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October 1849~June 1850 to be jocular or free from an uncomfortable apprehension; but it was cold fatigueing work & I was not sorry to mount a captured horse & proceed towards the fort with a prospect of a plentiful dinner. Hostilities were concluded after the annihilation of the Indians in which we were much assisted by the measles & the severity of the weather, the war was not however concluded without some small loss on the part of the whites one being killed & several wounded. This being over martial law was abolished & with others I was at liberty to leave the Utah Valley." The next event in my varied existence was an engagement with one of the principal men & missionaries of this Church, I assisted him to dig the cellar `for a house he is erecting. Our time was pretty much I9 The first Mormon pioneers in Utah Valley, acting as most American frontiersmen did, appropriated the choice spots for their farms and excluded the local Ute Indians from their traditional camping and hunting grounds. The natives soon responded by taking shots at people working outside the fort, attempting to steal cattle from the settlers' herd, and becoming "very saucy, annoying and provoking, threatening to kill the men and women." The settlers organized a militia company of sixty men and appealed for help from Brigham Young who criticized his followers at Fort Utah for fraternizing too freely with the Indians. A military conflict finally precipitated in early January when three men from the fort shot and killed "Old Bishop," a member of the local band of Utes, supposedly because the Indian had stolen a shirt. The natives demanded the surrender of his murderers, and when this was not met, began to kill and steal cattle. With these attacks becoming unbearable, Higbee received permission from Brigham Young to attack and kill all the Indian men of the local band but to save the women and children if they "behave themselves." Captain Howard Stansbury encouraged the Saints' leaders to attack the Indians and offered supplies of arms and ammunition as well as the assistance of Lieutenant George M. How- land and the army surgeon, Dr. James Blake. Two companies of fifty men each were dis- patched from Salt Lake City to cooperate with the Utah Valley militia in the campaign. On February 8 the troops laid siege to about seventy Indians who were located in a log house and behind some embankments near Provo River. After a one-day battle in which several of the soldiers and one Indian were wounded, the militia renewed the attack the next morning by storming the cabin during which Jabez Nowlan was shot in the nose, an occurrence which Mrs. Nowlan had predicted that morning-"if he was shot it would be in his nose" because he had "a verry large nose." The fierce fighting of the second day resulted in the death of Joseph Higbee, son of Isaac Higbee, and Chief Big Elk and seven other Indians. Although the troops pursued the Indians up Rock Canyon and later to the shore of Utah Lake where another twenty-two of the natives were killed, John Hudson's participation in the battle ended, as he indicates, at the end of the second day. It was a fierce and sanguinary engagement which Hudson's rather modest account does not fully describe. Federal Writers Project, Provo, pp. 44-61; Howard 0. Christy, "Open Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah, 1847-52," UHQ 46 (1978): 220-27; Whitney, History of Utah, vol. 1, pp. 423-31; Peter Gottfredson, camp. and ed., History of Indian Depredations in Utah (Salt Lake City: Press of Skelton Publishing Company, 1919), pp. 28-35; Manuscript History, October, 1849, pp. 154-56; Lieut. J. W. Gunnison, The Mormons, or, Latter-Day Saints in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. . . . (Phila- delphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Company, 1852), p. 146. 79 |
