Wakara was born in Utah Valley early in the nineteenth century, the son of a chief, and he won leadership of his people after a hard fight among his siblings. In the 1830s and 1840s he rode the Old Spanish Trail to California, raiding mission horse herds and trading horses and captive Paiute and Goshute people along the way. Settlers called him Walker. In 1849 he had shaken hands with Dimick Huntington at Fort Utah and invited the Latter-day Saints to settle his land in Sanpete Valley.
Four years later that friendship had worn through. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had spread across Utah Valley's creeks and pastures, the resources the Utes lived on were running low, and the new settlers were cutting into the trade in captives that had made Wakara's band rich. The historian Thomas G. Alexander notes that when the break came, many settlers ignored Brigham Young's call for conciliation and "responded in brutal kind."
A death at Ivie's cabin
The break came on July 17, 1853, at James Ivie's cabin near Springville. A Ute man and his wife had come to trade, and when the two quarreled, Ivie stepped in. In the melee that followed he killed Shower-O-Cats, a relative of Wakara. Wakara's band was camped about five miles up Peteetneet Canyon above Payson. Under Ute custom a killing called for one life in return, and Wakara asked for it. The settlers refused.
On July 18, Wakara's brother Arapeen and a party of riders came down to Fort Payson, where the settlers fed them as usual. As they left that evening they shot Alexander Keele, who was standing guard near the fort. The band packed up and retreated up the canyon, firing on the cabins of families living there. Riders carried the alarm north, and on July 20 Colonel Peter W. Conover, the same Conover who had cut the first wheat at Fort Utah, reached Payson with about 150 men from Provo. Troops from Spanish Fork and Springville were already there.
Conover's cavalry pushed on toward Manti. Back home the raids spread. At Springville William Jolley was shot through the arm. Two messengers, Clark Roberts of Provo and John W. Berry of Spanish Fork, rode into Summit Creek, now Santaquin, on July 24 and found it deserted, its families gone to Payson. Utes hidden in the empty houses opened fire, hitting Roberts in the shoulder and Berry in the wrist, and the two escaped at a gallop.
Into the forts
On July 25, Brigham Young put Colonel George A. Smith in charge of every settlement south of Salt Lake County. The policy was defense, not pursuit. Families were to gather into forts, corral their stock under guard, and send surplus animals north. Smith's orders told the small settlements in Peteetneet Canyon and other exposed places that they "must be evacuated." No one was to wander alone or after dark, and harvest crews were to work under guard. That same day Young sent Wakara a letter with a gift of tobacco, scolding him for fighting his best friends and promising beef and flour if his people were hungry.
In Utah County the order changed the shape of daily life. The Spanish Fork settlers moved into a walled enclosure called Palmyra Fort. Payson pulled its houses together and strengthened its walls. Men stood picket through the fall and winter, and the Utes still ran off cattle, including a large herd near Spanish Fork. The killing went both ways. A Utah County militia unit attacked a Ute camp near Goshen and killed four or five people. On October 2 at Nephi, settlers shot eight or nine Ute men who had come to the fort seeking protection, then reported it as a skirmish. Twelve days later about thirty Utes fired on harvesters at Santaquin and killed a man named Tindrel.
The killing went both ways.
Wakara himself spent much of the war away on the Spanish Trail, wintering to the south while his brother-in-law Wyonah and other men kept up the raids. By early 1854 his people were tired. That spring the Utes sent back fourteen head of stolen stock with a man the settlers called Bowlegs, and Peteetneet, leader of the band whose home was the Spanish Fork River, came down with four lodges and camped inside Palmyra Fort. At Young's suggestion the settlers built him a house.
Provo did not wait for the peace. Young directed the scattered city to draw in and build a wall. In the spring of 1854 the four western tiers of blocks were vacated, the families north of town moved inside the city limits, and every man was assigned his share of rods to build. The result was a mud wall twelve feet high, six feet thick at the base and two at the top, set on a rock footing and running about two and a third miles around the north, west and south sides of the city.
Chicken Creek
On May 11, 1854, Young's party reached Chicken Creek in Juab County, near present Levan, and camped beside Wakara's band. Wilford Woodruff recorded that the chief at first lay in the dirt and would not speak, saying he had no heart. Young and Smith went to his tent and gave a healing blessing to his seriously ill daughter. Kanosh, leader of the Pahvant Utes, was there with his men. After long talk, gifts, a feast of beef and a pipe, the war was declared over. No written copy of the agreement survives. Wakara told the visitors the young men had fought beyond his control, and on parting he said travelers could now cross his country in peace.
The peace held unevenly. In August 1854 a small band in Cedar Valley, angry over the Nephi killings, killed William and Warren Weeks at the mouth of Pole Canyon; two men were hanged for it that September. That fall, Shoshone raiders struck Utes camped in the brush beside Provo's new wall and killed fourteen. The Provo historian D. Robert Carter, writing in the Daily Herald, traced a cycle of revenge on both sides that ran for twenty years after the first killings near Battle Creek in 1849.
After Wakara
Wakara died of pneumonia in January 1855 at Meadow Creek in Millard County and was succeeded by Arapeen. He was buried in a stone grave up Dry Canyon above Meadow. By the account of the Utah historian Orson F. Whitney, his last counsel to his people was to live at peace with the settlers.
West of Provo's new wall lay the river bottoms where Fort Utah's founders had first farmed, and beyond them a lakeshore where no one had yet settled. That changed the summer after Wakara's death, when the Danish fisherman Peter Madsen built at the river's mouth in 1855 and became, in Andrew Jenson's account, the first settler of what grew into Lake View, the farming district on Vineyard's southern edge.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/walker-war-in-utah-valley/
