The state of Utah is named for them. So is the mountain that fills the eastern sky over Vineyard. Long before either name was written on a map, the Utes lived across the valleys of what is now Utah, and the people who made their home around Utah Lake were the Timpanogos Utes.
They called themselves Nuciu, which means "the people." Their country was the shoreline, the marshes, the river mouths and the mountains behind them, the same ground Vineyard stands on today.
The pantry
The lake fed them. Each spring fish swam out of the lake and up the rivers to spawn, and one of the busiest of those rivers was the Provo, which empties into the lake right beside Vineyard. Families gathered at the river mouth to catch the run and dried the fish to eat through the year. From the wetlands they gathered roots and seeds. They hunted ducks and other birds on the water, and deer and elk in the mountains.
Their year moved with the seasons: the lake in spring, the high country in summer, sheltered valleys in winter. Because they moved, no one can point to a single camp on the Vineyard shore. But this stretch of water, with its river mouth full of fish, was part of the circle they traveled every year.
In 1776 the Spanish friars Domínguez and Escalante reached the lake and met the people living beside it. Escalante wrote about the lake largely because of them, and noted that other tribes called them the Fish Eaters.
They called themselves Nuciu, which means "the people."
The world changes
In 1849 the world changed. Settlers built Fort Utah on the Provo River, a few miles from the Vineyard shore, and began farming the land and using the water the Utes depended on. Fish and wild plants grew harder to find. There was tension, and in the early 1850s there was war. It was a hard and sad time for Ute families, whose homeland was changing faster than they could adjust to it.
Leaders of the new territory and of the United States wanted the Utes in one place. In 1856 the Spanish Fork Indian Farm opened south of the lake, where Utes were taught to farm. In 1861 the government set aside the Uintah Valley in northeastern Utah as a reservation, and through the 1860s most of the Utes of Utah Valley moved there, some by choice and some because little choice was left.
Still here
The Utes did not disappear. The Ute Indian Tribe lives today on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and Ute families keep their language, ceremonies and history alive. Utah Lake is still part of that history.
When the settlers of Lake View broke ground beside Vineyard in 1855, they were farming land that Ute families had walked for generations. Look out at the lake from Vineyard and you are looking at a place that fed people for hundreds of years before the first farm, and that still matters to the people who knew it first.
