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Show In the 12 or 14 years which have elapsed since the removal of the bands from their aboriginal seat in Colorado, a new generation has come into the active management of tribal affairs, and to many of the band the treaty of 1880 is only a tradition, while occupancy of the Utah Reservation is a present fact. It is obviously quite natural, however unreasonable, that the Indians should feel themselves entitled to hold the existing reservation and should object to making payment for the fraction of that reservation which they will be allowed to retain. 75 The means to alter the Uncompahgre Reservation were found in the 1880 Agreement which provided that lands be allotted in severalty. 76 The allotments not made then were to be made now. As Indian Commissioner Browning later noted, " the United States got the benefit of all the lands purchased from the Ute Indians by the Agreement of 1880." 77 The Indians' title to their lands was not secured as required by the 1880 Agreement and 1887 General Allotment Act. Justification for altering the Uncompahgre Reservation was based on the grounds that the Indians not only did not need the land, but that they, in fact, had no real claim to the land. Officials began strengthening the argument made earlier that: The Uncompahgre Reservation, created by Executive Order of January 5, 1882, was not intended to be set apart as a permanent reservation for the Uncompahgres, but simply for the purpose of withholding from white settlement or occupation, or other appropriation, a sufficient quantity of land to make allotments to said Indians. 78 This argument was in contradiction to the recognition of Uncompahgre rights to their reservation in the Act of March 1887, which granted a right- of- way through the Uintah and Uncompahgre Reservations on the Utah Midland Railway Company. 79 The act provided that the Indians were to be compensated for the right- of- way and for materials. S. S. Scott, T. A. Byrnes, and William S. Davis, the three commissioners assigned to " allot in severalty to the Uncompahgre Indians with their reservation ... according to the Treaty of 1880," 8U held their first council with the Uncompahgre in January 1895. Byrnes reported that the Indians protested: ... they never agreed to come to this country, but were promised that they should remain in Colorado and be settled on the Grand River near the mouth of the Gunnison, where they were promised they should be given horses and farms and helped to live like the whites. They said that they never agreed to pay $ 1.25 an acre for lands they were to receive in exchange for the reservation in Colorado, and they never heard of such agreement until now.... 19 |