Chipeta
By Lilian White Spencer
(Writer of verse and well known journalist)
Since mine is the happy privilege of contributing a brief word-picture to the shining gallery of Colorado’s eminent women, I choose, as subject, one who stands at the threshold of our state history, Chipeta, whose story is a tragic poem in red and white.
She was of the Utes, that proud Rocky Mountain tribe, and the cherished wife of their wise and famous chief, Ouray, "the Arrow," who held out an unflinching hand of brotherhood to pioneers and doom:
This Moses of high summits led his braves
Out of free ages to captivity.
"They come as mighty waters, sons," said he,
"And desert sands are less. All men are slaves
to fate, that buries as in rising waves
Of these pale tribes. So, let their Chieftain be
Our great White Father too! What matter? We
Are dead and strangers trample on our graves."
There is no fairer romance than the idyl of Chipeta and Ouray. She was seventeen and he, twenty-six, when the white man's shadow fell upon these wedded lovers in 1859. They walked together through darkening days till he died in her arms in 1880.
During those twenty years, Ouray protected the settlers from his own people, who were restive under the inevitable, negotiated a treaty with the government and was received with the honors due a statesman at Washington. His portrait hangs beside illustrious white heroes of the early Colorado days in the State Capitol at Denver.
During the cruel times of adjustment, Chipeta was always at his side. They were one through supreme sorrow as well as mighty love. In 1863, while following the run of buffalo, they camped on the plains close to the foothills. Their baby son and only child was swinging in his sheepskin-lined, lattice-board cradle, outside their tepee when he was stolen by members of an enemy tribe. It is believed that the infant was brought up by his kidnappers as their own and, no doubt, in later life, went on the warpath against the Utes, but Chi-
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