Prologue: Utah Territory, Late October 1853
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 Paiute warriors stopped at the edge of a shallow marsh to make their final plan of attack. Their target, a camp of seven soldiers and five civilians some four hundred yards to the east, lay above the steep banks of the Sevier River where it looped in a tight three-quarter arc before spilling into the marsh where the attackers had paused to plot their ambush.
After a brief huddle, the raiding party leader, Moshquop, split his band into two encircling arms. Some were sent around 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 near the camp of mericats (the Ute word used to describe non-Mormon whites, especially soldiers). As they moved across the narrow, frozen inlet feeding the marsh, several of the attackers broke through skim ice, soaking their moccasined feet. This misstep caused the only discomfort they would endure that night. Once the others were in place, two warriors named Carboorits and Mareer, crept forward to lay in the dense brush just yards from the path the soldiers had beaten between the campfire and the river. It would be their task, when dawn broke in a few hours, to fire the first shots signaling the attack.
The dozen men encamped along the river were led by U. S. Army Captain John Williams Gunnison. This small squad, engaged in a mission of great national import, was part of the largest peacetime expeditionary force the United States had mounted prior to the Civil War, the Pacific Railroad Surveys.
Sent by a deadlocked Congress unable to breach the intractable argument over slavery’s extension, hundreds of men fanned out across the trans-Mississippi West “to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a railroad” from the Mississippi River to the Pacific.
Gunnison was leading perhaps the most politically sensitive of all the expeditions. By a happy coincidence of geography, the gateway city of St. Louis and the Gold Rush boomtown of San Francisco both lay near the 38th parallel, making it the favorite of the powerful Missouri Senator, Thomas Hart Benton, and his son-in-law, famed explorer John Charles Frémont. Both were fervent supporters of a Pacific railroad running along this “natural central route” and equally fervent opponents of slavery’s expansion west.
Benton’s fierce political rival, Mississippian Jefferson Davis, advocated a far southern route along the newly established border with Mexico, which favored the slave-holding South. Now, as Secretary of War, Davis was determined to ensure that the PRRS expedition report came to the right conclusion. He had appointed Gunnison to explore the central route, ignoring Benton’s insistence that his son-in-law lead the expedition. Davis expected the PRRS reconnaissance would find the Colorado Rockies, mid-way between San Francisco and St. Louis, an insurmountable obstacle to Benton’s plan.
And indeed, just weeks before they crossed the Wasatch Range into Utah Territory, Gunnison’s party had made a difficult passage over the continental divide at just over 10,000 feet, through Cochetopa Pass in the San Juan chain of the Rockies. Gunnison recorded in his journal that Cochetopa itself was a gradual crossing, despite its thick aspen forest slowing progress. But the high altitude and remote location, distant from any settlements, and the deep chasms on the western approach (today known as the Black Canyon of the Gunnison), made construction of a railroad along Benton’s “natural Central route” impractical.
Gunnison had split off the previous day from the main force of more than one hundred men who had proceeded twenty-five miles upriver, with their wagons, surveying equipment, rifles and 12-inch mountain howitzers. Planning to explore the river’s source at Sevier Lake as well as connections to the California Trail nearby, the small squad camped at the remote and isolated desert bivouac, beyond reach or rescue.
While his topographical judgement of the Cochetopa route would prove sound, Gunnison’s decision to stop at the bend of the Sevier, against the advice of his local guide, was not only a poor choice for a campsite, but bad timing for a small party of mericats passing through the Pahvant Valley 100 miles south of the Great Salt Lake.
Tensions between whites and the indigenous tribes had been growing since the arrival in 1847 of Brigham Young and a vanguard of 140 Mormon pilgrims, which had grown to more than 28,000 in a few short years. This tension was made worse by the California Gold Rush, starting in 1849, as the flood of treasure-seekers passed through Utah Territory along the great emigrant road. The year preceding the Gunnison Expedition saw more than 70,000 emigrants making the overland trek west, most of them hurrying to the gold fields as they passed through the Great Basin, creating a highway stripped of grass, game and clean water, while leaving disease and disorder in their wake.
Then, just months before Gunnison’s arrival, Utah Territorial Governor Brigham Young directly threatened the traditional trading and raiding economy of the Shoshone and Ute inhabitants by outlawing trade in human captives, expelling Mexican traders, and forbidding Mormons from commerce with Indians. The territory erupted into a series of bloody skirmishes, costing dozens of lives on both sides. Mormon settlers retreated behind fortified stockades and sent their livestock north to Salt Lake City for safety. By summer’s end, as Gunnison was still slowly moving across Cochetopa Pass, an uneasy truce had settled over the region. But Mormons, Natives, and emigrants passing through Utah, all remained on edge.
The Pahvant Paiute, living along the Sevier south of the Great Salt Lake, had stayed out of this larger conflict, guided by their leader, Kanosh. But that separate peace was broken when a small band approached a wagon train of California-bound Missourians, seeking to barter hides and moccasins for tobacco and flour. The nervous emigrants had been cautioned by Mormon elders to treat the Pahvant respectfully, but when they saw the Indians carrying bows and arrows into their camp, they ignored the Mormons’ advice and tried to disarm the band. 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 attempted to buy peace by offering Kanosh’s band “one beeve,” the frontier term for an ox. While Kanosh tried to maintain peace, a distraught Moshquop and two 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.
It was Gunnison’s misfortune to lead his expedition across the Wasatch Range a few weeks later. When he arrived in Utah Territory, Gunnison had been cautioned about the tense situation but was also told that Kanosh was preaching peace. Five years earlier, while exploring around the Great Salt Lake, Gunnison had met both Kanosh and Moshquop, and naively assumed that earlier friendly encounter would ensure safe passage through the territory.
Gunnison’s last journal entry recounted the day’s trek to their campsite along the Sevier:
I came down the river southwest for nine miles, and then, bearing more west for two miles, concluded to encamp, as the water below might prove too salt. The route was through heavy artemisia for five miles, when we came upon more open plains to the nine-mile point, where we met with sloughs alive with geese, ducks, brant, pelicans, and gulls. A few hawks were careering in the high wind, and the black-eared and black-tailed rabbits were very numerous in the large artemisia… The mountains wore all day their white night mantle of snow, and we had squalls from the north, with snow falling on the high mountains on all sides of us. Towards sunset it brightened up a little, and our hunters brought in four ducks of as many different varieties.
The hunters’ gunfire had attracted the attention of two of Moshquop’s band, out bow hunting rabbits across the Sevier. Unseen, they followed the duck hunters to their river bend bivouac and noted that the campsite, surrounded by dense willow bushes and wedged between the marsh and the steep riverbanks, 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. Unaware that the mericat he had met five years earlier was even in the Pahvant Valley, Moshquop would have his revenge.
At the Mormon settlement of Manti, where he had gone to hire local guides a week earlier, Gunnison sat down to write to his wife Martha, back home in Grand Rapids with their three children. His last letter, written just a few weeks before his impending 41st birthday, reached her several weeks later.
City of Manti, Oct. 18, 1853
My Dear Wife
We have arrived in the vicinity of the Mormons & today I rode some 20 miles with three men to the settlement. We’ve been very fortunate & traversed 700 miles of new country & brought ourselves & teams through safely. We had rain just as we wanted it on the desert and a beautiful month since when we approached the last great mountain ranges.
I have to go back to find my camp in the morning & I’ve hired two guides around to Utah from Sevier Lakes. This will take ten or twelve days, & then I
shall send for my letters. There is a war between the Mormons & the Indians & parties of less than a dozen not dare to travel. We did not know what a risk we have lately been running until coming here, for I have been riding carelessly in the mountains, hunting roads ahead and other curious capers…May the favor of Heaven attend us until the work is accomplished in the manner as heretofore.
It will be impossible to cross back this winter with the survey… I’ve hurried hard to escape the awful tedium of this wintering in the mountains, as you know, but the route has been longer, harder & more laborious than anticipated…
- W. Gunnison
In the pre-dawn twilight on October 26th, 1853, Gunnison’s personal servant and camp cook, a man named John Bellows, prepared a simple breakfast of bread and coffee. Roused by his activity, the other men arose and ate in the chill desert air before preparing to head out to Sevier Lake. Standing alongside the cook, the surveyor/artist Richard Kern and botanist Frederick Creutzfeldt warmed themselves by the campfire. Captain Gunnison, the first to finish breakfast, squatted at the river’s edge, washing his face and hands, just as the sun broke over the ridgeline of the Wasatch Range.