Prologue: Late October 1853 along the Sevier River
The weather had turned raw in the high Utah desert, promising winter ahead. Midday snow squalls rolled down off the Wasatch Mountains and the nights left a skim coat of frost that only retreated with the morning sun. Under a waning but still bright moon in the clear midnight sky, two dozen Pahvant Ute warriors stopped at the edge of a shallow marsh to make their final plan of attack. (1)
Their targets, seven U.S. Army soldiers and five civilians, lay less than a mile away. The mericats – a term the natives used to describe non-Mormon whites, especially soldiers – were camped above the steep banks of the Sevier River where it looped in a tight three-quarter arc, spilling its excess flow through a narrow inlet into the marsh where the attackers now plotted their ambush. Led by Captain John Williams Gunnison, this small squad had split off the previous day from the main force of more than 100 armed men now camped 30 miles upriver with their wagons, surveying equipment and howitzers – beyond reach or rescue.[1]
After a brief huddle by the marsh edge, the raiding party leader Moshquop split his band into two encircling arms. Some of the warriors rounded the half-mile wide wetland to cut off escape to the north and east, the others skirted its southern perimeter to hide among the willow bushes crowding the riverbank. A lone corporal stood watch over the company’s horses tethered in a clearing away from the river’s edge, unaware of the trap being set around the campsite. As they moved across the frozen inlet, several of the attackers broke through skim ice, soaking their moccasined feet. This misstep caused the raiders the only discomfort they would endure that night. Once the others were in place hiding among the willow bushes, a warrior named Carboorits crept forward to lay in the dense brush just yards from the path the soldiers had beaten between their campfire and the river. It would be his task to fire the first shot signaling the attack when dawn broke over the camp.
It was not only a poor choice for a campsite, but bad timing for a small party of mericats to be passing through the Pahvant Valley. For years, tensions between the growing number of Mormon settlers and the indigenous inhabitants over land and resources had been managed by leaders of both communities avoiding all-out war through a combination of accommodation and punishment, marked by occasional bloody skirmishes. The most prosperous and influential Indian in the region, a Shoshone named Wakara, (2) was also a dominant political force competing against the growing Mormon influence. His Ute and Shoshone raiders roamed across the southwest, stealing horses and capturing both Native and Mexican women and children from southern California to New Mexico and trading them to whoever had weapons and goods they needed.[2]
Months before Gunnison and his men had crossed the Wasatch Range, Brigham Young had imposed a ban on slavery and expelled Mexican traders, key customers of Wakara’s raiders, while instructing his Mormon followers not to trade with any Natives. This political and economic rivalry between the growing Mormon settlements with their fields, orchards and livestock and Wakara’s band, dependent on their raiding economy, exploded into open conflict in the summer of 1853 in what became known as Walker’s War, named after the Shoshone chief. Skirmishes and punitive counter raids had cost dozens of lives on both sides. Young ordered Mormons in the area to retreat from their farms into fortified stockades and send their livestock north to Salt Lake City for safety. By summer’s end, an uneasy truce had settled over the region. But all the inhabitants, Mormons and Natives, as well as the emigrant trains passing through the valley, remained on edge.
Pahvant Paiutes, guided by their leader Kanosh, had generally stayed out of Walker’s War. But the Pahvants’ peace had been broken a few weeks earlier when a small band had approached an emigrant train of California-bound Missourians seeking to barter hides and moccasins for tobacco and flour. The emigrants, who had been cautioned by Mormon elders to treat the Pahvant respectfully, were nervous when they saw the Indians carrying bows and arrows into their camp. Ignoring the Mormons’ advice, they tried to disarm the band, who resisted. In the ensuing melee Moshquop’s father was fatally shot and two other Indians were wounded. As the Missourians hurried on, Mormons in nearby Fillmore gave the band “one beeve,” the frontier term for an ox, in an attempt to buy peace while Chief Kanosh tried to calm his people. But within a few days of his father’s death, a distraught Moshquop and several dozen younger warriors left the band’s camp along Corn Creek and disappeared into the rugged desert wilderness, vowing to avenge the old man’s death by killing any whites they encountered.
Gunnison had chosen the riverside campsite because the water was sweet, not the alkaline brew they expected to find downriver nearer their ultimate destination of Lake Sevier, ignoring a local guide’s suggestion that they camp in open space away from the dense willow groves. Early in the afternoon a few of the men had set off to hunt the abundant waterfowl along the meandering river – the first fresh game they’d seen in several weeks. Their gunfire attracted the attention of two members of Moshquop’s war party out bow hunting rabbits across the Sevier. They followed the duck hunters unseen to their river bend bivouac and noted that the campsite, surrounded by dense willow bushes and wedged between the marsh and the steep river banks, offered a perfect ambuscade, difficult to defend with no easy route of escape. They returned to their own campsite eight miles to the west, where they reported what they had seen. Moshquop would have his revenge.