A sign along the White River in Meeker, Colorado, tells the tale of a massacre, where 11 white men were killed by Native Utes during a period of U.S. expansion onto ancestral Native lands now know as Colorado.

Another historic interpretive sign provides a story of events in Meeker as one of gradual conquest of the Utes, until they were forcibly removed from Colorado to Utah in 1881.

The story of Meeker, Colorado, where a white agent working as a missionary and Indian agent and 10 white men were killed by the Utes in 1879, is captured in Dee Brown’s epic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Ultimately U.S. cavalry forces defeated one of the last remaining bands of unconquered Native Americans in the central west, leading to their expulsion from their homeland to the barren, hot scrub of eastern Utah, where they remain today on a mostly impoverished reservation. When I stopped here two years ago, during the Memorial Day weekend in 2013, I found an older historic marker referencing the “massacre” and a newer interpretive sign noting the expulsion of the Utes from their ancestral land. The story of the West and its settlement remains constantly in flux.

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