| OCR Text |
Show 163 Further discouragements came, for nearly one-fourth of the cattle herds drowned in the above mentioned flood. The Ouray Agency was unsuccessful. The solution to the desperate situation was far from easy. The Congress had granted the lands for the reservation in good faith, supposing that the men of the Ute Commission knew what they were doing. A simple solution involved moving the Uncompahgres onto the Uintah Reservation's lands in the valleys of the Uintah and Duchesne Rivers. The fact that friction had occurred between the White Rivers and the Uintahs made this solution suspect. Thus the agency languished, waiting for a new thrust to solve their untenable position. The problem of the boundary line strained relations between white and Indian for a sustained period. In spite of the testimony of the Ute Commission which is quoted above, Special Agent E. E. White reported the problem in his interesting little book: The two Reservations, the old and the new, lie broadside to each other, and are only separated by the boundary line between Colorado and Utah. On the Colorado side are certain streams and valleys which the Indians have always coveted, and which were formerly thought to be in Utah. The Indians say that while the tribe lived in Colorado they were always told that those streams and valleys were not in that Reservation, but in Utah. Indeed they say that at the time of the treaty of removal the Treaty Commissioners themselves told them that they were in Utah, and would fall within their new Reservation in that Territory. I have no doubt that was true, for at that time they were in Utah, as the boundary line was then recognized. But since the removal of the Indians the discovery had been made by a careful resurvey that the boundary line was in fact several miles west of the original survey, and that the coveted streams and valleys were not in Utah, |
