LaConte: ‘Mean Girls’ and the Meeker Incident

News | Oct 4, 2024

John LaConte

Oftentimes in history, we hear modern stories compared to old legends, treating the original accounts with a new shine that can both bejewel and betray the earlier narratives.

This is common in the Wild West, where tall tales abound and a romanticized view of history is often reminisced upon with 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 Montana to the Battle of Thermopylae in ancient Greece, with General George Armstrong Custer as a Leonidas-like figure. It’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 deemed heroic rather than ill-conceived.

Closer to home, we have the legend of Lover’s Leap. In this story, which has been mostly passed down 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 the hunting grounds located between Two Elk Creek and modern-day Gilman in the 1850s. The young couple attempted to flee the battlefield on horseback but were pursued by angry Utes, so they rode off the large rock outcropping over modern-day Red Cliff rather than surrender, plunging to their deaths some 500 feet below.

In this tale, the rhyming with Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” is so obvious it seems probable that the story has been garnished with some of the later settlers’ glamorized memories of the Montagues and Capulets, served up with a side of the Noble Savage trope.

Succumbing to this same brand of (perhaps flawed) comparison, I recently found my mind wandering during the Vail Performing Arts Academy’s production of “Mean Girls, Jr.” in June. As I watched the local kids pull off a flawless production, I couldn’t help but notice how some of the plot elements seemed analogous to the accounts of the Meeker Incident which eventually drove the Utes off their lands in Western Colorado. The Meeker Incident took place almost exactly 145 years ago, in late September and early October of 1879, which is why I chose to revisit it this week.

While it’s true that Custer was no Leonidas, I do think Indian Agent Nathan Meeker was a bit of a mean girl. And here’s why.

The setting of the Meeker Incident is modern-day Meeker, Colorado, where a Ute settlement suddenly found itself at odds with a U.S. Indian Affairs base that was assigned to lands that belonged to the tribe according to the Ute Treaty of 1868.

The setting of “Mean Girls, Jr.” is a high school, where a group of outcasts finds itself at odds with a clique of cocky cool kids known at the Plastics.

In this analogy, the Ute tribe are the outcasts — clinging to their hunter-gatherer lifestyle — while the U.S. Indian Affairs agents are the Plastics, self-important and bent on molding the area into an agricultural hub. The main antagonist of “Mean Girls, Jr.” is Regina George, the leader of the Plastics, who attempts to convert the main protagonist — Cady Heron — to her lifestyle.

Heron is like a figure from the Meeker story known as Johnson (whose real name was Canavish), a Ute leader who pretends to adopt Meeker’s lifestyle while reporting back to the Utes on Meeker’s plans. This is quite similar to the plot of “Mean Girls Jr.,” in which 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 effort to sway the Utes away from horse racing, one of the tribe’s passions, instead insisting that they use their horses for agricultural pursuits like plowing fields. Johnson pretends to adopt the farming lifestyle, and Meeker rewards him with a plowing horse.

As told by the Colorado Encyclopedia from History Colorado, “Johnson tricked Meeker into breaking horses for him by saying they would be used for farming when he actually intended to race them.”

Johnson was indeed farming at the time, but only because he had found the crops to be a substance that could be used for his horses to gain muscle weight, making them faster in anticipation of his tribe’s next horse race.

When Meeker learned that Johnson was raising crops to feed his racing horses, Meeker became enraged and plowed the field. This led to the conflict for which the town of Meeker is now named.

In “Mean Girls. Jr.,” Heron also finds a substance that will pack on pounds, something called Kalteen Bars, but instead of feeding them to a horse like Johnson did, she feeds it to George, tricking her into putting on so much weight that she can’t fit into her cool-kid clothes anymore.

George discovers this and becomes enraged, like Meeker, leading to a conflict that results in her getting hit by a bus and fracturing her spine.

But that’s where most of the stories’ similarities end. In Mean Girls, Jr., the Plastics eventually disband and George has 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 settlers’ ensuing rage led to the state resolving to remove the Utes from their lands.

On both sides of the Meeker Incident, those involved would make choices they would later regret, and that’s where the final comparison to “Mean Girls, Jr.” can be found. Amid the chaos of the conflict between the cliques of high schoolers, the audience learns that all characters are capable of possessing mean-girl characteristics and behaving in ways they would later regret.

Learn about Eagle County’s response to the Meeker Incident in the Sept. 30 edition of the Vail Daily’s Time Machine.