This namesake of Ouray County was a Native American Chief of the Ute Nation. Ouray was born November 13, 1833 in what is now Taos, Taos County, New Mexico.  His father, Guera Murah, was a Jicarilla Apache adopted into the Ute, and his mother was an Uncompahgre Ute.  They named him Ouray, "the Arrow," because of a great meteor shower* the year he was born. He was not raised by his parents but by a Spanish family in Taos. He learned Spanish, English, only later did he learn Apache and the Ute language with its different dialects. At the age of 17, Ouray arrived in modern-day Colorado to be a member of the Tabeguache (Uncompahgre) Ute band, where his father was already a leader. He spent much of his youth working for Mexican sheepherders, but fought both the Kiowas and the Sioux while living among the Tabeguache.  At his father's death in 1860, Ouray became chief of the band.

He married Black Water and started a family with her. After her early death, he married Chipeta,  a beautiful Uncompahgre Ute 10 years younger than he toward whom he always showed deep devotion.  She was born into the Kiowa Apache Tribe in 1843, but her parents were both killed in a raid shortly after her birth. The Uncompahgre Utes found and raised her as their own. They named her Chipeta, meaning White Singing Bird. She was appointed to care for Chief Ouray's son after the death of his first wife, and in 1859 they were married. She became his close confidant and would frequently accompany her husband to peace delegations. . Although she did not have children, they reared his children by Black Water, as well as some orphans they adopted.

While fighting the Sioux in 1863, Ouray lost his only son to captivity by them. Despite attempts by the United States government to gain the boy's release, Ouray was unable to find him. A decade later in 1873, visiting the Indian Commissioner at Cheyenne, Wyoming, Ouray heard from a woman who lived with the Sioux that his son lived, but had been sold to the Southern Arapaho. A search for his son was unsuccessful.

Chief Ouray's diverse background and mastery of languages made him instrumental to Ute communications. Although he sought reconciliation between peoples, with the belief that war with the whites likely meant the demise of the Ute tribe, other, more militant Utes, considered him a coward, calling him The White Man's Friend. Ouray never cut his long Ute-fashion hair, though he often dressed in the European-American style. About the time that the White River Indian Agency was created in western Colorado, the government recognized Ouray as chief of the Uncompahgre; the White River Utes had separate leaders.

Ouray always attempted to secure the best possible conditions for his people while still remaining friendly to the whites.  In 1863 Ouray helped to negotiate a treaty with the federal government in which the Utes ceded all lands east of the Continental Divide.  With this treaty, he unknowingly set in motion the creation of reservation lands in Colorado's mountain valleys, and it received congressional ratification in 1864.  Each additional negotiation would bring increasing losses of land for the Indians, and some resented Ouray's friendship with the whites and the special favors he received from them. Disgruntled Utes made various attempts on Ouray's life, but he survived and maintained his conciliatory attitude.

On March 2, 1868, Ouray struck a deal with his friend, Kit Carson. The Kit Carson Treaty gave some six million acres of land to the Utes. In return they were guaranteed, no one would pass over the remaining Ute land, with an exception of authorized roads and railways. In 1868 he traveled to Washington, D.C., to represent his people and was appointed Chief of the Ute Nation by the US government. Ouray and his wife made several visits to the nation's capital and on one occasion met with President Ulysses S. Grant. 

In 1873 the Ute Nation signed the Brunot Treaty to allow mining in the San Juan Mountains, their best lands. The United States had offered $11,000.00 to the Utes, but but their negotiator, Otto Mears, was unscrupulous, and paid only $2.00 to each person who signed the treaty, there by saving the U.S. almost every dime it was willing to spend..  Though he managed to keep the Uncompahgre Tribe calm, Chief Ouray was unable to control other tribes within the Ute Nation who sought revenge for the unfair treaty.

With the discovery of gold in Colorado and the resulting influx of miners, Indian-white relations deteriorated. Finally, in the spring of 1878, Nathan Meeker, an Indian agent, triggered a series of events that led to the relocation of Ouray's people to Utah. The White River Utes had become infuriated over Meeker's attempt to force them to farm. Meeker called in federal troops, but on September 30, 1879, the White River Utes set fire to the Meeker agency, killing Meeker, ten of his employees and  took several women as captives. When the government appealed to Ouray for help, the influential chief intervened and secured the release of the hostages and even welcomed them into his home while the situation was defused. Six months after the Meeker massacre, Congress forced the Ute Nation to a reservation near the Sawatch Range. Repercussions from this incident were devastating for the Indians. In 1880 Ouray traveled for the last time to Washington where he signed a treaty providing for the removal of the White River Utes as well as his own Uncompahgre band from Colorado to the Uintah and newly created Ouray reservations in Utah. President Rutherford B. Hayes called Ouray "the most intellectual man I've ever conversed with."

Shortly after his final return from Washington, still in 1880, Ouray died.  Upon his death, he was secretly buried according to Ute custom, in the rocks south of Ignacio in LaPlata County.

Following Ouray's death, Chipeta continued as a leader of her tribe. Much of the money she had at the end of her life, she spent caring for orphan children. Chipeta died August 17, 1924 in Uintah County, Utah.  was originally buried in Bitter Creek, Utah, at the bottom of a sand wash.

In 1925, authorities sanctioned to have both Chief Ouray's and Chipeta's bodies  re-interred at the site of the couple's farm.

*According to oral history Ouray was born on a clear night of November 13, 1833, during the Leonid meteor showers, which was taken as an omen.