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Show W E S H A L L R E M A I N : U TA H I N D I A N C U R R I C U L U M G U I D E 25 greater distances and hunt more efficiently. The Goshutes and Paiutes used the horse as a new food source. Sheep, which were useful for their meat, skins, and wool, became an important part of the Navajos' economy and culture. Though there was a previous Spanish expedition into the Great Basin, the first recorded encounter between native peoples and Spanish explorers was the Dominguez/Escalante expedition, began in July 1776 and led by two Spanish padres, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Veléz de Escalante, who wanted to establish a trade route from the Spanish colony at Santa Fe to the newly founded colony on the West Coast at Monterey. Spanish officials were also interested in finding potential converts to Christianity, explor-ing Spain's northern frontier, and in learning of its peoples, plants, and animals. Spanish accounts of this expedition provided the earliest historical record of many of Utah's Native Americans. The padres preached Christianity to the Timpanogos Utes they met in Utah Valley, and they later described the Utes as friendly and helpful. The fathers promised to return the following year to establish a permanent mission among the Utes and to baptize them; however, the governor at Santa Fe refused to authorize a new colony. While they did not have to deal with Spanish settlement on their homelands, some Great Ba-sin tribes did begin to trade with the Spanish. The Spanish had a number of desirable goods, and tribes that wanted to obtain horses, metal, tools, or weapons found themselves embroiled in the violent Spanish slave trade. Spanish offi-cials in New Mexico felt that physical labor was beneath them and needed Indian slaves to sup-port their economy. Slave raids and violence became common, and people from all Great Basin tribes, especially groups like the Paiutes and later the Goshutes, were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Slave trafficking increased in the 1830s and 1840s, after the opening of the Old Spanish Trail, a trade route that connected New Mexico (by then under Mexican control) to the Pacific Ocean. New Spain slowly lost control of its northern frontier, including the land that would become Utah. While Utah's lands remained at the center of Native American worlds, the area came more firmly under American control as fur traders and trappers from Britain, New Spain, and America started to compete over the region's rich furs in the 1820s and 1830s. These fur traders greatly impacted Utah's Native American tribes. Native Americans married the trappers, worked for them, and became trappers themselves. In doing so they participated in an international economy, a fact that transformed their own cultures and economies. The Utes, in particular, adopted more of a hunting, raiding, and trading economy as a result of their participation in the fur trade. They acquired horses and firearms, which dramati-cally altered their culture. The Southern Paiutes, however, bore the brunt of Ute slave raiding. In the 1840s, Anglo emigrants began to traverse Utah on their way to the West Coast. In 1841, a group from the Bartleson-Bidwell Party became the first Euro-Americans to bring overland wag-ons through Utah. Government explorer John C. Fremont was not far behind; he led explora-tions into Utah in 1843, 1844, and 1845. Fre-mont's published accounts of these explorations were widely read, and he greatly expanded the available knowledge about western lands and their potential for settlement. Before departing for the West from Illinois, members of the Church AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY |