In the last days of March 1849, about thirty men, some with sons and a few with whole families, drove wagons south from the Salt Lake Valley toward a river the Timpanogos Utes had fished for generations. Their colony was approved almost reluctantly. Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had not planned to settle Utah Valley that spring, but a trader named Alexander Williams announced he was going to farm there, and a group of former Nauvoo fishermen kept pressing for a fishery on Utah Lake. When the high council took up the plan on March 10, John D. Lee recorded its aims: thirty families who would put in crops, "open a fishery, introduce schools," and teach the Timpanogos to farm.
On the evening of March 13 the volunteers chose John S. Higbee, a commercial fisherman, as president and bishop, with Isaac Higbee and Dimick B. Huntington as counselors. Early historians dated Provo's founding to March 12, but the Provo historian D. Robert Carter, working from the diary of Zina Diantha Young and the memoir of George Washington Bean, shows that the party reached the Provo River on April 1. In 1969 a Provo committee settled on April 3, the day work on the fort began, as the city's official birthday.
A line across the trail
The last miles ran along the shore that would become Vineyard. Near present Pleasant Grove the wagons left the dry bench where Orem now stands and took a lowland trail that Carter traces along the approximate route of Geneva Road, east of the lake's marshes. About two and a half miles short of the river, a teenaged Ute rider named Ang-a-Te Wats galloped up, dismounted in front of the lead wagon and warned the settlers to go no farther. A larger party followed, possibly led by the war chief Old Elk. After two or three tense hours the interpreter Huntington was made to "swear by the sun" that the newcomers would not drive the Utes from their land, and word went to Little Chief, head of the Timpanogos band. That night, while the men ate suckers from the river and Bean stewed a crane for his eighteenth birthday supper, about forty warriors kept up war cries across the water until morning.
The fort rose on bottomland just south of the river, where Interstate 15 now crosses the Provo River. The earliest map, drawn that spring, shows two facing rows of eleven cabins. Most were about sixteen feet square, built of cottonwood and of box elder logs cut on Box Elder Island, a dense thicket downstream where the river split and rejoined. Windows were cloth, leather or greased paper. Pickets closed the gaps, and by Bean's recollection the finished rectangle measured about 165 by 330 feet around an open square of an acre and a half. Samuel Clark's daughter Anna remembered her family's cabin as logs with a dirt roof, a bare ground floor and a fireplace, holding twelve people that first winter.
Fish, frost and first bread
South of the fort, surveyors laid out Fort Field, a band of farmland about a mile long divided into 58 lots of five acres, one of them reserved for a cemetery. On June 7 Bean, serving as clerk, counted 188 people at the fort: 107 males and 81 females, with an average age of 20.5. There were ten babies under a year old, and at least five women were expecting.
Food was thin until harvest. Many families had brought cows but little flour, and they leaned on wild roots, greens, game and above all fish. In May the Timpanogos and visiting bands gathered on the lower Provo for their spring fish festival, when suckers ran so thick, Bean wrote, that the river was full from bank to bank for days. Bean joined their horse races, foot races and wrestling and learned much of their language. Visiting in the summer, Parley P. Pratt wrote, "I saw thousands caught by hand, both by Indians and whites," and said a hundred fish could be had for a plug of tobacco the size of a finger.
Weather tested them. A three hour snowstorm on May 23 and a killing frost that night ruined much of the young crop, and the farmers replanted. On July 16 Peter W. Conover began cutting the first wheat. His sons hauled it to a mill in the Salt Lake Valley, and the family ate its first bread since April. The colonists made their own rules, too. On July 2 a mass meeting set fines of $25 to $100 for gambling with the Utes and banned reckless shooting near the fort, and on July 4 about sixty men organized a militia under Jefferson Hunt. Samuel Clark opened the valley's first tannery, curing hides with bark hauled down from Provo Canyon.
I saw thousands caught by hand, both by Indians and whites.Parley P. Pratt, 1849
A school, a cannon and a sick winter
That August Zina Diantha Young, Huntington's sister, pitched a tent and taught what was very likely the valley's first school, an alphabet class with slab benches and a McGuffey reader. Her pupil Jane Park later recalled Ute visitors peering in through a small opening. Young went home on September 18. Older Provo histories instead credit Mary Ann Turner, daughter of Chauncey Turner, with the first school in the old fort. In late August the settlers finished a bastion in the middle of the square, a roof of brush and dirt on forked posts carrying a six pound cannon, with meeting space beneath. On September 1, while firing it for visiting gold seekers, a charge went off early. Lieutenant William Dayton was killed, and Bean lost his left hand.
Brigham Young made his first visit that month. On September 17 he rode out with a small party and chose a site about two miles southeast, near today's Center Street and University Avenue, higher, safer from floods and with less alkali than the river bottoms. That night he led out a dance in Isaac Higbee's cabin.
The winter that followed was the fort's worst. Measles spread through the settlement and into Ute camps, where many died; Wanship, chief of the rival Salt Lake band, died of measles that March. When Old Elk, sick with measles, came to Celia Hunt's cabin for medicine in January 1850, Alexander Williams threw him out of the fort, and cows began to vanish that night. Relations had already been poisoned by the killing of a Ute man known as Old Bishop, and the crisis ended in the February 1850 fighting on the Provo River told elsewhere on this site.
From the bench back to the lake
In the spring of 1850 families began taking apart their cabins and the palisade and hauling the logs about a mile east, to a second fort on the site of today's North Park at 500 North and 500 West. In its middle they raised a log building fifty feet long that served as school, church and town hall. A teacher named Hirst, bound for California, stopped to teach there, and the hall doubled as a theater. Mary Ann Turner married Robert T. Thomas in the old fort, the first wedding in Utah County according to the historian Edward Tullidge. Surveyors drove the first stake of a city plat that summer, the legislature incorporated Provo on February 6, 1851, and families moved out to their own lots. By the fall of 1852 the second fort stood nearly empty.
The bottomland they left did not stay empty. The name Fort Field still clung to that corner of Provo generations later, and Box Elder Island, which had supplied logs for the first cabins, was homesteaded in the 1870s by the father of Andrew Knudsen and cleared into open farmland. Closer to the lake, the Danish fisherman Peter Madsen settled at the mouth of the Provo River in the summer of 1855, the first settler in what the church historian Andrew Jenson called the Lake View district. During the grasshopper famine of 1855 and 1856 he fed hundreds of visitors and sent barrels of fish to poorer settlements, carrying on the fishery that had first drawn Fort Utah's founders. In 1858, during the Move, hundreds of families camped on sand ridges near the river and left dugouts whose traces Jenson could still see. A school district followed in 1876, and in 1877 the farmers there became the Provo 6th Ward, later renamed Lake View, with Madsen as bishop. Its boundaries ran from the Provo River north to the Vineyard Ward and west to the lake.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/life-inside-fort-utah/
