The Indian farm on Spanish Fork

When the Walker War ended in 1854, the Ute band that called the Spanish Fork River home came in early. Its leader, Peteetneet, camped inside the settlers' fort at Palmyra, and at Brigham Young's suggestion the settlers built him a house. The question that followed was where his people, and the other Ute bands of central Utah, would live now that the best creek bottoms were filling with farms. For the next dozen years one answer lay a few miles south of Vineyard, on the low ground where the Spanish Fork River meets Utah Lake.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had begun experimenting with Indian farms in 1851. A Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker west of Spanish Fork says Young, then the territory's superintendent of Indian affairs, set apart a reservation there in 1854, about twenty square miles running from the river to the lake, with Joseph E. Beck as farm superintendent.

Hurt's experiment

The man who made it a working farm was Garland Hurt, a federal Indian agent who reached Utah in February 1855. Hurt concluded that gifts and promises were only filling Ute minds with expectations that could never be met. Before the end of 1855, with neither authority nor money from Washington, he offered the Utes tracts of land as permanent homes. He opened three such farms: at Corn Creek in Millard County, at Twelve Mile Creek in Sanpete County, and on the Spanish Fork River near the lake. In his report of 1856 he admitted the risk and wrote that "the circumstances left me without an alternative."

Spanish Fork became the most important of the three. The historian Edward Tullidge recorded that in the spring of 1856 a hundred men came from Salt Lake City to break the ground, dig an irrigation canal, build a dam and raise a large farmhouse where Hurt lived and kept a store, about two miles from the town on the south side of the river. Hurt's report described the land as covered with dense brush, more costly to clear and plow than he had expected. The canal was finished so late that much of the first crop failed to ripen, but he reported a harvest ample for the Utes' immediate needs. That June, Young told Washington that farming was being successfully conducted on all three of Hurt's reservations.

The farm did not survive the politics of 1857. As a federal army marched toward Utah, Hurt fled the territory. Latter-day Saint leaders came to see him as an enemy: George A. Smith wrote that Hurt had "decamped from the Indian farm" and was rallying Ute bands against the settlements, and Governor Cumming later reported a similar charge to Washington. His successor, Jacob Forney, was dismissed for mismanagement, and an agent named Humphreys sold off the stock and implements to pay debts. In the account of the Northern Ute historian Clifford Duncan, everything left at the Sanpete and Spanish Fork farms was finally sold to keep the Utes from starving.

Monuments of decay

By December 1862 Utah's acting governor described the Spanish Fork reservation to the legislature as about 15,000 acres of good, irrigable land at the south end of Utah Lake, untouched for three years. The farmhouse was falling down, the fences were gone and the fields had gone back to brush, leaving improvements that were "monuments of decay and ruin." He asked the legislature to petition the president to open the land to settlers. In 1863 the territory's superintendent of Indian affairs called further spending there a waste and urged moving the agency to the Uinta Basin. In Washington, Commissioner William P. Dole recommended selling the Spanish Fork and Sanpete reservations to pay for a new reserve.

The new reserve already existed on paper. In 1861 President Abraham Lincoln had set aside the Uinta Basin, which a survey party a year earlier had judged poor farmland, and in 1864 Congress confirmed it, set money aside for improvements and directed that the old Indian farms be dissolved.

The council at the farm

In the spring of 1865 Superintendent O. H. Irish called the Ute bands to meet him at the Spanish Fork farm. Most federal officers refused to come because Irish had invited Brigham Young, and Governor James Duane Doty fell ill the night before and died about ten days later. The interpreter Dimick Huntington spent several days among the bands as they gathered. George Washington Bean, the boy who had lost a hand to Fort Utah's cannon, interpreted alongside him.

Talks began June 6. The next day Irish laid out his terms. The bands would give up the lands they occupied in Utah Territory and move within a year of ratification to the Uinta Valley, kept for their exclusive use. They could still fish at their accustomed places and gather roots and berries on unclaimed land. The government would pay $25,000 a year for ten years, then smaller sums for fifty more, build a mill, shops and a school, and give each principal chief a house on five fenced acres. The old reservations at Spanish Fork, Sanpete, Corn Creek and Deep Creek, 291,480 acres in all, would be sold for at least 62 and a half cents an acre.

The leaders did not agree easily. Clifford Duncan records that Sowiette and Sanpitch both spoke against it, and that the Utes asked why the two peoples could not simply share the land. Sanpitch said he would "rather go without than to give up my title to the land," and left the circle. Kanosh objected to dividing the country, and Tabby asked for time. Young told them that if they did not sell, the government would take the land anyway, as it had in California and Oregon. On June 8 about sixteen leaders made their marks, Sowiette among them. Young signed only as a witness.

Signed and shelved

The United States Senate never ratified the treaty. It sat in committee from 1866 until March 1869, when it was reported unfavorably and filed away among unratified treaties. No annuities were paid. Many people moved anyway, drawn by the reservation's promise, while the Black Hawk War, which had broken out in Sanpete two months before the council, went on. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker dates the move from Spanish Fork to the Uinta Basin to 1867. There, the historian Gustive O. Larson found, funding was short: about 1,500 people were counted at the agency in 1869, and about 700 in 1871. By 1879, Duncan writes, most Utah Utes lived at Uintah, their numbers down from about 4,500 in 1859 to about 800.

Back at Spanish Fork, Tullidge wrote in 1884 that the reservation had been abandoned, the land thrown on the market, and the town's residents were acquiring titles and bringing it under the plow. Today a 1935 marker stands where River Lane meets Highway 115 west of Spanish Fork. The one treaty clause that spoke to the lake itself, the right to fish at accustomed places, would have mattered to people whose spring fish gatherings on the lower Provo River, just south of Vineyard, had once drawn bands from 150 miles away. It never took effect.