Page:Women of the West.djvu/124

Rh peta and Ouray always maintained that their little Loquito was dead. To them, this thought was less terrible.

In 1879, at a time when their chief was not by to curb and counsel, a band of enraged Utes fell upon an Indian agent, Nathan Meeker, at his post, massacred him and all the other white men there and dragged the women and the three-year-old child of one of them off into the hills. Ouray heard of it. He was a sick man but his wife was still young and strong. At his command, she rode swiftly through that savage country bearing their chief's orders to his murderous braves to release the Meeker survivors and to leave the warpath. They dared not disobey. When those suffering women and the baby were brought to Chipeta and Ouray in their comfortable cabin far above the plains, they were received with sympathy by their host and by their hostess, with tears. Chipeta fed, clothed and comforted them and the little one was mothered by her aching heart. Red and white wept together till the latter were restored to their own people.

Eugene Field wrote a poem, "Chipeta's Ride," celebrating this gallant deed of an alien woman for her sisters of the usurping race.

Chipeta's lonely path was hard and long. She saw the day of the Utes depart forever and thanked the Christian God, whom she and Ouray had received with His people, that her dear one had been spared this bitter sunset. Through nearly half a century of widowhood, Ouray slept in a secret place, that no disrespect might ever visit his tomb. His grave was unknown to all but the few brother-chiefs who had left him there.

The years went on and on, for Chipeta, in poverty, in age, in neglect till, on a reservation to the southwest, in August, 1924, what was once a queen of warriors and now, a withered, weary, forgotten squaw of eighty, reached the end of the trail.

Then, the white people remembered. Much honor was paid to that bit of Indian clay. She was interred with ceremony and encomium in the reservation cemetery at Ignacio. In the minds of Coloradans, the nobility of Ouray, the goodness of Chipeta, lived again. The commonwealth was ashamed. The state legislature appropriated a thousand dollars for a monument to their memory.

This granite tribute was unveiled by the Daughters of the American Revolution (who had already made a gracious commemoration of their own) in May, 1927, above their united dust.