Ute Indian Museum

In 1875 the federal government gave Ouray, the Uncompahgre Ute leader, and his wife Chipeta a farm of about 500 acres on the Uncompahgre River south of present-day Montrose. They lived here until the Uncompahgre Utes were marched to Utah in 1881. Ouray died in 1880, Chipeta on the reservation in Utah in 1924.

The memorial grew up afterward, in pieces. In 1924 the Daughters of the American Revolution built a concrete tipi over the spring the couple had used. In 1925 Chipeta's body was brought back from Utah and buried here in a crypt, with a procession reported to have stretched a mile. An obelisk to Ouray followed in 1926, and Chipeta's brother John McCook was buried beside her in 1937. The Colorado Historical Society hired the landscape architect Saco DeBoer to design a museum and grounds, and the museum opened in 1956 on about nine acres of the old farm.

In 2015 History Colorado closed it for a rebuilding planned with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and it reopened in June 2017, its exhibits organized around places in Ute country and told as a living people's history rather than a vanished one. Among about 200 objects on display are a velvet dress of Chipeta's, a shirt of Ouray's, and things belonging to the Southern Ute leaders Ignacio and Buckskin Charley, alongside work by contemporary Ute artists. The flags of the three tribes fly out front.