The roots of the Posey War ran deeply
through the history of San Juan County. In the 1880s
cattle companies, Mormon and Gentile settlers, and Navajo
herders and hunters all began to place increasing demands
on the natural resources traditionally claimed by the
Weeminuche Utes and San Juan Band Paiutes. By the early
1900s, the hunting and gathering lifestyle of the Utes
and Paiutes was totally impractical; therefore, as the
natural food supply and grass diminished, the Indians
went to the next best source to obtain sustenance--the
settlers. Friction, threats, counterthreats, and depredations
ensued, with violence breaking out in 1915 and 1921,
at which times settlers killed or wounded small numbers
of Utes and Paiutes.
By 1923, Posey, a Paiute who had married
into the Ute band in Allen Canyon, had become the symbol
of this mutual antagonism. Approximately sixty years
old, Posey had been involved in the previous conflicts,
acquiring a reputation for arrogance and thievery. He
naturally came center focus when in March 1923 Sheriff
William Oliver arrested two Utes, Joe Bishop's Little
Boy and Sanup's Boy, for robbing a sheep camp, killing
a calf, and burning a bridge.
The two men stood trial, but during
the noon recess, they made a dramatic escape from Blanding
with the sheriff in hot pursuit. Oliver failed to apprehend
his charges, and so he returned to town and deputized
a large body of men anxious to find a solution to the
"Indian problem." The posse went to the Ute community
of Westwater next to Blanding and rounded up forty men,
women, and children, first placing them in the basement
of the school and later in a one-hundred-foot-square
barbed-wire stockade in the center of town. Others from
the Ute community fled toward Navajo Mountain, a traditional
sanctuary during times of trouble. Within a few days,
however, the posse apprehended them, loaded them on
cattle trucks, and placed them in the compound.
During this time, Posey and some of
the Indian men fought a delaying action, exchanging
shots with their pursuers. The Indians killed a horse,
barely missed three passengers in a Model T, and created
a media sensation that played in newspapers as far away
as Chicago. Posey received wounds that eventually proved
fatal, while Joe Bishop's Little Boy was killed instantly
in another fracas. The settlers did not realize that
they had mortally wounded their nemesis, and so for
about a month they kept the Utes incarcerated until
U.S. Marshal J. Ray Ward found Posey's body. Although
he diagnosed the cause of death as blood poisoning from
a gunshot wound, the Utes believed Posey died from poisoned
Mormon flour. Before the settlers released the Indians
from the stockade, government officials gave them individual
allotments in Allen Canyon and sent many of the children
to attend school at Towaoc, the Ute Mountain Ute Agency
in Colorado. Thus ended the Posey War.
However, for the Indians it was not
a war and never was intended to be such. A desperate
flight through the canyons, a few shots fired as a delaying
action, and a very rapid surrender do not justify elevating
an exodus to a war. For the whites, however, it was
an opportunity to release pent-up fear and frustration
that had accumulated for over forty years. They mobilized
quickly and combined frontier know-how with World War
I warfare techniques. Talk of electrified fences and
aircraft armed with machine guns and bombs, the use
of a prisoner stockade, and the dissemination of volatile
propaganda in the yellow press, combined with using
automobiles to track Indians, horse-mounted posses,
and old-fashioned gunfights made this event dramatic
if not unique. Even today, Posey looms large as a symbol
of an attitude and a time when vestiges of the old West
were manifest in rural Utah.
Robert S. McPherson
