About A.D. 400, the Fremont Culture began to emerge in northern and eastern Utah out of this Desert tradition. The Fremont peoples retained many Desert hunting-gathering characteristics yet also incorporated a maize-bean-squash horticultural component by A.D. 800-900. They lived in masonry structures and made sophisticated basketry, pottery, and clay figurines for ceremonial purposes. Intrusive Numic peoples displaced or absorbed the Fremont sometime after A.D. 1000.

In Utah, the Numic- (or Shoshonean) speaking peoples of the Uto-Aztecan language family evolved into four distinct groups in the historic period: the Northern Shoshone, Goshute or Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Ute peoples. The Northern Shoshone, including the Bannock, Fort Hall, and Wind River Shoshone (Nimi), were hunter-gatherers who rapidly adopted many Plains Indian traits through trade. They occupied an area mainly north and east of the state, yet periodically utilized subsistence ranges in Utah. The Goshute (Kusiutta) inhabited the inhospitable western deserts of Utah. Derogatorily labeled "Digger Indians" by early white observers, the Goshute were supremely adaptive hunter-gatherers living in small nomadic family bands. They constructed wickiups or brush shelters, gathered seasonal seeds, grasses, and roots, collected insects, larvae, and small reptiles, and hunted antelope, deer, rabbits and other small mammals. The Southern Paiute (Nuwuvi) lived in southwestern Utah, where they combined their hunting-gathering subsistence system with some flood-plain gardening--an adaptation attributable to Anasazi influences. The Southern Paiute were non-warlike and suffered at the hands of their more aggressive Ute neighbors in the historic period.

By the year 1700 Navajos began to move into the San Juan River drainage area of Utah in search of pasture for their herds of Spanish sheep and goats. The Navajo (Dine) were recent immigrants to the Southwest--migrant Athabaskan-speaking peoples from the subarctic who arrived sometime between A.D. 1300 and 1400. The Navajo were highly adaptive hunter-gatherers who incorporated domestic livestock and agriculture into their subsistence system. They lived in dispersed extended family units in northern Arizona, New Mexico, and southeastern Utah, dwelling in hogans. While maintaining fair relations with the Spanish and Pueblo peoples, Navajos came under intense pressure from raiding Utes from the 1720s through the 1740s, forcing many to retreat from Utah.

The Mormons settled in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847--a neutral or buffer zone between the Shoshone and Ute peoples. Conflict between Mormons and Indians did not really begin until Mormons extended their settlements south into Utah Valley--a major trade crossroads and subsistence area for the Ute people. Brigham Young espoused a moderate Indian policy in line with Mormon theological beliefs that Indians were "Lamanites," with an ancestry in the tribes of Israel. Young counseled that it was cheaper to feed than to fight the Indians, and he instituted some token missionary efforts among them. Yet, as Mormon settlement expanded north and south along the front range, conflict increased with Indians displaced from traditional subsistence areas. Young countered Ute raiding with an iron fist. The Walker War (1853-54) and the Black Hawk War (1863-68) revolved around Indian subsistence raiding to avoid starvation.

During this period the Indian Bureau and the Mormon Church operated reservation farms for the benefit of Indian peoples, but they either proved inadequate or failed completely. Weakened by disease and starvation, Ute Indians faced annihilation or retreat. In 1861 President Abraham Lincoln set aside the Uintah Valley Indian Reservation for the Utah Ute people. In 1881-82 the federal government removed the White River and Uncompahgre Ute from Colorado to the Uintah and Ouray Reservations in eastern Utah. Today these three bands are collectively called the Northern Ute Tribe.

In 1871 the federal government ended the practice of making treaties and instituted a legislative approach to administering Indian affairs. In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes General Allotment (or Severalty) Act, aimed at breaking up Indian reservations into individual farms for tribal members and opening the rest for public sale. Policy makers intended to detribalize native peoples and turn them into yeoman farmers and citizens; but the policy was largely a failure. Indians resisted farming and most reservation environments limited agrarian success. Allotment did, however, break up the Indian estate. In 1897 and 1904 the Indian Bureau allotted the Uintah and Ouray reservations. Tribal land holdings fell from nearly four million acres to 360,000 acres, and individual sale of Indian allotments further reduced Northern Ute lands. Nationwide, Indians lost more than eighty percent of their lands by 1930. Poverty, unemployment, underdevelopment, and health problems plagued most reservations, and Native Americans became ever more dependent on the federal government.

During World War II a number of Utah Indians distinguished themselves in the armed forces and many more learned trades useful on and off their reservations. In 1948 the Indian Bureau began a relocation program to place Indians in off-reservation jobs in urban America. Many Navajos in particular took advantage of the program which, nationally, was only partially successful at best. Ties to family, culture, and land drew many back to underdeveloped reservations.

In the late 1950s and 1960s federal Indian policy once again moved back to a more liberal self-determination stance. Native Americans received assistance from the Public Health Service, the Office of Economic Employment, and other federal and state agencies. One major factor in promoting Indian self-determination has been the success of Indian claims against the United States government for violations of treaty agreements. In 1909 the Utes received a settlement of more than $3,500,000. In a 1962 comprehensive claims settlement, the Ute people were awarded nearly $47,700,000, of which the Northern Ute tribe received $30,500,000. In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the tribal right to exercise "legal jurisdiction" over all pre-allotment reservation lands. In the 1970s the Southern Paiutes and Goshutes each won settlements of more than seven million dollars. Other important factors in Utah Indian self-determination have been the development of mineral deposits on reservation lands, utilization of water resources, development of recreation and tourism, and industrial development to provide employment for tribal members.

See: Beverly Beeton, "Teach Them to Till the Soil: An Experiment with Indian Farms, 1850-1862," American Indian Quarterly 3 (Winter 1977-78); Pamela Bunte and Robert J. Franklin, From the Sands to the Mountain: A Study of Change and Persistence in a Southern Paiute Community (1986); Howard Christy, "Open Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah, 1847-52,"Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978); Fred A. Conetah, A History of the Northern Ute People (1982); "Utah Indians," Utah Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 1971); Joseph G. Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless (1972); Dale L. Morgan, "The Administration of Indian Affairs in Utah, 1851-1858," Pacific Historical Review 17 (November 1948); Floyd O'Neil and Stanford J. Layton, "Of Pride and Politics: Brigham Young as Indian Superintendent," Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978); Helen Z. Papanikolas, ed., The Peoples of Utah (1976); Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (1984); S. Lyman Tyler, "The Earliest Peoples," and "The Indians of Utah Territory, inUtah's History, ed. by Richard Poll, et al. (1989); Richard O. Ulibarri, "Utah's Unassimilated Minorities," in Utah's History, Richard Poll, et al. (1989).