The Southern Utes are comprised of three bands. Historically, the eastern-most band was the Muache, who lived in the Denver area; the Capote ranged through the Sangre de Cristo Mountails of Colorado and south to Taos New Mexico; the Weeminuche hunted and gathered on lands bounded by the Dolores River in eastern Colorado, while in Utah the Colorado River to the north and west, and the San Juan River to the south marked the boundaries of their territory. All of these groups were highly mobile and visited far into the Great Basin, throughout the Colorado Plateau, and onto the Plains. Although their name has a variety of spellings in historical documents -- Wimonuntci, Weminutc, Guibisnuches, Guiguimuches, Wamenuches, and others -- the Weeminuche Utes were the ones that dominated southeastern Utah.

Anthropologists argue as to when the Utes arrived in the Four Corners area. Some believe there were two different migrations of Numic speakers, one occurring around the beginning of the present era, the second, more than 1,000 year later, around A.D. 1150. The latter movement generally coincides with the Anasazi abandonment of the San Juan Basin, but evidence of turmoil between the two groups is sketchy at best. Other anthropologists believe Southern Utes came much later; however, most agree that by the 1500s they were well-established in the region.

At about this same time, the Paiutes separated from their linguistic brothers, the Utes. In southeastern Utah, the San Juan Band Paiute lived in close proximity to the Weeminuche. These Paiutes have been the most ethereal of an already amorphous group. Southern Paiute territory centered in southwestern Utah and Nevada, with its most eastward extension pushing into the Monument Valley region of the Utah-Arizona border.