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Show THE GOSHUTES 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 117 independently for a long time, although they did experience some encounters with other Indian groups and with Spanish colonial forces. Indeed, subsequent to the creation of a southwest Indian trade network and the establishment of the Old Spanish Trail, some Goshutes were captured as slaves by Ute and Mexican raiders. This devas-tating experience, Defa contended, encouraged the tribe to "avoi[d] contact with outside people whenever possible," marking another Goshute adaptation to difficult circumstances. Still, while outsiders increasingly entered the Goshute homelands, until 1849 the region remained too challenging for non-Goshutes to attempt to settle. At that point, however, white people began to arrive in and settle portions of the Goshute lands, generating a significant disruption of tribal ways. In 1849 the establishment of a United States Corps of Topographic Engineers facility in the Tooele Valley and of a nearby timber mill by Mormon Apostle Ezra T. Benson and other Latter-day Saints signaled a decisive change in the disruption of Goshute ways by outsiders. Between 1849 and 1860, Mormons occupied the prime lands in Skull, Rush, Cedar, and Deep Creek valleys. They took control of vital Goshute water resources, farmed in a way that harmed na-tive vegetation and the soil, and overgrazed and overhunted the delicate ecosystem. Thousands of California gold rush participants also helped themselves to the limited resources available on Goshute land. Brigham Madsen concluded that "the herds of draft animals and cattle of the emigrant trains and the efficient farming opera-tions of the Mormon farmers in Utah destroyed the grass seeds and roots the Shoshoni [and the Goshute] had counted on for survival." The Pony Express, along with twenty Overland Mail sta-tions, drove the Goshutes from many of their remaining critical resource sites. By the end of the 1850s, whites in the area outnumbered Goshutes. Driven by the interlocking motivation to stay on their homelands and to sustain themselves, the typically non-confrontational Goshutes respond-ed to white encroachment by adopting the tactics of other indigenous groups under duress. As BYU professors James B. Allen and Ted J. Warner argued, "When food was scarce it seemed only reasonable to take the white man's cattle or to raid mail stations and establishments where provisions could be found." Such maneuvers opened up all Goshutes to harsh retribution: in one of the most horrific examples, Captain Samuel P. Smith and his detachment of California Volunteers exterminated fifty-three Goshutes in May 1863 as punishment for suspected raids on the overland route by other Goshute tribe members. Not all whites supported such attitudes toward the Goshutes, and, once again showing adaptability, some Goshute people sought out alliances with white people who wanted to address the tribe's loss of resources, including govern-ment agents and Mormon settlers who proposed western-style farming as a way to provide the Goshutes a livelihood and stop their raiding. With the support of federal agents, some Goshutes began raising crops on what would come to be known as Deep Creek Farm. But other Goshutes rejected farming as incongruent with Gos-hute values or ways of life; in compelling the Goshutes to stay in one location and accept white |