LaConte: “Mean Girls” and the Meeker Incident

In history we often hear modern stories compared to ancient legends, treating the original accounts with a new gloss that can both embellish and betray the earlier tales.

This is common in the Wild West, where tall tales abound and a romanticized view of history is often reminisced through rose-colored glasses.

In John F. Finerty's War-Path and Bivouac: The Conquest of the Sioux, Finerty compares the Battle of the Little Bighorn In 1876, the Battle of Thermopylae occurred in Montana in ancient Greece, with General George Armstrong Custer as a Leonidas-like figure. That's a troubling comparison by today's standards, but in 1890, when the book was first published, Custer's battle was perceived as a tragedy that people viewed as heroic rather than ill-conceived.

Closer to home we have the legend of Lover's Leap. In this story, passed down largely orally in the Eagle River Valley, an Arapaho warrior is said to have fallen in love with a Ute woman while the two tribes battled over hunting grounds between Two Elk Creek and present-day Gilman in the 1850s. The young couple attempted to flee the battlefield on horseback, but were pursued by angry Utes, so rather than surrender, they rode off the large rocky outcrop above what is now Red Cliff, falling to their deaths some 500 feet below.

In this story, the rhyme with Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet” is so obvious that it seems likely that the story was garnished with some of the later settlers' glorious memories of the Montagues and Capulets, served with a side of Noble Savage style.

I succumbed to this same type of (perhaps erroneous) comparison and recently caught my mind wandering during the Vail Performing Arts Academy's performance of “Mean Girls, Jr.” in June. As I watched the local children put on a flawless production, I noticed that some of the plot elements seemed similar to the accounts of the Meeker Incident that eventually drove the Utes from their land in western Colorado. The Meeker Incident occurred almost exactly 145 years ago, in late September and early October 1879, which is why I decided to revisit it this week.

While it's true that Custer was no Leonidas, I think Indian Agent Nathan Meeker was a pretty mean girl. And here's why.

The setting of the Meeker Incident is present-day Meeker, Colorado, where a Ute settlement suddenly came into conflict with a U.S. Indian Affairs base that had been allocated land owned by the tribe under the 1868 Ute Treaty.

The setting of “Mean Girls, Jr.” is a high school where a group of outcasts come into conflict with a clique of cocky, cool kids known as the Plastics.

In this analogy, the Ute tribe are the outcasts, clinging to their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, while the U.S. Indian agents are the Plastics, who are complacent and intent on turning the area into an agricultural center. The main antagonist of “Mean Girls, Jr.” is Regina George, the leader of the Plastics, who tries to convince the main character – Cady Heron – to accept her lifestyle.

Heron is like a character from the Meeker story known as Johnson (whose real name was Canavish), a Ute leader who pretends to adopt Meeker's lifestyle while reporting on Meeker's plans to the Utes. This is quite similar to the plot of Mean Girls Jr., where Heron pretends to adopt George's lifestyle, dressing and acting like her, while reporting back to the outcasts.

Among Meeker's main goals was his attempt to wean the Utes away from horse racing, one of the tribe's passions, and instead insist that they use their horses for agricultural purposes such as plowing fields. Johnson pretends to adopt the farming lifestyle and Meeker rewards him with a plowing horse.

As told in History Colorado's Colorado Encyclopedia“Johnson tricked Meeker into riding horses for him by saying they would be used for farming, even though he actually intended to race them.”

Johnson was actually farming at the time, but only because he had discovered that the crops were a substance that his horses could use to build muscle mass to make them faster in anticipation of his tribe's next horse race.

When Meeker learned that Johnson was growing grain to feed his racehorses, Meeker became angry and plowed the field. This led to the conflict for which the town of Meeker is named today.

In “Mean Girls. “Heron also finds a substance that makes you put on pounds, something called Kalteen Bars, but instead of feeding it to a horse like Johnson does, she feeds it to George, causing him to gain enough weight for her to do so. She no longer fits into her cool children's clothes.

George discovers this and, like Meeker, becomes angry, leading to a conflict that results in her being hit by a bus and breaking her spine.

But this is where most of the stories' similarities end. In Mean Girls Jr., the Plastics eventually disband and George makes a full recovery.

For both Meeker and the Utes, the story is much more tragic. Meeker and his men were killed by the Utes, and the resulting anger from the settlers led the state to decide to drive the Utes from their land.

On both sides of the Meeker incident, those involved made decisions they would later regret, and this is where the final comparison to Mean Girls, Jr. can be found. Amid the chaos of the conflict between high school student cliques, the audience learns that all of the characters are capable of possessing mean girl traits and behaving in ways they would later regret.

Read more about Eagle County's response to the Meeker incident in the Vail Daily's Sept. 30 Time Machine.

John LaConte is a reporter for the Vail Daily. Email him at [email protected].