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Although white men, including the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition (Table 2) <br />• had penetrated into western Colorado in the postcontact period, the <br /> region was formally closed to settlement until the Utes had been <br /> removed from the region by the Federal Government in 1881 (Borland 1952). <br /> Western Colorado, including the North Fork and Gunnison Valleys, had been <br /> guaranteed to the Utes as a permanent reservation by treaty in 1868. <br /> In 1873, another treaty required that the Ute Peoples re]inquish the <br /> mineral-rich San Juan Mountain region of southwestern Colorado but <br /> left the bulk of the reservation intact. The remaining reservation <br /> was divided into two parts but still included a large area of western <br /> Colorado. This area remained closed to settlement by non-Indians. <br /> In the 1870's burgeoning populations in the Gunnison area to the east <br /> of the Uncompahgre Ute section of the reservation and the Ouray area <br /> on the south, made it virtually certain that the Uncompahgre Ute <br /> Reservation would eventually be opened to white settlement. The <br /> details of the white pressures on the Ute Reservation have recently <br /> been discussed in close detail by this writer (Baker 1978). In short, <br /> however, the highly publicized Meeker Massacre of 1879 climaxed growing <br /> pressure to remove the Utes, and in 1880 another treaty was negotiated. <br /> By the terms of this document, Ute leaders were to obtain the consent <br /> of tribal members for cession of all remaining reservation lands in <br /> Coiorado north of the San Juan Mountains. This consent was soon <br /> obtained, but the Indian lands were not immediately opened to legal <br /> white settlement. Legal formalities meant little, however, and once <br /> the Indians had physically abandoned the reservation, settlement of <br />• the Uncompahgre and Gunnison County began in earnest. Squatters from <br />the Gunnison area began to take up the reservation lands about the <br /> North Fork and general Gunnison Country almost as soon as the Indians <br /> has left (Borland 1952:56, Goodykoontz 1927:461; and Stewart 1971). <br /> The Utes were removed .from the Gunnison and Uncompahgre areas in 1881 <br /> and thus ended an aboriginal presence which had probably begun several <br /> thousand years earlier. <br />L I <br />8 <br />