Wakara's America
The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The forgotten life and complex legacies of Wakara, the mighty, once-notorious Native leader whose battles and conquests shaped the American West
“A sobering reassessment of the history of the Great Basin and locates the disruptive and violent influences of colonialism at its center.”—Ned Blackhawk, National Book Award–winning author of The Rediscovery of America
The Native American leader Wakara (ca. 1815–1855) was among the most influential and feared men in the nineteenth-century American West, famed as a fierce warrior, a merciless trader of Indian slaves, and history’s greatest horse thief.
In Wakara's America, historian Max Perry Mueller illuminates Wakara’s complex and sometimes paradoxical story, revealing a man who both helped build the settler American West and defended Native sovereignty. Wakara was baptized a Mormon and allied with Mormon settlers against other Indians to seize large parts of modern-day Utah. Yet a pan-tribal uprising against the Mormons that now bears Wakara’s name stalled and even temporarily reversed colonial expansion. Through diplomacy and through violence, Wakara oversaw the establishment of settlements, built new trade routes, and helped create the boundaries that still define the region.
Drawing together deep archival research with Native oral histories, archaeology, geology, and ecology, Wakara's America offers an innovative new vision of the history of the American West with Native people at its center. It serves as a powerful testament to Wakara’s legacy, which endures in his story, in his tribal descendants, and in their stewardship of their ancestral lands today.
Finalist for the 2026 Spur Awards • Longlisted for the 2026 Plutarch Award
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gripping history, classicist Mueller (Race and the Making of the Mormon People) uncovers the life and complicated legacy of Wakara, the Ute tribal leader who during the 1840s commandeered the 700-mile crescent of commercially prosperous land spanning from New Mexico through Utah to California known as the Old Spanish Trail. Known for his brutality, Wakara started out as the "greatest horse thief in history"—so prolific that the efforts required to police him eventually contributed to the "fall of Mexico-era California," Mueller asserts. Wakara then graduated to slave trading in captive Native people, amassing a small fortune in cattle and cash. In presenting the story of this complex character, Mueller unravels the mythic notion of the colonization of the frontier as a straightforward standoff between Native peoples and European settler colonialists. For example, he revisits an incident from 1850 in which Wakara asked for a son of Mormon leader Isaac Morley as payment for allowing Mormons to settle on Ute land in Utah. Using DNA evidence, Mueller reveals that Wakara's own daughter had likewise been "adopted" by a white family, in a ritual act of child exchange, contradicting a racist retelling of the story over the years in which Wakara's request had been reduced to a "whim" of the "savage" Natives. It makes for an eye-opening and layered new vision of the American West.
