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Show The Old Spanish Trail and the Slave Trade 51 traveling. Quinnie had two or three children out in the Uintah country, then her husband died and she came back to her old home and people where Cedar City, Utah, now stands. She married again and had more children here and her grandson, John Merricats, an old man, died in 1948 at Cedar City.56 The Nuwuvi accounts of slavery are important, for few, if any, of the white documents are concerned with Nuwuvi feelings about losing their families and friends to slave traders. The oral tradition also preserved accounts of the Navajo seizing Nuwuvi. Mabel Dry, a Nuwuvi woman from Moccasin, Arizona, recalls that long ago on the Virgin River the Navajos attacked a group of Nuwuvi, killing some and taking at least one woman as a slave. In another incident, a Nuwuvi man and his two children, a boy and a girl, were living near Mt. Trumbull. Navajos came to his camp and killed him, and stole his children. They were taken by way of the old Ute crossing (the Crossing of the Fathers) into Navajo country. The boy grew sick and died, but the girl was put to work herding sheep. After being forced to marry a Navajo, she ran away, managing to recross the Colorado River. After finding some Nuwuvi, she was accompanied to Cedar Valley. The Navajo pursued her, but her people kept her hidden and claimed they had not seen her.57 The decades between 1829 and 1849 were the first years during which Nuwuvi contacts with foreigners developed into a regular pattern. During this period these contacts became more and more hostile. The Spanish and Mexicans were involved in the slave trade, and the Nuwuvi avoided them whenever they entered their country. Beginning with James Pattie in 1826, relations between Americans and Nuwuvi became so unfriendly that open hostilities were a constant threat. The Americans tended to degrade the Indians in their descriptions of them and were eager to fight them at every opportunity. These descriptions influenced other travelers who came in contact with the Nuwuvi, and consequently a mistaken picture of the Nuwuvi and their culture was passed on. The end of the annual caravans on the Old Spanish Trail decreased the number of Nuwuvi taken as slaves to Santa Fe and Southern California and caused a change in the pattern of Indian-Mexican trading relations. However, slave trading continued for a time between the Utes and New Mexicans even after the arrival of the Mormons. |