WAKARA'S AMERICA

Deeply researched biography of an overlooked Native American leader.

When members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints—Mormons, as University of Nebraska historian Mueller colloquially calls them—arrived in Utah in the late 1840s, they encountered a Timpanogos Ute leader named Wakara, whom they called Walker. Wakara made a handsome living in two untoward trades: He was an accomplished horse thief, raiding far into California, and he traded in enslaved people. Wakara professed to convert through baptism, becoming “the first Utah Native to be ordained in the Mormon priesthood.” Many other Indigenous people, including a hundred of Wakara’s band, also converted. But when Mormon settlers began to encroach on Ute hunting and fishing grounds, fencing off traditional festival areas, Wakara mounted a war of resistance. Complications abound: Although Brigham Young wound up suing for peace, he waged a war against the Utes in which hundreds of Native people—mostly women and children—were massacred, even as the Indigenous rebels, for their part, killed plenty of settlers. And ironies abound: Although the slave trade was technically illegal and accounted immoral, the Mormons effectively took it over from Wakara, especially by bullying Paiute families into selling their children, who were then indentured “until they worked off the cost of their own purchase price.” Official Latter-Day Saints doctrine held that the Natives, or Lamanites, as they called them, were “white and delightsome,” but that did nothing to end the depredations. As Mueller observes, the Walker War ended following Wakara’s death: Possibly poisoned by arsenic that laced a gift of tobacco from Young, he was buried with two of his wives, two enslaved Paiutes, and a dozen horses, all slaughtered for the occasion. But the Utes and other Native peoples continued to suffer, converts or not, removed from fertile lands to inhospitable reservations and even, well into the 20th century, from national parks such as Arches.

A revealing study from a forgotten theater of the war against Native America.