Special Order No. 2 by Gen. Daniel Wells of the Nauvoo Legion, ordering a militia to "exterminate" any Indigenous person in the Utah Valley who shows any hostility to Mormon settlers. Image: Utah State Archives, via FamilySearch.org
One of the deadliest slaughters of Utah's Indigenous people by white pioneers began 175 years ago this week: The Fort Utah Massacre.
- This is Old News, our Monday trek through Utah's past.
What happened: Up to 100 Timpanogos people were killed on Brigham Young's orders in an attack that reportedly started with a fight over a shirt.
Friction point: In 1849 or early 1850, a group of pioneers in the Utah Valley accused a Timpanogos neighbor of stealing a shirt and fatally shot him during the dispute. They "ripped his bowels open and filled them with rocks" to sink his body in the Provo River, Young later wrote.
- Meanwhile, settlers had been sending word to Young that the Timpanogos were taking their corn and cattle — possibly retribution for the killing.
Behind the scenes: When the settlers asked Young to support an attack on the Timpanogos, he initially demurred, saying it was excessive punishment for theft.
- But the settlers and other church leaders pressed him until Jan. 31, 1850, when Young ordered the militia "not to leave the [Utah Valley] until every Indian was out," his general wrote.
What they said: "Let the women and children live if they behave themselves. … We have no peace until the men [are] killed off — never treat the Indian as your equal," Young said, according to meeting notes quoted by historian Howard Christy.
The following weeks soaked the Utah Valley with blood.
- On Valentine's Day, the militia promised mercy to a group of Timpanogos men whose wives and children were already captured — but executed them after they surrendered, wrote J.W. Gunnison, a U.S. Army lieutenant who was in Utah to map the Salt Lake Valley.
- Widows and orphans were "placed in families as servants, to make white people of them," Gunnison added. A California-bound U.S. Indian agent who learned of their abduction wrote to Washington, D.C. to warn slavery was alive in Utah. Most of the enslaved Timpanogos died or escaped.
Zoom in: A government surgeon with Gunnison's expedition decapitated the fallen Timpanogos to send their skulls to Washington, D.C., for medical research, settler Abner Blackburn wrote.
- But first the heads were displayed at Fort Utah — the settlement that would become Provo. In her memoir, settler Anna Clark Hale — who was 8 years old at the time — recalls the "horrible and frightening scene." Epsy Jane Williams, then a teenager, estimated 40-50 heads were brought there.
Between the lines: Young later wrote that he was not initially told the conflict was triggered by the killing of a man accused of stealing a shirt.
- Young himself characterized the man's death as murder.
By the numbers: Contemporaneous accounts estimated around 40 Timpanogos were killed — a figure historian Jared Farmer describes as "deliberate undercounting."
- Williams, the teenager, cited a death toll of over 100, which Farmer says is more likely.
- One white militia member died.