Anthropologists argue as to when the Utes arrived in the Four Corners area. Some believe there were two different migrations of Numic speakers, one occurring around the beginning of the present era, the second, more than 1,000 year later, around A.D. 1150. The latter movement generally coincides with the Anasazi abandonment of the San Juan Basin, but evidence of turmoil between the two groups is sketchy at best. Other anthropologists believe Southern Utes came much later; however, most agree that by the 1500s they were well-established in the region.

At about this same time, the Paiutes separated from their linguistic brothers, the Utes. In southeastern Utah, the San Juan Band Paiute lived in close proximity to the Weeminuche. These Paiutes have been the most ethereal of an already amorphous group. Southern Paiute territory centered in southwestern Utah and Nevada, with its most eastward extension pushing into the Monument Valley region of the Utah-Arizona border.

The historical record concerning the Southern Utes in Utah is vague until the mid-nineteenth century. Spanish and Mexican interaction with the Weeminuche was generally characterized as a love-hate relationship. Both Euro-American groups used barter and military might to encourage peaceful affiliations. They hired Utes to guide expeditions and fight their neighbors, the Navajos, while both Native American groups sold their captives on the slave blocks in Taos and Abiquiu, New Mexico. The Spanish Trail that ran through parts of San Juan County into central Utah, then through southwestern Utah and eventually to California, was another favored placed for Southern Ute slave and horse trading.

The Weeminuche, with other bands, joined in extensive forays which caused the major portion of Navajos in Utah to flee to isolated, peripheral areas, though some remained. Paiutes sometimes assisted the Navajos in avoiding detection through early warning. Between 1858 and 1864, a period known to the Navajos as "the Fearing Time," the Utes wreaked havoc on Navajo settlements, though there is strong indication that perhaps because of marriage and trade ties, some families were not bothered. By 1868, when the majority of Navajos returned from their forced exile at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, there was little love lost between them and the Utes.

Ironically, the same year-1868-that the Navajos received their reservation, the Utes received theirs. The original Ute reservation of 56 million acres comprised approximately the western third of present-day Colorado. Subsequent treaties in 1873, 1880, and 1934 saw a land base of 56 million acres shrink to 553,600 acres. For the Weeminuche in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah, the days of hunting and gathering came rapidly to a close. The Southern Ute Reservation in Colorado, eventually consisted of a strip of land 15 miles wide and 110 miles long.

The 1880s and early 1890s were characterized by intense, sporadic confrontations between the Indians and cowboys, settlers, and military units. Conflicts at Monument Valley, Pinhook Draw, White Canyon, Blue Mountain, McElmo Canyon, and Navajo Mountain resulted in deaths and a growing animosity on both sides. Different Ute/Paiute factions under the leadership of men like Red Jacket, Narraguinip, Mariano, Bridger Jack, Polk, Johnny Benow, and Posey reacted to the disintegration of their lifestyle. Many of these fragmentary groups either gave up and moved to the reservation in Colorado or coalesced into what would be recognized by the late 1800s as the Montezuma and Allen Canyon Ute groups. Although these two factions were interdependent, the particulars of their experience varied somewhat.

Special government agents who visited the Utah Weeminuche in 1908 and 1915 reported their destitute condition and the continuing friction against their white neighbors. Two serious events happened within the next seven years. The first incident involved a Ute named Tse-Ne-Gat, who killed Juan Chacon, a Mexican sheepherder. Ten months after the crime occurred, the Ute was still free, so Marshall Aquila Nebeker deputized local helpers from Cortez, Bluff, and Blanding and set out to make the arrest. Men from both sides died, but the Utes were only too happy to flee the field. Hysteria in local white communities ran rampant, and it was not until General Hugh L. Scott arrived that the Indians felt comfortable in surrendering. Polk, Tse-Ne-Gat, Posey, and Posey's Boy accompanied Scott to Salt Lake City then Denver, where Tse-Ne-Gat stood trial and the jury found him not guilty.

In spite of what the newspapers reported then, and what has since been billed as the "Posey War" or the "last Indian uprising in the United States," the events that followed moved little beyond a mass exodus of Utes and Paiutes fleeing their homes to escape the white men. Posey fought a rear-guard action to prevent capture, was eventually wounded, watched his people get carted off to a barbed wire compound in the middle of Blanding, and died a painful death from his gunshot wound a month later. Only one other Ute died during the incident.

The government too the opportunity to settle both the Allen Canyon Utes involved in the fracas, as well as the Montezuma Canyon Ute band, on individual parcels of land. Twenty-three allotments went to those in Montezuma and neighboring Cross Canyon, and thirty went to those in Allen Canyon, thus removing the Indians from long disputed range lands.

Many Utes realized that their isolation in Allen Canyon was counter-productive, while others living on the outskirts of Blanding, wanted to have better lands for farming. Starting in the mid-1950s, families began to move onto White Mesa and form a community eleven miles south of Blanding. Frame homes arose out of the sagebrush, electricity arrived in 1964, and bus service delivered Ute children to the schools in town.

See: Robert W. Delaney, The Ute Mountain Utes (1989); James Jefferson, Robert W. Delaney, and Gregory C. Thompson, The Southern Utes: A Tribal History (1972); Robert S. McPherson, The Northern Navajo Frontier, 1860-1900 Expansion through Adversity (1988); Gregory C. Thompson, "Southern Ute Lands, 1848-1899: The Creation of a Reservation," Occasional Papers of the Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, March, 1972; Forbes Parkhill, The Last Indian War (1962); Robert S. McPherson, "Paiute Posey and the Last White Uprising," Utah Historical Quarterly, 53 (Summer 1985).