When the pioneers built Fort Utah on the Provo River in March 1849, they built it in the middle of the Timpanogos Utes' fishing country. The river mouth near today's Vineyard shore was one of the places Ute families had gathered for generations. From the first months there was friction over land, water, cattle and game.
Old Bishop
That winter, three settlers accused a Ute man known as Old Bishop of stealing a shirt. They killed him and hid his body in the Provo River. When his people found out, they demanded that the killers be handed over or that the settlers pay for his death. Neither happened.
Relations broke down. Ute leaders warned they would take the settlers' cattle, and the leaders at Fort Utah sent word to Salt Lake City that they feared an attack. At a council in Salt Lake City on January 31, 1850, the leader of Fort Utah reported that the Utes' intentions were growing more aggressive. Brigham Young authorized a military campaign.
February 1850
On February 8, 1850, militia from Salt Lake City arrived and surrounded a Ute encampment on the Provo River led by a chief the settlers called Old Elk. After two days of fighting, the Utes slipped away. Militia companies pursued them up Rock Canyon and south along the lake.
Over the next days dozens of Utes were killed. Old Elk died, and so did his wife, who fell from the cliffs while trying to escape. One settler was killed. At a place called Table Point, Ute men who had surrendered were killed, and women and children were taken to Salt Lake City as captives. Historians today often call it the Provo River Massacre as well as the Battle at Fort Utah.
What followed
The fighting did not end the conflict. The anger and grief of that winter fed the Walker War a few years later. Through the 1850s and 1860s the Utes of Utah Valley were pushed off more and more of their land, and in the 1860s most of them moved to the Uintah Valley reservation in northeastern Utah.
Some of the names in the valley carry this history. A peak above Provo was long named for Old Elk's wife with a word now recognized as a slur, and in 2022 it was renamed Kyhv Peak.
It is hard history, and it belongs in Vineyard's story. The farms, the town and the city that came later grew on land that the Timpanogos Utes had called home for a very long time. Remembering what happened in the winter of 1850 is part of understanding where Vineyard comes from.
