Fort Utah and the Provo War

The winter of eighteen forty-nine to eighteen fifty was a season of accumulating misunderstandings and deliberate provocations on both sides of a line that neither the Timpanogos nor the Mormon settlers had agreed to. Fort Utah had been established in April of eighteen forty-nine, planted directly on the grounds the Timpanogos used for their annual fish festival, close to the main village on the river. The settlers had promised, when Timpanogos men stopped them three miles north of the Provo River, that they would not drive the Indians from their lands.

The promise did not hold. By January of eighteen fifty, tensions had produced violence in both directions. A Timpanogos man was killed by three settler men in a dispute over stolen goods.

A group of Timpanogos responded by taking cattle. Territorial Governor Brigham Young authorized a militia campaign, directing that the men be killed but the women and children spared if they submitted. What followed in early February of eighteen fifty was a multi-day siege.

Ninety Mormon militiamen with rifles and a cannon surrounded an encampment of Timpanogos families on the Provo River. Estimates vary, but between forty and one hundred Timpanogos men and one woman were killed during the siege and the subsequent pursuit of those who tried to escape. More than forty women, children, and a few surviving men were taken prisoner and transported north to Salt Lake Valley, where they were distributed as household servants.

Chief Old Elk was among those killed. His head was cut off and displayed at the fort. The descendants of the Timpanogos who survived have never been federally recognized as a tribe.

That fight for recognition continues.