Contact

Map of expedition by Escalante, 1777. Library of Congress.

For the bands in south-central Utah, the first recorded contact with Euro-Americans occurred in Coal Creek near present day Cedar City. The Domínguez-Escalante expedition left Santa Fe in July of 1776. Their purpose was to lay a foundation of missionary work with Indigenous Peoples and find a route to Monterey, California for the Catholic Church. Part of their route would become the eastern portion of the Old Spanish Trail.^[1] 

The Domínguez-Escalante party came across about twenty women gathering grass seed near Coal Creek that autumn. Two of the women were caught and “forcibly detained.”^[2] These frightened women told the travelers that many of their people lived in the area.^[3] The Spanish party continued through farmlands between Toquerville and Pintura. They recorded finding “maize fields with their well-dug irrigation ditches.”^[4] While traveling through Southern Paiute land in present-day Arizona, the party ran out of food and were unable to find water.^[5] Domínguez and Escalante wrote of the generosity of the Southern Paiute people, detailing that after “learning that we came without food supplies, they told us to send one of our men with theirs to their huts...and they would bring some back.”^[6]

Monument at the San Daniel Campsite at the Black Ridge. The Dominguez-Escalante Expedition camped here on October 13, 1776. Photo by Reuben Wadsworth.

After the Domínguez-Escalante expedition, Spanish traders and fur trappers gradually extended their operations into northern Utah.^[7] The trade established between northern nations, such as the Utes, and the Spanish had a devastating impact on the Southern Paiutes. Both traders and other Indigenous Nations began slave trafficking. This era of Euro-American contact has very few records. The Spanish government placed a restriction on trading with Indigenous Nations as early as 1778, which encouraged traders to cover up their activities. Even with a government ban, trafficking was a “very lucrative business...as fully established and systematic...as ever were the slavers on the seas.”^[8] This period of Southern Paiute history rapidly reduced the population and some have estimated that as many as half of Southern Paiute children did not grow up in their homeland.^[9]

Slave trafficking was not the only use of the Spanish Trail during this time.^[10] Large caravans would travel through Southern Paiute land to California and return with thousands of horses, mules, and cattle every year, disrupting the landscape. Bands had to move their farms and adjust their gathering patterns to accommodate these caravans. The caravans continued for about two decades and marked the beginning of major vegetational and ecological change throughout Utah.^[11]