Early History
Although located far from the early Spanish settlements, the Southern Paiute were nonetheless deeply impacted by Spanish colonization of the Southwest. By the early 1700s their children were regularly being stolen by Navajo, Ute and New Mexican slave traders to be sold as laborers to the Spanish. To avoid being captured, the Paiute increasingly limited their foraging to marginal areas where raiders were less likely to stray. The inability to move freely across the landscape in pursuit of water and food resources reduced a once healthy people to regular malnourishment.
It was in the mid-1800s, however, that their lives were to become drastically and irrevocably altered. Before then encounters between the Southern Paiute and Anglo Americans had been mostly sporadic. But in the mid-19th century the Mormons, led by Brigham Young, begin to establish settlements in Southern Paiute territory. Mormon forts and villages were constructed adjacent to springs and wherever the best farmland could be found—the same areas that had been important resource locations for the Southern Paiute. Furthermore, the livestock that the Mormons brought denuded the landscape of the grasses that the Paiute had depended on for food. Less than twenty-five years after the arrival of the Mormons, the population of some bands had declined by as much as 90%, and the Paiute had been transformed from self-sufficient farmers and foragers to destitute people forced to rely on wage labor to stay alive.
In the following sections we will examine what is known about the early lifeways of the Southern Paiute. It should be kept in mind, however, that most of what we know comes from late 19th century historic accounts. Because of their nomadic lifestyle, the Southern Paiutes left behind a limited archaeological record. And, because of the remoteness and perceived harshness of the environment in which they lived, few Europeans ventured into their territory during the early historic period. Therefore, most of what we know come from descriptions of a people whose lives had already been tremendously and negatively impacted.
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1877 painting of Mormon wagon train in Utah. Source - http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95510919/ |
Brigham Young, ca. 1870 Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigham_Young |
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