Against the backdrop of a snow-covered Mount Timpanogos, members of the Timpanogos Nation and others gathered in Utah Valley to remember a tragic event known as the Provo River Massacre.
In early 1850, high tensions with Latter-day Saint pioneers led Brigham Young to approve an order to kill any Native people who put up a fight. There’s now a call to acknowledge and rescind that order.
Tribal council member Perry Murdock thanked the memorial walk participants. They were there to retrace the path where some of his ancestors died.
“Their blood's in this ground, and their spirits [are] still around here,” Murdock said. “And that's what we believe — our ancestors are around us all the time.”
He sang and played a drum to call his ancestors and bless the group before they left. Cars whizzed by — a contrast with a song passed down over generations. His cousin, Julian Reed, said they’ve prayed in ceremonies for 40 years for the truth to come out about the massacre.
The Timpanogos Nation is a branch of the Snake Shoshone and a distinct Indian tribe, separate from the Ute Nation.
After he learned about the tragedy, pioneer descendant Kenneth Cox started this memorial walk three years ago. It follows 4.5 miles from the Fort Utah monument at a park near Utah Lake to the mouth of Rock Canyon.
“I grew up in this valley and went to public schools, took Utah history, and never heard about this,” he said. “I was appalled and wanted to do something to memorialize and remember.”
Before the early Latter-day Saint settlers arrived, there were far fewer trees in the valley and many more Native Americans. Historians estimate there were 20,000 Native people in Utah at the time. The Timpanogos Nation says there were about 70,000 along the Wasatch Front from the Bear River all the way down to Mount Nebo.
Everything changed when the newcomers built Fort Utah. Suddenly, there was competition for resources in the Utah Valley, and animosity grew.
A big turning point came in an argument over a shirt. In the summer of 1849, near what’s now called the Provo River, three settlers came upon a Native man they had nicknamed “Old Bishop.” He wore a shirt that they accused him of stealing from a clothesline. He said he had traded fairly for it and refused to give it back.
They took the shirt off forcefully, and one of the men shot him, said historian D. Robert Carter, author of “Founding Fort Utah.”
“And then to make things worse, they took his body, eviscerated him and put rocks in his cavity where his stomach had been and sank him in the river, hoping that it would put him out of sight,” Carter said. “But it didn't.”
The Timpanogos people demanded that the settlers turn the killer over. They refused. The Native Americans then demanded compensation in the form of goods. Again, the settlers refused.
Over the next several months, conflict escalated as the Latter-day Saints expanded their settlement and Native people stole crops and shot at livestock they saw as trespassing on their land. So the pioneers asked their prophet and elected governor of the provisional State of Deseret, Brigham Young, what to do.
“I say, go and kill them,” Young said in a meeting about the issue.
That resulted in Special Orders Nos. 1 and 2 issued by the commanding officer, Daniel H. Wells, who was also the provisional state’s attorney general. The territorial militia was ordered to put a stop to “all hostile Indians, exterminating such as do not separate themselves from their hostile clans and sue for peace.”
A two-day battle ensued at a nearby Timpanogos village in February 1850. Today, it’s near a Walgreens and a Target in Provo. The villagers eventually fled, and the settlers pursued them, killing more while others died from exposure. The tribal nation says the militia also took and executed some prisoners.
At least 40 Native people were killed, Carter said, but there were probably more deaths that weren’t recorded. The tribal nation believes it may actually be more than 100.
One of those killed was Chief Old Elk. After his death, the settlers decapitated him and displayed his head in the fort. His wife then climbed the cliffs of Rock Canyon to escape the settlers and either purposefully or accidentally fell to her death. As the story goes, settlers named the peak after her with a derogatory term, Squaw Peak. It was renamed in 2022 to Khyv Peak.
According to Carter’s research, the Timpanogos killed only a single settler in battle. It’s a wonder any of the Native people survived, Carter comments in his book, because the Timpanogos lost almost everything in the middle of a harsh winter.
“The first pioneers, they wanted the valley for themselves, and we were in their way,” said Mary Murdock Meyer, chief executive of the Timpanogos Nation.
There are only about a thousand of her people left today, and a lot of them, she said, still live in fear because the extermination order remains in effect.
“It's still being utilized in the aspect we're still being ignored,” she said. “We've been exterminated from public view.”
“And when you speak out, there’s a lot of retaliation that takes place. So we're trying to move forward in a positive light and let people know that we're not the bloodthirsty savages that history writes about.”
Their name has slowly been erased from the valley. When the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake were connected, she said it used to be called Timpanogos Lake. And the Provo River was the Timpanogos River.
Perry Murdock sees parallels between the Special Orders and the 1838 Missouri order to kill Mormons or drive them out of the state.
“They escaped the extermination order themselves, only to come out here and put one on our people,” he said.
Timpanogos Nation people want The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Gov. Spencer Cox to publicly apologize and rescind the extermination orders. If that happens, Meyer thinks her people’s response will be similar to the healing Latter-day Saints felt when Missouri rescinded its extermination order in 1976.
“It would just make our people be more at peace,” she said. “Maybe have some faith in this state. Maybe children are not growing up in fear anymore.”
It might also give them some momentum to get the official recognition they want as an independent tribe.
It’s been 176 years since the massacre, and she said it’s time for things to be fixed. Utahns learning what happened is a start. She prayed that the group on the memorial walk felt what her ancestors felt.
