abandoned much of their farming. Jacob Forney wrote that a man who had led an emigrant party to California twelve years earlier had seen many wheat and cornfields of at least six acres. The man's party had depended heavily on the vegetables they purchased from the Nuwuvi. Forney wrote that "These Indians have evidently degenerated very rapidly during the last twelve years, or since white men have got among them." 51 He indicated that there had been a definite decline in farming as a result of this white pressure. The biggest blow to the Nuwuvi stronghold in southwest Utah came in the early 1860's. During that period a large new group of Mormons began to settle in the country which they called "Utah's Dixie." The city of St. George was founded in the Autumn of 1861 on an old Nuwuvi campsite. Settlements spread rapidly until they occupied almost all of the fertile spots along the Virgin and Santa Clara Rivers, where the Nuwuvi previously had farmed and camped. The Nuwuvi finally were cornered. They were forced either to abandon their homes and move in with other bands to the west, east, and south or to live off the new communities. Jacob Hamblin was unique as a white man, for he could understand the effect the increased white population was having. He wrote that: At this time a considerable change had taken place in the spirit and feelings of the Indians of Southern Utah, since the settlement of the country in 1861-62. Up to that time, our visits among them and our long talks around their camp fires, had kept up a friendly feeling in their hearts. . . . The great numbers of animals brought into the country by the settlers, soon devoured most of the vegetation that had produced nutritious seeds, on which the Indians had been accustomed to subsist. When, at the proper season of the year, the natives resorted to those places to gather seeds, they found they had been destroyed by cattle. With, perhaps, their children crying for food, only the poor consolation was left them of gathering around their campfires and talking over their grievances.52 Hamblin believed that this frustration led directly to theft and raiding, but that the settlers tended to react indiscriminately to these acts, punishing and further alienating the uninvolved Nuwuvi. It is no wonder that the most common adjectives applied to the Nuwuvi were words like "begging" and "thieving." The Nuwuvi, because of |
