A first-rate investigation into a little-known episode of the Indian Wars, this study examines Utah’s Black Hawk War—a conflict that raged for nearly a decade and cost several hundred lives, yet is rarely mentioned in histories of the American West. During the war, a Ute elder named Black Hawk assembled a coalition of Utes, Shoshones, Navajos, and Paiutes and launched attacks on Mormon livestock settlements across central and southern Utah, determined to drive the ranchers from their land.
As Peterson explains, the conflict was little publicized at the time, even within Utah itself, largely because the Mormon Church deliberately obscured its existence. Brigham Young and other church leaders feared that the federal government might seize upon an Indian uprising as a pretext to send troops into the territory—troops who, after suppressing the Indians, might then turn their attention to polygamists and other perceived nonconformists. As a result, Mormon militiamen quietly fought Black Hawk’s forces in what Peterson characterizes as “an anomaly in Western history.”
The war was anomalous in two respects. First, while neighboring territories were witnessing brutal anti-Indian campaigns—such as the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in which federal troops slaughtered hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho following the murder of miners in Colorado—Utah’s military actions were conducted with relative restraint. Second, Brigham Young’s agents, convinced that Native Americans were somehow connected to the so-called lost tribes of Israel, consistently sought peace and worked, as Peterson notes, “to encourage the Latter-day Saints to lay down their vengeful feelings.”
Peterson further reveals that frontier artist George Catlin even proposed a grand Mormon–Indian alliance against the federal government as a form of “mutual protection against the invading military forces which are entering the great Far West on every side.” That alliance never came to pass. Nor, however, did the cycles of reprisals and vendettas that characterized Indian–settler relations elsewhere in nineteenth-century America.