A UTE PRESIDENTIAL CONVENTION.
The presidential conventions of last summer, and their attendant excitement, personal bitterness, and political sharpness, have called to my mind an occurrence in the history of a nation, of whose politics and whose statesmanship the civilized world knows but little.
Much has been said pro and con relative to the Indian character in general, and recently, of the Ute nation in particular, but those who knew the least have been most willing to shed information right and left, and to beam down upon the great reading world with the effulgence of the average cultivated lunatic.
I do not intend at this time to enlarge upon the question of western intolerance and eastern hero worship, as applied to the Indian nation, but simply to remark in my own gentle, soothing style, that those who know the Indian best, have the least respect and veneration for him.
At some other time I may say something relative to the Indian's home life, and attempt to show that while he appears in his public career to great advantage, both as a general and as a statesman, he is prone, like other great men, to little domestic irregularities. At this time, however, I intend simply to give some particulars of the great convention of 1875, which have never been brought to the eye of the reading public.
In the autumn of the above year at that delightful season when
The maple turns to crimson,
And the sassafras to gold.
When the soft and mellow light of the declining year sheds a subdued splendor of misty, dreamy languor over the snow-clad mountains and wooded canyons of Colorado, when the deep green of the mountain pine is darkly outlined against the pale gold of the poplar, and the cottonwood, and the willow, the chairman of the Republican central committee of the Ute nation, issued a call for a mammoth convention, to be held at Hot Sulphur Springs, for the purpose of nominating a candidate for head chief, to succeed Ula, whose term of office had expired by reason of his having violated the provisions of his first general order, in which he had pronounced himself as a champion of civil service reform.