Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West

In this gripping history, classicist Mueller (Race and the Making of the Mormon People) uncovers the life and complicated legacy of Wakara, the Ute tribal leader who during the 1840s commandeered the 700-mile crescent of commercially prosperous land spanning from New Mexico through Utah to California known as the Old Spanish Trail. Known for his brutality, Wakara started out as the “greatest horse thief in history”—so prolific that the efforts required to police him eventually contributed to the “fall of Mexico-era California,” Mueller asserts. Wakara then graduated to slave trading in captive Native people, amassing a small fortune in cattle and cash. In presenting the story of this complex character, Mueller unravels the mythic notion of the colonization of the frontier as a straightforward standoff between Native peoples and European settler colonialists. For example, he revisits an incident from 1850 in which Wakara asked for a son of Mormon leader Isaac Morley as payment for allowing Mormons to settle on Ute land in Utah. Using DNA evidence, Mueller reveals that Wakara’s own daughter had likewise been “adopted” by a white family, in a ritual act of child exchange, contradicting a racist retelling of the story over the years in which Wakara’s request had been reduced to a “whim” of the “savage” Natives. It makes for an eye-opening and layered new vision of the American West. (Nov.)