History of Goshute Indians of Utah

By 1869 the majority of Goshutes had abandoned many of their traditional ways and had settled on farms at Deep Creek and Skull Valley. Hunting and gathering were still important to the Indians subsistence, but their traditional lifestyle had ended. Attempts were made to relocate the Goshutes to other Indian reservations, including the Ute reservation in the Uinta Basin. All attempts to remove the Goshutes failed, and the government cut off the annuities promised in the treaty of 1863.

The remaining decades of the nineteenth century proved tumultuous for the Goshutes. Whites moved into their homeland in even greater numbers and the federal government reneged on its treaty obligations. Finally, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the federal government established two reservations for the Goshutes. The larger of the two is on the Utah-Nevada border at the base of the Deep Creek Mountains, while the smaller reservation is located in Skull Valley. Today, the Goshutes live on these reservations and in the surrounding communities, small in numbers and still relatively isolated from their white neighbors.

See: James B. Allen, and Ted J. Warner, "The Gosiute Indians in Pioneer Utah," Utah Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 1971); Carling I. Malouf, "The Gosiute Indians," Archaeology and Ethnology Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Utah 3 (1950).

Dennis R. Defa