This Was the Place: the Darker Side of Mormon Zion

For over 400 years before the Mormon arrival in 1847, many of the Northern Utes and their protohistoric ancestors lived in relative peace and stability within the territory currently encompassing much of Utah. In less than twenty years of settlement by the brethren in their newest Land of Zion, the collective authorities of the Mormon Church, Bureau of Indian Affairs and U. S. Army convinced Congress to officially dispossess these Northern Utes of all their traditional and best lands except for the sprawling and considerably barren wastes of the Uintah Reservation located in northeastern Utah. By Church Prophet and President Brigham Young's own accounting, several bands of these original first contact Indians - through starvation, pestilence and white inspired epidemics - had experienced somewhere between a 90% to99% mortal attrition rate in their numbers by 1867. In the mid-1870s Brigham Young, searching for new areas to colonize with land seeking church members, began a policy that actively encouraged the Utes to depopulate their reservation where treatment by BIA officials over the years was poor and inefficient. Through the Church leader's ability to significantly control both Indian movements and affairs in Utah, Brigham began quiet efforts to induce Congress to throw open the Uintah Reservation to homesteading. Though the soil was largely infertile, the valuable water, timber and grazing resources of the country were coveted by the surrounding Latter Day faithful as well as the large cattle companies. Brigham Young's death in 1877 temporarily slowed this movement. In 1879BIA Agent Nathan Meeker's heavy-handed policy of forcing the White River band of Northern Utes in Colorado to become sedentary farmers resulted in a tragedy of bloodshed since known to history as the Meeker Massacre. The fallout of this massacre witnessed several bands of Colorado Northern Utes exiled to Utah. The consolidated White River band located on the Uintah Reservation while the more popu