The First Native Americans in Utah
Humans have been living in the area now known as Utah for at least 12,000 years. Among the first arrivals were the Apache, who descended from Canada to settle in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico. The Apache eventually evolved into several groups, including the Navajo Nation, or Diné.
At around A.D. 400, ancestral Puebloans—referred to as the Anasazi, or “enemy,” by the Navajo—arrived from south of the Colorado River. They relied, in large part, on farming and settled in communities with large apartment-like dwellings built into the cliffs or valley floors. Between 1200 to 1400, climate changes and crop failures combined with the invasion of Numic- speaking (Shoshonean) people to drive the Puebloans out of Utah and into Arizona and Nevada.
Numic people began populating Utah around A.D. 800 and evolved into four groups based on their location: Goshute (Western) Shoshone, Northern Shoshone, Southern Paiute and Ute. The first three groups were relatively peaceful hunter-gatherers. The Ute adopted the horse and buffalo culture of the Indigenous Plains peoples. Notorious for raiding, they partnered with the Spanish to campaign against the Navajo and Apache and traded captured Southern Paiute and Navajo people as slaves. After the Navajo arrived in Utah around 1400, Ute raiders drove them out by the mid-1700s.
Native American Reservations and Land Cessions
In 1776, European explorers and trappers passed through Utah and established a trading relationship with Indigenous people. When the first Mormon settlers arrived in 1847, they believed that Indigenous people were “Lamanites,” a group that they say left Israel in 600 B.C. and settled in America. According to Mormon teachings, Lamanites were punished with dark skin for disobeying God and needed to be rehabilitated by the Mormon church.
As Mormon settlements began to expand, they displaced Indigenous people. Many Native Americans died of disease and hunger, leading to battles between settlers and Indigenous people in the 1850s and 1860s. The conflict was resolved when the United States government established treaties with Indigenous people that terminated their land claims and attempted to move them to reservations between the 1860s and the 1880s.
The 1887 Dawes Severalty Act established private farms for Indigenous people on their territory across the United States and sold whatever land was remaining land to white settlers. Native Americans in Utah rejected the plan, which served to break up reservations. Eventually, 80 percent of reservation land was sold to individuals by the 1930s.
In the 1950s, the government terminated Native American groups in Utah, and the groups lost control of their small slice of the remaining land. Beginning in the 1960s, the United States government paid out settlements to Native American tribes in Utah for violations of treaty agreements, and the Indigenous population began to grow.
As of 2022, approximately 60,000 Native Americans live in Utah, belonging to more than 50 tribal nations. Eight nations are federally-recognized, including the Navajo Nation, Northwestern Band of Shoshone Nation, Confederated Tribes of Goshute, Skull Valley Band of Goshute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe and Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah.
Utah Exploration
Among the first Europeans to visit Utah were Spanish explorers seeking treasure in the mid-1700s. Guided by members of the Ute tribe, Spanish Franciscan friars Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante traveled from Colorado to Utah Valley in 1776, intending to return to settle the area and convert Indigenous peoples to Christianity. Their group mapped large parts of the American southwest, opening it up to future settlement.
French-Canadian, American, British and Canadian trappers and traders, such as Jim Bridger, Francois Leclerc, Etienne Provost, Antoine Robidoux and Miles Goodyear, ventured into Utah’s Great Basin in the 1820s and 1830s. In the 1840s and 1850s, surveyors working for the United States government—such as Kit Carson, John Charles Fremont, Howard Stansbury and John Gunnison—mapped Utah for future settlement.
