By Virginia Simmons The story of this mountain pass really begins a few hundred years before any Europeans entered North America. Until the U.S. Government and pioneers pushed the Ute Tribe onto the reservations on the Western Slope in 1868, the nomadic Ute Indian hunter-gatherers of the Tabeguache Band often used this route as they roamed from the Uncompahgre Valley to the Arkansas River Valley and beyond. The title of Marshall Pass appeared after a crossing in the autumn of 1873 by Lieutenant William Louis Marshall. He was in charge of a survey party that had been mapping in the ...