On the morning the posse reached the rim of Comb Ridge, the men watched something they would spend the rest of their lives trying to describe. Below them, forty-three Paiute and Ute riders had just driven their horses straight off a series of sandstone ledges, drops of fifteen to twenty feet that no sane rider would attempt. The horses went over one after another, leaping into open air with their riders bent low against their necks, vanishing into the canyon below as if the rock itself had swallowed them whole. The twenty men of the posse pulled up short and sat in their saddles, breathing hard, staring into the gulf where their quarry had simply disappeared.

A settler named John Rogers kept trying for years to write down what he had seen. He never quite managed it. He kept saying the same thing in different ways: you would not believe a horse could do that; you would not believe a man could ask a horse to do that. The man at the front of that vanishing band was called Posey.

He was a Paiute who had married into the Ute, a man whose face was on wanted posters from Bluff to Monticello. The posse turned back. They could not follow. For three days the canyon country went silent, and the settlers in Blanding, waiting for news, read their own newspapers and began to believe Posey had assembled an army hidden somewhere in the rocks.

The truth was simpler and harder. The man they were chasing was already dying. A bullet had entered his hip three days before. Blood poisoning was moving through him.

Posey, sixty years old, had less than thirty days left to live. He would lead the very last Indian war in American history, and he would do it while already dying. To understand why Posey vanished into the country around Bears Ears, you have to understand what he was running from. In the spring of 1923, Blanding, Utah, was an ordinary small Mormon town.

There were Ford automobiles on the main street, telephones in the post office, a sandstone bank, a schoolhouse. The pioneer generation had arrived forty years earlier down the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, and the old fights with the Indians were supposed to be over. But on the southern edge of town, in a hollow called Westwater, there was a small encampment of Ute and Paiute families. They had no reservation in San Juan County.

They had been told for forty years to move to the Ute Mountain Reservation in Colorado, and for forty years they had refused. They were called renegades, outlaws, Indians who had not yet been settled. Posey had been born in the 1860s in the high country around what is now Blanding, in a land the Paiutes called the Land of the Mists. He was small and thin, married into the Ute band of a man named Mancos Jim.

In an accident the records describe only in fragments, he had killed his first wife with a rifle he believed to be empty. He later married her sister and had two sons, Anson and Jess. He had watched his entire lifetime bring the country he knew to ruin. As a boy, the grass grew up to the bellies of the ponies, and the hills were full of deer and elk.

By 1923 the grass was gone, the deer were few, the springs ran dry by August, and the cottonwoods were dying. He told a friend once that he could not understand how the white people did not seem to see it. Where he saw a country dying, they saw progress. Some said that if he had been born a white man, he might have been called a conservationist.

As it was, he was called a thief. The trouble that became the Posey War began on March 19, 1923, in the basement of the Blanding schoolhouse. Two young men of Posey’s band, about twenty years old, had raided a sheep camp, killed a calf, burned a small bridge, and assaulted a herder. They surrendered on their own and stood trial.

The jury found them guilty. Sentencing was set for three that afternoon, and the court adjourned for lunch. Sheriff William Oliver was left alone in the basement with the two convicted boys, a deputy clerk, and a small group of angry Utes. When the sheriff tried to move the boys, one of them refused, saying he was sick.

The sheriff rode close and threatened him. The boy grabbed his stick, swung, and hit the sheriff hard. The sheriff drew his revolver and pulled the trigger. It misfired.

He pulled again. It misfired a second time. In that pause of perhaps two seconds, the boy reached up, took the revolver from the sheriff’s hand, swung onto a nearby horse, and fired the sheriff’s own gun back at him. The bullet missed the sheriff but hit his horse.

By the time the sheriff got out from under the dying animal, both boys were riding south, hard, toward Westwater. Waiting somewhere along that road with fresh horses was Posey. The news ran through Blanding like fire. Within an hour every able-bodied white man had a rifle.

The sheriff deputized everyone in sight and gave a simple order: every man is deputized to shoot. In plain English, shoot to kill. The posse rode out to Westwater and began rounding up Indians. Not just the men.

Everyone. Old people, women, anyone with brown skin who could not run fast enough. Forty Utes were marched at gunpoint into the basement of the schoolhouse. Within a week the white men had built a barbed wire stockade in the middle of town, a hundred feet square, with ten-foot posts and three strands of tight wire.

Albert Lyman, one of the founders of Blanding, compared the people inside it to a bedraggled bunch of pinyon-busted steers. Eighty Utes were forced into that enclosure. They built two small hogans inside the wire for shelter and lit small fires for warmth. They were guarded around the clock.

Some of the young people inside would remember it for the rest of their lives. Some of the old people would never speak of it again. A photograph survives of the stockade, showing the fence, the hogans, the prisoners in cold spring sunlight, and the federal Indian agent standing at the far left, half in shadow, doing nothing. Outside the wire, Posey was riding for his life.

He had not been at Westwater when the posse came. He had been waiting on the trail with fresh horses, exactly where the boys had said he would be. When they came galloping toward him, gunshots echoing behind, Posey swung onto his horse and rode. He had perhaps twenty followers, maybe a few more.

Some were on horses, some on foot, some old, some carrying small bundles and nothing else. They moved south, then west, climbing toward Comb Ridge, an eighty-mile wall of red sandstone that rises out of the desert floor like the back of a sleeping animal. Posey knew that ridge the way a man knows the lines on the back of his own hand. He led his people up onto the top, sent the women and the old men ahead toward Bears Ears, and kept six or seven men with him on the high ground.

What followed over the next two days was a kind of fight not seen in the American West in thirty years. Posey fired down at the posse, not trying to kill anyone but trying to slow them down. One round struck the horse out from under a sheriff. Another passed close enough to a Ford automobile that the driver later said he could feel the heat of the bullet on his cheek.

The posse pulled back and sent for more men. Within twenty-four hours the combined force from Blanding and Bluff numbered over fifty men, armed with rifles, pistols, trucks, and horses. The county commissioner sent a telegram to Salt Lake City asking for the United States government to send an airplane equipped with bombs left over from the recent World War. The plane never came.

The request was quietly set aside. But it tells you everything about what the settlers believed they were fighting. The newspapers made it worse. Reporters came in from Salt Lake City, Denver, even Chicago, filing dispatches every night by telegraph.

One headline read: Ute band declares war on whites in Blanding. Another claimed Posey commanded a mobile squadron of sixty men skilled in mountain warfare. Another said he planned to rob the San Juan State Bank. None of it was true.

Posey had perhaps twenty followers, and most of them were trying to escape. When a citizen asked a reporter why he was not writing the truth, the reporter gave an honest answer: we are not ready to go home yet. If we do not keep something going, our editors will telegraph us to come back. On the second day of the chase, Posey’s people were exhausted.

The horses were spent, food was nearly gone, and some had not slept in two nights. A settler named Bill Young hid in the low branches of a cedar tree with a rifle. Two riders came toward him at full gallop. The closest was Joe Bishop’s little boy, the one who had taken the sheriff’s gun.

Young aimed for the third button on the boy’s shirt and pressed the trigger. The boy died in the saddle, slumped as the horse carried him down the slope. He was the first of the war’s two Indian deaths. Posey, riding farther back, took a bullet in the hip in another exchange of fire that day.

The bullet went in and stayed there. He stayed in the saddle. He told his people they had to keep moving. That night the posse camped on a high flat place.

Below them, in the broken country, they saw small cedar torches moving along the canyon rims. They knew it was Posey’s people signaling each other in the dark, trying to bring him food. John Rogers wrote in his journal that the torches flickered on the high ridges like little stars fallen from the sky, and that he could not help but admire the men he was hunting. The next morning the posse rode hard up onto Comb Ridge, certain they had Posey cornered.

They found nothing. When they walked to the edge and looked down, they saw the place where Posey’s people had taken their horses straight off the cliff, a drop of twenty or thirty feet of solid sandstone, and below it a steep slope of broken rock falling another two hundred feet. At the bottom, in the soft sand of the canyon floor, were the marks of horses’ hooves. The posse turned around and rode back to Blanding.

They had, in the narrowest sense, won. Most of Posey’s people came down out of the canyons over the next two weeks and surrendered. But Posey did not come down. With the bullet in his hip and the fever rising in his blood, he vanished into Bears Ears.

For almost a month no white settler could say whether the most wanted Indian in the United States was alive or dead. Posses went out week after week in different directions and found nothing. The prisoners in the stockade would not say where he was. Some of them, allowed out in small groups to tend livestock scattered beyond Comb Ridge, took food with them every time and left it in the canyons where Posey, if he was still alive, might find it.

Sometimes the food came back uneaten. Sometimes it was gone. The white men understood what was happening. The Utes were feeding their leader.

How Posey died is a story that splits in two. The settler account says he died of blood poisoning from the gunshot wound, alone or nearly alone, sometime in late April, his body found by his own people from the strength of his hip, the one the settlers said had killed him, almost healed. This is the account passed down through Posey’s own descendants, who still live today in the community of White Mesa, south of Blanding. His great-great-granddaughter has put it into the historical record, and her relative, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, has spent years trying to bring it into the open.

The historical record cannot tell us which account is true. The settler account was written by the men chasing Posey. The Ute account was passed down by the people running with him. Both accounts agree on this much: Posey was alone when he died, in the country he loved, within sight perhaps of the Bears Ears themselves.

The men who found him were Myers Can’t See, his own two sons Anson and Jess, and three others. They found him sitting against a rock, a dead dog beside him, partly eaten biscuits still in his hand. They covered him with rocks and earth and walked the long miles back to Blanding to tell the United States Marshal the war was over. The marshal rode out, found the body, and certified in the official record that William Posey had died of blood poisoning from a gunshot wound.

He did not mention the flour, the dog, or the biscuits. He buried Posey in an unmarked grave, and within days men from Blanding had located it, dug up the body, and taken photographs of themselves standing over it. The body was reburied, dug up again, and reburied again, by some accounts three times. Eventually Posey’s own people moved him one last time, to a place no white settler would ever find.

To this day no one outside his family knows exactly where William Posey lies buried. The prisoners in the Blanding stockade were released within days, having been held for a little over a month. As a condition of release, every adult signed away their claim to a much larger tract of country informally proposed years earlier as a Ute reservation, trading it for 160 acres of farmland each in Allen Canyon. Many of the children were sent away to boarding school at Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Reservation in Colorado, separated from parents, grandparents, songs, and language.

Some of those children never came home. Some who did could no longer remember the words for things in their own language. By the summer of 1923 the stockade was taken down, the barbed wire rolled up, the posts pulled from the ground. There was no plaque, no marker.

The newspapers stopped printing the story almost as quickly as they had started. By the end of the year the Posey War was barely mentioned. The Old West did not end in the 1890s with the closing of the frontier. It ended on a quiet morning in March 1923 in a basement courtroom when an old Paiute man watched two young men of his band throw away the last small chance they had to live in peace.

It ended on Comb Ridge when forty-three horses dropped off the side of the world. It ended in a barbed wire stockade where eighty people were held for a month for the crime of being who they were. And it ended in a quiet canyon somewhere in what is now Bears Ears National Monument, where a sixty-year-old man, alone, sat down by a fire, ate biscuits made from flour he could not have known was poisoned, and closed his eyes for the last time. In June of 1924, just over a year after Posey died, the Indian Citizenship Act was signed into law.

When he died in that canyon in April 1923, he died fourteen months too soon. But the people of White Mesa still hold their annual Bear Dance every spring, a healing ceremony older than Blanding, older than the United States. In the long shadows of late afternoon, they dance in their corral of cottonwood branches, a people who refused to vanish, telling their own story.