Ute people
Native American people in the United States
The Utes () are an Indigenous people of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau in present-day Utah, western Colorado, and northern New Mexico. Historically, their territory also included parts of Wyoming, Nevada, and Arizona.
Their Ute dialect is a Colorado River Numic language, part of the Uto-Aztecan language family.
Historically, the Utes belonged to almost a dozen nomadic bands, who came together for ceremonies and trade. They also traded with neighboring tribes, including Pueblo peoples. The Utes had settled in the Four Corners region by 1500 CE.
The Utes' first contact with Europeans was with the Spanish in the 18th century. The Utes had already acquired horses from neighboring tribes by the late 17th century. They had limited direct contact with the Spanish but participated in regional trade.
Sustained contact with Euro-Americans began in 1847 with the arrival of the Mormons to the American West and the gold rushes of the 1850s. Utes fought to protect their homelands from invaders, and Brigham Young convinced U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to forcibly remove Utes in Utah to an Indian Reservation in 1864.
“Ute people” enters the record as native American people in the United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what people, Native and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1253290. The Library of Congress control number is sh85141600. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1500, 1847 and 1864.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ute people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.