Utes visited valley into early 1950s

Jim Tomlinson remembers playing with young Ute Indians on a knoll above the railroad stockyards in Mack in the late 1940s. Some of the Ute youngsters had never seen a train, he said, so when the locomotive pulled in and blew its whistle, “they would whoop and holler, they were so excited.” Many current residents of the Grand Valley know that some Ute Indians who were forced out of Colorado in 1881 regularly returned to visit in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Daily Sentinel frequently reported on the visits of these Utes, as when it told of Chipeta’s final visit to Colorado in September 1923. Chipeta, the wife of the late Ute leader Ouray, was the most famous of the Utah Utes who regularly visited Colorado. She died in 1924 at her home at Bitter Creek on the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah. But other Utes continued to come to the Grand Valley on a regular basis, particularly those from the Bitter Creek area. They arrived every fall with several hundred head of cattle to ship to Denver from the railroad center at Mack, Tomlinson said...more