Troubled Trails: The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion of Utes from Colorado Paperback – Illustrated, 30 Oct. 2011

In 'Troubled Trails', the author, Robert Silbernagel, brings to life a set of events, people and locations. Prior to reading this book, I had little understanding of the history of the Utes, non natives, politics and settlement in Western Colorado; this book has changed my understanding. The author has done a great job researching the material for this book. For many of the characters, whom I would have expected there would be little historic record, the author found detailed information about their lives, background and perspective as it affected the events. Further, the author describes the amazing mobility of people traveling hundreds of miles on horseback over rugged mountainous terrain in very short time. Although there are maps in the book to help the reader, I referred to Google Maps in 'Terrain' view as I read the book and follwed the movement of the characters through the story.

As a Ute researcher and historian, this book is vital to my collection. Sibernagel did a great job researching the events and putting the story together - a story which needed to be told from the Ute perspective. In the midst of researching the story myself, all of the genealogical and federal records, plus all of the fabricated reports and stories, I know the characters and circumstances of the Meeker incident well. Most of the facts in the book are correct, except for erroneous details in history of the Colorow family. Such fatal flaws make me suspicious of all the facts in the book. It may surprise historians that the records of the tribes is far better than any records of whites, particularly of immigrants from Europe. Censuses were taken annually when annuities and allotments were given out. Newspapers were always full of tales of Natives, albeit totally in error as per the image of Harper's Weekly shown in Plate 9. Photographers paid the Natives to sit for photographs (then sold the photographs to artists who sketched the pictures for the newspapers). However, few historians have investigated those federal records to find the true information or realized how many of the photographs are misidentified. In this book, one photograph in particular (Plate 12) has been even labeled with two different captions by one online database and listed totally different names. Unfortunately, Sibernagel chose the wrong version of the caption as provided by History Colorado. about it in the fall edition of the Utah Historical Quarterly. Read more

I havn't had time to read this book yet, but a friend of mine who is a member of the Ute Indian Tribe and has credits in the book, helped with its writing. I live and was born in the Uintah basin, an area where many of the book's people and their land and activities has reference. Their home was and is here first and my home was and is here later so I feel a love and admiration for them. I strongly recommend this book and I am grateful to those who produced it. It is imparative that we think about and remember the past.Nelson

---I purchased this book as an addition to my "western" history collection, and although the author shows painstaking research in documenting the "Meeker massacre," the book is incredibly slanted toward one side (Ute Indians), at times showing a breathtaking disregard/reinvention of historical documentation and the time period the massacre occurred in.--- Author Silbernagel, while presenting (possible) alternate scenarios of the altercation and motives of the participants, strains credulity at times, by portraying the Indians involved in the murder of reservation agent Meeker and others, as "victims,", with few alternatives to murder, and questioning the credibility of the statements of almost all "white" witnesses involved.--- While even a cursory study of Western history reveals the depredations suffered by Native Americans living on "reservations," and the often huge "understanding gap" between agents of the US government appointed to oversee such reservations, and its inhabitants, the author seems to view the ambush/murder of such an agent and other males present as "unfortunate" by-products of racism, and a fate richly deserved by its victims for their lack of understanding of Indian custom. A straight-forward description of the events leading up to, and including, the massacre, without the author's constant attempts to justify the acts would have been more effective, I feel, and would have spared the reader the sneaking suspiscion the narrative was a tract of revisionist history "gone wild" (reaching rather uncomfortable levels when he infers that the daughter of the murdered agent--one of several kidnapped by the Utes after the murders-- was somehow complicit in her captivity).---The problem with this particular type of revisionist history, of course, is that by the author's attempts to negate all "responsibility" of the perpetrators, he is also inadvertantly "infantalizing" the Utes (a white settler commiting the same crimes would have been quickly hung, but they are "savages," thus, don't know any better)...---Whereas Silbernagel purports to understand Ute culture at the time, he shows a glaring lack of insight into late 19th century sexual mores :Silbernagel questions the veracity of the kidnapped womens' accounts of rape, two of whom hesitated at first to acknowledge sexual assault by their captors--Mr. Silbernagel should be well aware that the women involved would know (through 100 years of best-selling "captivity" accounts) of the fate of other white, female captives of Indians who admitted to sexual liason with Native Americans (forced or not): They were usually disowned by their husbands, and/or viewed with suspicion and hostility by the white community for the rest of their lives, as "damaged" or "polluted" goods. The surprise to me, in this case, was that they admitted it at all (after sustained interrogation). As a book purporting to be a "historical" text of one of the last altercations between settlers and Indians, I had expected a more nuanced approach, without so much editorializing on the part of the author---as such, he took what could have been a very interesting, in-depth summary of a historical event, and turned it into a revisionist cheerleader's dream. Disappointing.

Lots of historic pictures and well written.