We drive this valley now as Little Denmark — cream-stone towns, Danish names, festivals on the calendar. But it had a name long before the Scandinavians arrived, and we still use it. Sanpete is a settler's spelling of San Pitch, the Ute people whose country this was. The story of how they lost it is the hardest one Central Utah has to tell, and nearly every town on US-89 sits inside it.
A valley that already belonged to someone
When the first Mormon settlers came up into Sanpete in 1849, the valley was not empty. The Ute bands who lived here had hunted and gathered across it for generations, and at first the two peoples shared the ground. The arrangement was never equal and never stable. Cattle and plows ate into the grasslands the Utes lived on, game thinned, and the diseases the newcomers carried moved through the bands faster than any treaty could. By the early 1860s the Utes had been pushed toward a reservation in the Uinta Basin that the government failed to supply, and a hard drought in 1864 finished what the encroachment had started. People were starving.
Brigham Young had said it was cheaper to feed the Indians than to fight them, and the church did try — setting up an Indian farm on Twelve Mile Creek, near present-day Mayfield, among others. But the farms were underfunded and short-lived, and they did not stop the hunger. By the spring of 1865 there were starving Ute families camped around the Sanpete towns, killing the occasional ox to stay alive.
The match at Manti
On April 9, 1865, Ute leaders met settlers and a government agent at Manti to talk over the missing cattle, and the talk went badly. A settler named John Lowry — drunk, by most accounts — pulled a young Ute leader, Jake Arapeen, off his horse by the hair in front of his own people. It was an unforgivable insult laid on thirty years of grievance. Arapeen and a war chief the settlers called Black Hawk — a man who had already buried wives and children dead of the newcomers' diseases — rode off, ran off cattle, and within hours the killing had begun. The Mormons would name the seven years that followed the Black Hawk War. For the Utes it was the last fight for a homeland.
Forting up
Black Hawk was a gifted raider, striking with sixty to a hundred mounted men and vanishing into the high country, and his aim was plain: cattle, to feed people who would otherwise die. The settlers answered the only way they knew. They forted up — pulling their log houses inside walled squares, abandoning their most exposed farms, and calling out a militia that eventually numbered in the thousands. Gunnison raised a bastion in 1867 and gathered the smaller settlements behind it; outlying sites like Sterling would not be permanently settled until the fighting was over. Across five counties, more than two dozen settlements were given up entirely.
It was an ugly, grinding war, and it was ugly on both sides. Raiders killed herders and travelers when it suited them; perhaps seventy settlers died before it ended. Frustrated militiamen, often unable to tell one band from another, at times killed Ute men, women, and children indiscriminately — and when Chief Sanpitch, the valley's own namesake, was caught and killed in 1866, his killers hid the body under a rockslide.
What the valley keeps
Black Hawk laid down arms in 1867 and spent his last years riding from settlement to settlement asking for peace; he died in 1870. The hunger that had driven the war did not die with him, and scattered raids went on until 1872, when federal troops finally arrived and forced the surviving Utes onto the Uintah Reservation for good. The valley the settlers kept. The people it was named for, they did not.
None of this is on the welcome signs, but it is worth carrying as you drive: the same ground the Danes turned into Little Denmark was, a few years before, the front line of the longest and costliest Indian war in Utah's history — and the name on every county map, Sanpete, belongs to a people no longer here to use it.