The Elk Mountain Mission: A Settlement That Lasted Four Months
Near Moab, Utah
In the spring of eighteen fifty-five, forty Latter-day Saint missionaries arrived in the Moab valley and set about building a settlement. They called it the Elk Mountain Mission. It lasted four months.
The missionaries built a small fort near the Colorado River crossing and planted crops in the river bottomland, working with peaceful intentions and a genuine hope of developing relations with the Ute people who lived in the valley. The Ute bands of the Moab area had their own claims to the resources there, including the game and the farmable bottomland the missionaries had moved onto. Over the summer of eighteen fifty-five, tensions built.
In September, missionaries were killed in separate incidents with Ute men. The surviving missionaries abandoned the fort and retreated north, and the mission was finished after barely four months of existence. The fort stood empty for more than two decades before the next settlers arrived.
The experience at Elk Mountain illustrates the central tension of Mormon colonization in the canyon country: missions were sent to build peaceful relations with Native peoples while simultaneously occupying land those peoples depended on. The two goals were not compatible. The missionaries who came to the Moab valley were not soldiers, and most had genuinely peaceful intentions, but they arrived in a place that was already occupied, with resources that the Ute people could not afford to share without cost.
When the conflict became lethal, the mission ended. The name Elk Mountain referred to the La Sal Mountains to the southeast. The valley itself would wait for its next chapter.
