Chipeta (1843-1924) Born in 1843, Chipeta grew up near present day Conejos, Colorado. She was a member of the Uncompahgre (also known as the Tabeguache) tribe, one of seven Ute tribes. At sixteen she married Chief Ouray, the main treaty negotiator for the Uncompahgre Utes. Ouray was a skilled negotiator, and both he and Chipeta befriended white settlers. In 1879, a group of White River Utes killed eleven men, including Indian agent Nathan Meeker, at the White River agency in northwestern Colorado. Several women and children were taken hostage and held for twenty-three days. Oral history suggests that Chipeta had a role in rescuing and housing the hostages. While Chipeta and Ouray were not part of the Ute band involved in the Meeker Massacre, they traveled to Washington, DC, to help negotiate a treaty with the United States government. The Utes ratified the treaty but the U.S. government did not agree to allow the tribes to stay in Colorado. Instead, the tribes were moved to the Uintah Reservation in Utah. Ouray died there in 1880. Three years later, Chipeta remarried and later adopted four children. She died in 1924 on the reservation in Utah. Her body and Ouray's were re-buried in 1925, in Montrose, Colorado. The experience of Chipeta's Ute tribe mirrors the experience of Native Americans in the West. By the 1850s the U.S. government's policy increasingly became one of displacement of Native Americans to specific locations or reservations, often far away from their ancestral lands.