Kaibab

The Kaibab Paiute homeland covered plateau country north of the Colorado River, where native grasses supplied tiny edible seeds and fed animals including rabbits, grouse and antelope. Gathering and hunting depended on access to these grasslands and to scattered water sources. Farming also formed part of Southern Paiute life wherever irrigation was possible.

Spanish explorers entered Kaibab Paiute lands in 1776. The Domínguez–Escalante expedition, attempting to find a route from Santa Fe to Monterey, turned back in southern Utah. On its return it crossed the Virgin River through an extensive Southern Paiute agricultural landscape. The encounter brought outsiders into a country already organised around food production, springs and paths. Later colonial expansion would threaten those resources, but the eighteenth-century journey encountered an established Indigenous landscape rather than an unoccupied route to California.