The Ute Indians of Southwestern Colorado

The Ute Indians of Southwestern Colorado was written by Helen Sloan Daniels in 1941 as a project for the Durango Public Library. Our description calls it one of the first, if not the first, popular books on Ute culture. Daniels had to mimeograph it, and she used a four color memo process and made elaborate drawings of Ute artifacts on mimeograph paper. The result was hard to read, in places impossible, and the book soon became very rare and was not widely distributed.

This edition fixes that problem. Jan and P. David Smith edited and retyped the book so the general public can read it. The Open Library record we hold lists the edition as 2008 from Western Reflections Pub. Co., with the subject Ute Indians, and our catalogue lists 163 pages.

The description is frank about what you will find. It says the book is interesting and sometimes shocking, not only about Ute culture but about how local whites viewed the tribe in the 1930s and 1940s. Daniels also includes quite a bit of material about the Utes from the 1880s and 1890s, and the description says the book shows a split in white attitudes toward Native Americans in both periods. It adds that much of the information cannot be found elsewhere.

This book is for readers of Ute history, Southwest Colorado local history and anthropology, and for researchers who want a primary source on how the Durango area thought about the Utes in the early 1940s. It is also for anyone who wants a window into the author's own period, with its blind spots. The description warns the content is sometimes shocking, so read it as a historical document rather than a current reference on Ute people.

Helen Sloan Daniels was born in Durango on December 21, 1899, and died there in May 1979, according to the finding aid for her papers at the Center of Southwest Studies. She served as a trustee of the Durango Public Library and an officer of the San Juan Basin Archaeological Society. Her author page gives more on her life and papers.

More about Helen Sloan Daniels →

Daniels worked at a time when Durango's museum and archaeology efforts were growing. The Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College says she supervised a 1936 National Youth Administration museum project in which Durango-area youth excavated archaeological artifacts. She also compiled The Ute Medicine Man's Kit in 1940, a year before this book.

Her papers at the Center now run to 15 boxes, dated circa 1873 to 1986, with most of the material from 1939 to 1978. They hold printed materials, scrapbooks, photographs, postcards, drawings and government records. The subjects include the Apache, Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo and Ute peoples and the archaeology of the Four Corners region.

Among the notable items is an 1899 letterpress copybook of outgoing correspondence from the Southern Ute Agency to the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The collection also includes 290 photoprints, postcards and drawings. A reader who finishes this book and wants to see what Daniels herself gathered can follow the finding aid to the archive.

Source: Helen Sloan Daniels Papers finding aid, Center of Southwest Studies