A record for posterity · Utah history
What I Don’t Want to Forget
Utah’s Indigenous history before and after the pioneers — documented, sourced, and kept so we don’t repeat it.
This is history I didn’t learn growing up, and learning it changed how I see the place I call home. I don’t know for certain whether my own ancestors took part, but it’s likely, and that weighs on me. What follows is what the documents actually say — every claim linked to its source, and where I couldn’t verify something, I’ve said that outright.
Before you read further
There was fighting on both sides here. Wrongful killing on both sides. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and I haven’t hidden it below. But keep one question in the back of your mind as you read: what do you call it when one population is nearly wiped out and the other multiplies 170-fold in the same 53 years? Mutual conflict doesn’t produce that. Something else does, and the numbers below make the case.
AI-Generated Podcast Overview of This Article
Audio companion · not a substitute for the sourced text below
The Numbers Tell the First Story
1847 — when the pioneers arrived
Statewide estimate of all tribes (Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Shoshone, Navajo, Timpanogos), per an 1861 report by Utah Superintendent of Indian Affairs J.F. Collins. Source · Pioneer count: Deseret News
1900 — fifty-three years later
Settler figure: U.S. Census Bulletin 50, 1900 (original PDF scan). Native figure: 1890 federal reservation enumeration, likely an undercount, per Axios SLC.
— Brigham Young, late in life, acknowledging the scale of the collapse. Source, JOD, Wiki
The U.S. government’s estimate for ALL Native people in Utah in 1847 was 15,000-20,000 — a figure from an 1861 Indian Affairs report whose own author admitted no one had ever obtained reliable numbers (source). The Timpanogos Nation’s own records and histories written with their cooperation put their federation alone at ~70,000
(Wikipedia · Acknowledge Timpanogos · Gottfredson, with access to ~13,000 pages of the tribe’s Interior Dept. records).We do not accept histories of any atrocity written solely by the government that carried it out — we insist on the victims’ own records, survivor testimony, and outside witnesses, precisely because official counts made by the responsible party tend to shrink the harm. That’s why Holocaust history rests on survivor testimony and camp records alongside German state documents, never on the perpetrating state’s numbers alone. The same standard belongs here. So this article gives you both counts, tells you who made each one, and lets you weigh them. Either way, the direction and scale of the collapse — roughly 90% — is attested from multiple sides, including by Brigham Young himself, quoted above.
“It Was the Wild West” vs. What the Documents Show
People sometimes wave this history away as frontier violence, tragic but mutual. The population chart above is the first answer to that: mutual conflict does not produce a 90% collapse on one side and a 170-fold increase on the other. But the stronger answer is in the paper trail. The UN definition of genocide (1948) includes killing members of a group, causing serious harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group, and forcibly transferring its children. Utah’s own archives document, in the leadership’s own words and laws:
- Formal extermination orders voted on and ratified by the territory’s highest religious and civil authority (below)
- Destruction of food sources — fisheries emptied, hunting grounds fenced and settled, “let them eat crickets” [source]
- Legalized taking of Native children into servitude by statute (1852), with 400+ documented children taken, most dying young [LDS Church’s own history topic page], [UofU Library], [ChurchOfJesusChrist.org], [Church History Library | Brigham Young 1852 Speech on Legalizing Slavery], [Archive.org Brigham Young’s 1852 Speech Given to Joint Session of the Legislature]
There was violence in both directions — that’s documented too, and I won’t hide it. But orders, statutes, and outcomes on this scale are not “the wild West.” They are policy.
In Their Own Words: Documented Statements by Church Leadership
Every quote below is tied to an archival document, with the citation and a link. Nothing here is folklore.
“If the Lamanites won’t hearken to our council, they shall be oppressed & killed until they will do it.”
Declared the Timpanogos “have no right to their land” and moved the all-Mormon legislature to “extinguish all titles.”
“I say go [and] kill them… 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.” The vote to exterminate was unanimous.
Formal militia order to exterminate Timpanogos in Utah Valley who would not “sue for peace.” Result: the Fort Utah Massacre, ~102 killed, surrendered men executed in front of their families, ~50 severed heads displayed; surviving women and children “placed in families as servants.”
Encouraged settlers to “buy up the Lamanite children as fast as they could” to “educate them, and teach them the gospel,” so that in a few generations they would become “white and delightsome.”
“Inasmuch as we believe in the Bible… we must believe in slavery. This colored race have been subjected to severe curses… I am a firm believer in slavery.“
“[We] just [as well] make [a] bill here for mules to vote as Negroes [or] Indians… My voice shall be against [it] all the day long.” Apostle Orson Pratt argued the opposite: slavery is “a great evil… enough to cause the angels in heaven to blush!” Pratt lost.
“An Act in Relation to Service” (Black slavery) and “An Act for the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners” (Native servitude, terms up to 20 years) both signed by Governor Young. Utah becomes the only U.S. territory to legalize Native American enslavement by statute.
Look closely at what the numbers say
Here are the same numbers again, side by side:
Utah Native Tribes (est. by government records, tribal records est. ~70,000): ~20,000
Settler population (1847): 1,637
Utah Native Tribes (1890): 2,848
Settler population: 276,749
Whether you use the government’s official count or the Timpanogos Nation’s own tribal records, and just as we trust Jewish survivors’ own records of the Holocaust more than the perpetrating government’s paperwork, the tribal count deserves that same priority here, both versions land in the same place: a population overwhelmingly, catastrophically wiped out, against a settler population that multiplied 170-fold in the same 53 years. Mutual conflict doesn’t produce numbers like that — an intention to exterminate does, and it’s documented in council votes, military orders, and statutes, not just battlefield chaos.
And yes, some Mormon families showed real kindness, took in children, protected people at real risk to themselves. That deserves acknowledgment, and it’s well documented. But too many settlers did not, and not enough stood up to stop what was happening. Kindness from some does not undo policy carried out by the leadership as a whole.
Violence Traceable to a Leadership Order, 1847-1900
This section lists only events where the documentary chain runs through top church/territorial leadership — an order, a vote, a signed directive, or a statute. General frontier violence without that paper trail is excluded on purpose. (Note: the 1863 Bear River Massacre, ~250-490 Shoshone killed, was carried out by the U.S. Army under Col. Connor, not by church order, so it is not listed here, though it belongs in Utah’s larger story.)
Brigham Young ordered a company of ~40 men “to take such measures as would put a final end to their depredations in future.” The militia attacked a small Timpanogos camp accused of cattle theft; the men of the band were killed. First armed engagement between settlers and Utah’s Native people.
Mormon forces attacked a band near Parowan, killing ~25 men; the women and children were taken as slaves. News of the enslavement reached the federal government, which appointed an Indian agent partly in response.
Authorized by the Jan 31 unanimous council vote (Young: “go and kill them”) and Wells’s Special Order No. 2. ~102 Timpanogos killed, including 11+ men who surrendered on a promise of friendship and were executed the next morning in front of their families, some shot on the frozen lake as they fled. A government surgeon beheaded the dead “for research”; heads were displayed at the fort. Eyewitness: Lt. John W. Gunnison, U.S. Army Stansbury Expedition. Surviving women and children “placed in families as servants.”
A series of armed conflicts between Chief Walkara’s people and Mormon militia under the territorial command structure (Young as governor, Wells as militia general), rooted in settler expansion and Young’s suppression of the New Mexican slave trade that Walkara’s band depended on.
Utah’s longest and deadliest Indian war, fought by the Nauvoo Legion under the same church-led command structure. Gottfredson’s research (with Timpanogos records) counts 150+ violent confrontations and roughly 766 Native deaths across Utah’s six massacres combined. Circleville (below) happened inside this war; church officials had ordered the Paiutes disarmed.
The two 1852 laws signed by Governor Young functioned as standing policy for three decades: 400+ Native children from Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Navajo communities were taken into Mormon households, per the LDS Church’s own current history page. Over half died before their early twenties (Gordon & Waite).
All remaining Timpanogos forced onto the Uintah reservation. The 1865 Spanish Fork Treaty had promised payment for their entire homeland (~62.5 cents an acre); Congress never ratified it, and the promised payments were never made — but removal proceeded anyway.
Public “Peace” and Private Enforcers: Wild Bill Hickman
While Brigham Young stated publicly that his policy was to feed rather than fight the Native Americans, his private actions often contradicted this. He relied heavily on violent enforcers like William Adams “Wild Bill” Hickman, a confessed Danite and personal bodyguard to Young. Hickman was frequently called upon when acts of extreme violence or assassination were deemed necessary by leadership.
Hickman’s involvement in the aftermath of the 1850 Fort Utah Massacre is one of the darkest chapters in this history. After the militia routed the Timpanogos, Chief Old Elk fled into the canyons and ultimately froze to death. Hickman found the body and personally hacked off Old Elk’s head with a Bowie knife, seeking a $100 bounty allegedly placed by mountain man Jim Bridger.
Hickman returned to Fort Utah and proudly displayed the chief’s severed head, hanging it by its long hair from the eaves of the fort to terrorize the surviving prisoners. Historical accounts indicate that seeing Hickman’s “trophy” is what inspired Dr. James Blake to order the decapitation of the other 50 executed prisoners for “medical research.” According to a local legend memorialized on a historical marker, and considered doubtful by historians, Old Elk’s wife fell to her death fleeing up Rock Canyon during the retreat — the origin of the name “Squaw Peak.” That name was formally retired in September 2022, when the U.S. Board on Geographic Names renamed the peak “Kyhv Peak,” from a Ute word for “mountain,” as part of a federal effort to remove the word “squaw” from place names nationwide.
Hickman later confessed to his crimes, including assassinations he claimed were ordered directly by leadership, in his autobiography Brigham’s Destroying Angel.
William A. Hickman’s Autobiography, Brigham’s Destroying Angel (1872 original text, scanned on Archive.org):
https://archive.org/details/brighamsdestroyi00hick
LDS Church History Biographical Database (Confirming William Adams Hickman’s position as Brigham Young’s bodyguard and militiaman):
https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/chd/individual/william-adams-hickman-1815
KUER / NPR Utah (Documenting the Timpanogos Nation’s history of Old Elk, the display of his head, and his wife’s escape up Rock Canyon):
https://www.kuer.org/race-religion-social-justice/2026-03-02/an-lds-pioneer-era-extermination-order-still-weighs-on-the-timpanogos-nation
The “Intertribal Warfare” Argument vs. What Really Caused the Collapse
When confronted with this history, a common counter-argument is that conflict and exploitation weren’t invented by the pioneers. It is a historical fact that tribes fought, killed, and sometimes enslaved members of other tribes. Most notably, after obtaining horses and firearms, some Western Ute bands under leaders like Chief Walkara developed a predatory “raid-and-trade” economy. They raided non-equestrian neighbors like the Southern Paiutes, capturing women and children to sell into the New Mexican slave trade along the Old Spanish Trail.
Settlers often packaged their participation in this system as “care” or unavoidable necessity. When Mormon leaders encouraged members to “buy up” Native children, it was framed as saving them from being killed by Ute raiders or redeeming them to become “white and delightsome” through religious education. But this framing ignores that settler expansion, including fencing lands, depleting hunting grounds, and taking over water sources, was what plunged local tribes into the extreme starvation and desperation that accelerated these internal conflicts in the 1850s.
The European Double Standard
Attempting to use intertribal conflict to explain away a 90% population collapse reveals a glaring double standard. For centuries, European nations tore themselves apart in industrial-scale slaughter — the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and countless internal massacres. Yet, we would never argue that because Englishmen killed Frenchmen, an outside power was justified in arriving, seizing the entire European continent, forcing the survivors into tiny tracts of land, and systematically taking their children into servitude for their own “betterment.”
Intertribal friction, while violent, kept the total regional population relatively stable for centuries. A raid-and-trade economy requires the other population to survive. The catastrophic 90% plummet only occurred when a massive, permanent population arrived with centralized policies designed to replace one population with another.
Circleville, April 1866
During the Black Hawk War, settlers in Circleville lured a peaceful band of ~26-30 Koosharem Paiutes into town, disarmed and imprisoned them, then killed them after an escape attempt — the men shot, the women and children taken from the cellar one by one and killed, most by having their throats cut, so no witnesses would remain. Between 15 and 26 died. No one was ever charged. The mass grave has never been found. A memorial came 150 years later, in 2016.
— A Circleville guard’s own recollection, quoted in Albert Winkler, “The Circleville Massacre,” Utah Historical Quarterly 55 (1987), p. 18, via Utah Communication History Encyclopedia. Witness A.C. Anderson recalled seeing the throat of the first person brought up from the cellar cut. Utah Division of State History
The May 10, 1866 Deseret News buried the event in a single line: “In a skirmish with the savages, near Circleville, in that region, several of them got killed, but no whites.” [source] That is how a massacre disappears from history for a century.
The children who escaped, and what happened to them
Three children slipped out during the killings and were found the next day hiding in a nearby cave. What followed is documented:
- They were taken by James Allred to Marysvale, who intended to sell or trade the children as slaves.
- The little girl was killed by a violent bludgeoning.
- One boy’s fate is unknown. No record of him has been found.
- The third boy was taken to Spring City and sold to Peter Monson for a horse and a bushel of wheat. Monson first housed him in a tool shed. The boy befriended Monson’s daughter, whose face had been disfigured by burns, and Peter and Bertha Monson eventually adopted him, naming him David Monson. He lived into adulthood, known as “Indian Dave,” and is buried in Saratoga, Wyoming.
In addition to the three younger children, at least three or four of the very youngest, “too young to talk,” were spared during the killings themselves and adopted by Circleville families. [Utah Division of State History] And separately, Paiute oral tradition, engraved on the 2016 monument itself, records two young men who broke through the guards, ran over the cemetery hill under gunfire (one shot in the ribs, a flesh wound he dressed with plant medicine and his own shirt), and escaped to Parowan or Beaver. That account passed from Walker Ammon (~1854-1920) to Jimmy Timmican of the Koosharem band (~1895-1972), and is now cut in stone. [Monument text, Historical Marker Database]
Chief Black Hawk (Antonga / Nu’Iunts)
Timpanogos war chief, son of Chief Sanpitch (who was himself murdered in 1866). Wounded at Gravelly Ford in 1866 while rescuing the warrior Shi-Nav-Egin; died of complications in 1870 at Spring Lake, after spending his final years riding village to village, deathly ill, apologizing and pleading for peace.
His grave was robbed (1911 per some accounts, 1919 per the contemporary newspaper record), his bones displayed in a Spanish Fork hardware store window and then at LDS Temple Square for decades. His remains were finally located at BYU’s Museum of Peoples and Cultures and reburied at Spring Lake on May 4, 1996, before 2,000+ people.
Slavery in Utah, by the Numbers
A name behind the numbers
The statistics above are not abstract. Chief Mary Murdock Meyer’s own great-great-grandmother, Perneta, daughter of Chief Arapeen, was taken by Joseph Stacy Murdoch, a member of the Mormon militia. She attempted to flee once; Porter Rockwell found her and brought her back. She is reported to be the first Native American married in an LDS temple. Despite photography being common for others of that era, no photograph of her is known to survive.
“Not well, I guess it is as serious, but it’s the Holocaust, what they did to the people there. I mean, we weren’t put in concentration camps. We’re just killed but or shoved over here and maybe slaves or whatever.” — Chief Mary Murdock Meyer, on her family’s history. Girlscamp podcast, April 2026
Slaves as tithing: After enslaver James Flake died in 1850, his widow donated Green Flake — one of the three enslaved men in the very first 1847 pioneer company — to the LDS Church as tithing. He then labored for Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball. Deseret News, 1997 · Wikipedia, “Civil rights and Mormonism”
One last thing
Forced assimilation gets remembered as a kindness. It wasn’t.
Imagine someone asking to stay in your home for just the couch, then quietly taking your bed. Then your kitchen, your spare room, your living room and family room — until you’re told you can stay in your own house only if you dress like them, speak like them, and adopt their religion. Imagine them handing you alcohol, telling the whole neighborhood you’re a drunk because of it, and then using the very trouble they caused as the reason you need to become them.
— Chief Mary Murdock Meyer, describing the extermination order in her own words, independent of anything written above. Girlscamp podcast, April 2026
More from the interview
— Chief Mary Murdock Meyer
— Chief Mary Murdock Meyer
Hear It From the Timpanogos Nation Directly
Everything above comes from archives, statutes, and secondhand scholarship. But the Timpanogos Nation is not history, it’s a living nation with a sitting chief today. In April 2026, Chief Mary Murdock Meyer, Chief Executive of the Timpanogos Nation, sat down for a long, generous conversation on the Girlscamp podcast, hosted by Hayley Rawle. She speaks about Timpanogos life before 1847, the extermination order, her own grandmother’s story, the boarding school era, and what she wishes Utah pioneer descendants understood today. I’d encourage you to listen to the whole thing before you read anything else I’ve written here.
“The Timpanogos Nation & Mormon Settlers with Chief Mary Murdock Meyer,” Girlscamp podcast with Hayley Rawle, released April 8, 2026 (1 hr 9 min).
In her own words
“Understand and acknowledge the fact that we still exist. That’s the big problem, is we’ve been hidden so much that people don’t even know we’re still here.”
— Chief Mary Murdock Meyer, Chief Executive of the Timpanogos Nation, in answer to what she wishes Utah pioneer descendants understood
| Date / Period | Event or Action | Key Figures / Leadership | Description & Impact | Victim Group(s) | Casualties / Displacement | Policy Type | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| March 1849 | Battle Creek (Pleasant Grove) | Brigham Young | Young ordered a company to “put a final end to their depredations.” Militia attacked a small camp accused of cattle theft; first armed engagement between settlers and Native people. | Timpanogos | The men of the band were killed | Extermination | [1] |
| Jan 1850 | Special Order No. 1 | Apostle George A. Smith | Declared the Timpanogos had no right to their land and moved the legislature to extinguish all Native titles. | Timpanogos | Not in source | Removal | [1] |
| Jan 31, 1850 | Vote to Exterminate | Brigham Young; Council of Twelve | Brigham Young stated “I say go [and] kill them… We have no peace until the men [are] killed off.” The vote to exterminate was unanimous. | Timpanogos | Not in source | Extermination | [1] |
| Feb 1850 | Fort Utah Massacre (Provo) | Gen. Daniel H. Wells (Special Order No. 2); Brigham Young; Wild Bill Hickman | Formal order to exterminate those who would not “sue for peace.” Surrendered men were executed; over 50 severed heads were displayed at the fort. Surviving women and children were taken as servants. | Timpanogos | ~102 killed; surviving women and children placed in families as servants | Extermination / Enslavement | [1] |
| Winter 1849-50 | Parowan region attack | Mormon forces | Forces attacked a band near Parowan. News of the resulting enslavement reached the federal government, leading to the appointment of a federal Indian agent. | Not in source | ~25 men killed; women and children taken as slaves | Enslavement | [1] |
| May 1851 | Order to “buy up” children | Brigham Young | Encouraged settlers at Parowan to buy Native children to educate them so they would become “white and delightsome.” | Lamanite (Native American) | Not in source | Enslavement | [1] |
| Feb 4 & Mar 7, 1852 | Act for the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners | Governor Brigham Young | Utah became the only U.S. territory to legalize Native American enslavement by statute, with terms of servitude lasting up to 20 years. | Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Shoshone, Navajo | 400+ children taken into servitude; over half died young | Enslavement | [1] |
| 1853-54 | Walker War | Brigham Young; Daniel H. Wells | Conflicts between Chief Walkara’s people and militia rooted in settler expansion and the suppression of the New Mexican slave trade. | Timpanogos / Walkara’s band | Not in source | Removal / Conflict | [1] |
| April 1866 | Circleville Massacre | Settlers / Militia; Church officials | A peaceful band was lured to town, disarmed, and imprisoned. Men were shot; women and children had their throats cut. Survivors were sold or traded as slaves. | Koosharem Paiutes | 15 to 26 died; children taken as slaves | Extermination / Enslavement | [1] |
| 1865-1872 | Black Hawk War | Nauvoo Legion; Church-led command structure | Utah’s longest and deadliest conflict. Included over 150 violent confrontations and six major massacres between settlers and Indigenous groups. | Timpanogos | ~766 Native deaths | Extermination / Removal | [1] |
| 1872 | Removal to Uintah reservation | U.S. Congress | Remaining Timpanogos were forced onto a reservation after the U.S. Congress refused to ratify treaties. Promised payments from the 1865 Spanish Fork Treaty were never made. | Timpanogos | Forced displacement of remaining tribe members | Removal | [1] |
[1] See full citations for each event above under their respective sections. Table compiled from the same sources cited throughout this article: Utah State Archives, Wikipedia (cross-referenced with primary sources), Gottfredson’s Black Hawk War history, and LDS Church History Library records.
