The man settlers called Black Hawk was born around 1830 near Spring Lake, at the south end of Utah Valley. His people knew him as Antonga. He grew up through the years when the valley's creek bottoms filled with farms, and the Daily Herald has noted that close relatives of his were among the victims of violence in Utah County during that time.
The winter of 1864 to 1865 brought smallpox and near starvation to the Ute bands of central Utah. The elder Arapeen, Wakara's brother, died in the epidemic. Some Utes blamed the settlers for the sickness. Bands wintering in Sanpete Valley killed and ate at least fifteen head of settlers' cattle, which they said they did to avoid "the very real threat of starvation." Congress had passed a law in 1864 meant to move them to the Uinta Basin.
Manti, April 1865
In early April 1865 settlers and Ute leaders met at Manti to settle the matter of the cattle. Arapeen's son, Jake Arapeen, pressed his own claim over his father's death. John Lowry, who worked for the federal Indian Office, pulled him from his horse by the hair. Jake Arapeen and Antonga rode out of town, and Lowry went home for a gun. Within days a settler named Peter Ludvigsen was dead, and Black Hawk was leading a mixed force of Utes, Paiutes and Navajos on raids for cattle across central Utah.
Two months later the war shadowed a council held near Utah Lake. In June 1865, while Ute leaders met with Superintendent O. H. Irish and Brigham Young at the Spanish Fork Indian Farm to sign away their central Utah lands, Black Hawk's men struck at Thistle Valley. Sanpitch, who had walked out of the council in anger, was suspected of ties to the uprising and later fought in it.
Down Spanish Fork Canyon
Spanish Fork Canyon became a raiders' road. In June 1866, after Utes led by Mountain, Isaac Potter and Richard James attacked a militia detachment near Indianola, the pursuit ran up Spanish Fork Canyon until the riders scattered at Soldier Summit. Late on June 26, 1866, a raiding party led by the warrior known as Mountain came down Maple Canyon and drove off about fifteen horses and thirty-eight cattle from a ranch near Mapleton. Colonel Creer of the territorial militia gave chase with a posse that included Albert Dimmick, and a second party rode from Springville. They caught the raiders in Little Diamond Fork. Dimmick was mortally wounded and died as he was being carried back over the summit. Another man, Edmundson, was found the next day, scalped. Six Utes died in the fight, by the count of the historian Phillip B. Gottfredson.
Black Hawk was not at Diamond Fork. Sixteen days earlier, at Gravelly Ford near Richfield, he had been shot while trying to rescue a fallen warrior, and the wound never healed. By the end of the war the territory had called more than 4,700 militiamen into service and spent more than $1.5 million, according to a state highway marker at Spring Lake, and settlers abandoned some 25 settlements in five counties. Research compiled for that marker counts at least 70 settlers killed and at least 140 Native people, possibly more.
It's actually a real person we're laying to rest here.Wayne Gardner, at the 1996 reburial
A mission of peace
In August 1867 Black Hawk rode into the Uintah agency and said he was ready to talk peace, and the next year he gave a verbal peace to Superintendent Head. In 1869 he asked Brigham Young to help him announce his decision and set out on what the Daily Herald called a mission of peace, from St. George north to Springville. In meetinghouses across Sanpete he spoke of forgiveness; at one he said he "had buried the hatchet and meant to keep it buried." Others kept raiding.
He went home to Spring Lake. He died there in September 1870, of tuberculosis on top of the old wound, and his people buried him in a ravine nearby. Brigham Young, by the marker's account, called him the most formidable opponent the settlers had faced in years.
The end, and the long road home
Raiding by smaller bands went on until federal troops stepped in in 1872. That summer Kanosh and Tabby led groups off the Uintah reservation, and a council at Springville, in Utah County, persuaded them to go back. A peace treaty was signed at Mount Pleasant on September 7, 1872. By 1879 most Utah Utes lived year round at Uintah, their numbers cut from about 4,500 in 1859 to about 800.
Black Hawk's grave did not stay undisturbed. Miners dug it up in 1911, the Deseret News reported; other accounts give 1919. A local physician kept the bones and later had them donated to the museum of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they were later located in the collections of the Museum of Peoples and Cultures at Brigham Young University. In the 1990s Shane Armstrong, a Pleasant Grove boy looking for an Eagle Scout project, asked why the grave was not registered with the Forest Service, which now owns the land. His questions led to the remains. Charmaine Thompson, the Forest Service heritage program leader, did the paperwork to return them to his people.
On a Saturday in May 1996 Antonga was reburied in the Spring Lake town park, below the mountain where he had first been laid. His family and descendants of a brother named Mountain came, along with Spring Lake residents. The casket carried pine boughs, sage and berry branches tied with strips of colored cloth. "It's actually a real person we're laying to rest here," said Wayne Gardner, a Ute tribal member who spoke at the service.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/black-hawk-war-in-utah-valley/
