Black Hawk Indian War: Utah's Forgotten Tragedy

The Black Hawk War

Utah's Forgotten Tragedy

A Documentary Film Dedicated in Honor of the Noochew

©Black Hawk Productions, LLC

Funded in part by
Utah Division of Indian Affairs
The George S. Deloris Dori Eccles Foundation
and
Private Donors here
†
Filmmakers
Black Hawk Productions, LLC
and
Ron Hill Imagery
and
Turtle Island Productions
†
Consultants
Historian/Scholar Will Bagley - Executive Director of Indian Affairs Forrest Cuch - Professor/Historian Dr. Floyd O'Neil - Dr. Daniel McCool PHD Political Science - Historian Robert Carter - Filmmaker Larry Cesspooch Ute Tribe - Venita Taveapont Director of Indian Language Program Ute Tribe - Loya Arrum Ute Tribe - Descendents of Ute Leader Black Hawk - Members of the Ute Tribe - National Forest Service Archeologist Charmain Thompson
and
Black Hawk War Researcher Phillip B Gottfredson

Coming Soon
2009
Exclusively on this website a preview video of The Black Hawk War: Utah's Forgotten Tragedy
documentary film will be shown in our online theater here!

Date to be announced soon!

Decoding The Myths Of
The Black Hawk War
“Until the lion tells it’s story, the glory will always go to the hunter.”

A Synopsis by Researcher Phillip B Gottfredson

Now within shouting distance of the promised land, the miles-long, creaking wagon trains snaked their way down through the narrow crevices of the Shining Mountains of the Yuhtas. Tabby, Walkara, Old Elk, and Kone—seasoned war chiefs of one of the most revered bands of the Shoshoni Nation the Utes—watched, more amused than amazed, while the emigrants of 47 emerged from the craggy cliffs by the hundreds and spread onto the foothills above the sun-scorched valley of the Great Salt Lake.

They were unlike the steel-clad Spanish explorers centuries before who robbed them of their gold, or the greedy British, French and American invaders who divvied up their land. They were nothing like the cagey fur traders who for a century plundered their rivers and streams of beaver. Old Wuna Mucca, medicine chief of the Ute and Paiute, had decades before foretold of the coming of the missionaries. It would take but a season when the death-winds begun to blow, north to south, as the foothills and valleys of the Rocky Mountain range would become the longest graveyard east of the setting sun. They had endured it all, but none so sinister as these. The missionaries had come to settle, to save the heathens from hell, to worship God almighty. . . and get rich.

A proud and fierce people the battle-worn Yuhtas had been shaped by their environment, they were a tough and rugged people. Led by Walkara, Ute leaders had long-established an economic trade network from the Columbia River Basin to the Gulf of Mexico, trade relations with Euro-American fur traders and merchants that proved profitable on all sides. They became the pivotal source of the horse trade begun in 1541. They had tremendous knowledge and skills to master their environment, and sustained a flourishing population numbering in the hundreds of thousands. To feed a lot of people they needed a productive and fertile environment. Theirs was a highly structured civilization, noble and skilled in their ways, and respected by all throughout North America.

"There was a time when our people were happy and content living in the majestic mountains and fertile green valleys of Utah. Then the Mormons came, and our people were killed—the old, the young, the children, women—and many taken to reservations where many more would die."

Christianity was never a democracy. The church has always held firmly to the divine doctrines of authority and hierocracy. "The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity." - Peter d'Errico, Legal Studies Department, University of Massachusetts/Amherst

Christian expansionists attempted to reason with the Indian people saying they had the right to take possession of their land because the Indians were heathens, non-Christians, who didn't believe in the bible or Jesus, the Messiah. And this is the basis for the denial of Indian rights in federal Indian law today, based upon the metaphor that the American Indians are the Canaanites or pagans in the promised land. These arcane elements of reason have long been the mentality of Christian supremacy upon which so many millions of dollars have been spent and so many thousands of lives wrecked. - Steven T. Newcomb Indigenous Law Institute

The Mormons believed they had a divine obligation to convert Utah American Indians to Mormonism according to church doctrine, and in so doing the so-called "loathsome" Indians would become a "white and delightsome people" and would be forgiven of the sins of their forefathers. (Book of Mormon 2 Nephi 5:21-23) According to church doctrine, the nature of the dark skin was a curse, the cause was the Lord. The reason was because the Lamanites "had hardened their hearts against him, (God)" and the purpose was to punish them by making them "loathsome" unto God's people who had white skins.
"When the Ute failed to assimilate into Mormon culture, the answer was to exterminate them." Historian Robert Carter
They were not given a choice", said University of Utah Political Science Professor Dr. Daniel McCool, "we didn't buy their land, we stole it."

It was a matter of who would own the land and who would survive. "It was a battle over resources that led to a brutal and bloody conflict between Mormon settlers and the Ute." - Historian Will Bagley

I am certainly aware of the extreme hardships Early Mormon pioneers endured as they migrated from foreign lands to Utah, my ancestors were among them. But they had a choice, whereas the Native peoples of Utah didn't.

In 1850 Mormon apostle George Albert Smith declared that the Indian people "have no right to their land" and he instructed the all-Mormon legislature to "extinguish all titles" and get them out of the way and onto reservations. This set the stage for the infamous Black Hawk War that would follow.

But the victors of any war will always rewrite history. And such is the case of Utah's Black Hawk War; our education system has failed miserably in teaching the truth regarding Indian history. Educators, historians and authors need to break the habit of over simplifying, trivializing and belittling the tragic past of the First People of Utah. It is discrimination at its worst. It sends the wrong message that Indian history has little or no importance, that only the victors’ version matters. Remember, discrimination has to be taught. Children learn to discriminate from their teachers, family, and community.

"The Time has come when Indian people need to stop being victimized. They need to tell their story and demand that it be told accurately." - Forrest S. Cuch Executive Director of Indian Affairs

What is the Ute Indians’ side of the story? And, why has their history, their account, been deliberately ignored and long omitted from school curricula?

Eight years ago I set out on a daunting journey to learn the Utes’ story, and to understand the inequalities between the white man and the Indian peoples. I became immersed in their history and culture and often they told me their grim tales of the past. But as profoundly disturbing as their past has been, what emerges is their endearing humanity that most inspired me. For as strong as they were on the battlefield, they were no less strong spiritually. The message of Indigenous America is connection, relationship, and unity. "All people are one. One of the direct living descendants of Creator." Chief Joseph said, "We have no qualms about color. It has no meaning. It doesn’t mean anything. When we are together we are one. Nothing can break it (the connection)."

This is same message Chief Sitting Bull conveyed when he said, "The heart knows not the color of the skin." This is an ancient traditional teaching. It still lives among their true traditionalists everywhere. "The power of forgiveness is greater than hate; love vanquishes condescension and discrimination. That is the power our elders, our true traditionalists hold."

I witnessed first-hand that these are fundamental truths found among the Indian people wherever I traveled. Certainly I recognized the same qualities among the First Peoples of Utah, and can only conclude these traditional beliefs are universal and were rooted deep in the hearts and minds by great leaders, such as Black Hawk.

During my many years of research I was often told by people in Utah "We have given the Indians every chance to succeed, yet they choose to live off the government, and live in poverty. It's their own damn fault." Arrogance and ignorance gives rise to the many misconceptions we have toward the Indian peoples. It is the slimy-stuff that has polluted our hearts and minds, the social snag upon which so many precious lives have been devestated. The people I have met don't live off the government. Nor do they choose to live in poverty.


	Forrest S. Cuch - Executive Director Of Indian Affairs	Will Bagley - Historian

A Name Sacred to the Ute Indians

The decimated lives of some 40,000 Native people caused by the Black Hawk War has simply been swept aside. Brigham's victory was perhaps a hollow one for, in order to fulfill his dream, he had to destroy a civilization. The truth regarding the history of the war has since been cloaked in brilliantly managed rhetoric to discredit the Ute Nation in every conceivable way. The victors’ accounts are saturated with ambiguities, omissions, platitudes, and half truths and they lead us to believe the fate of the Indian people was divine destiny. Twenty-six years of Utah's Indian history have since been deliberately ignored, only to disappear like shadows in the pine.

He (Black Hawk) had "remarkable vision and capacity. Given the circumstances under which he operated, he put together an imposing war machine and masterminded a sophisticated strategy that suggest he had a keen grasp of the economic, political, and geographic contexts in which he operated, comparable to Cochise, Sitting Bull and Geronimo." - John Alton Peterson author of Utah's Black Hawk War

The name "Black Hawk" is not a Ute name. It was a name Brigham Young, in jest, called the Ute's leader. So it became that Brigham Young’s supercilious term, 'Black Hawk,' is the name by which he is now most commonly known. He was known to the Utes as Nooch, he was so named in honor of his people the Noochew, a name sacred to the Utes.

Nooch was born into a noble clan of legendary leaders spanning centuries of time. He fought bitterly. This courageous warrior had to confront unimaginable terror as his people were dying from diseases and hunger, their homeland being invaded and plundered by the white-man, he as a young boy witnessed his family and kin murdered by Mormon militia. He faced challenges that were monumental for any leader of any people in any time. He should have given up, but something in his character wouldn't allow him to. Before Nooch died in 1870, deathly ill from a bullet wound he received a year earlier at Gravelly Ford, he traveled 180 miles by horse and visited every Mormon village to apologize for the pain and suffering he and his warriors had caused. He asked for forgiveness and pleaded with the settlers to do the same, and end the bloodshed. "You didn't see that happening on the part of the settlers", said Forrest Cuch, "So it took a greater man to do such a thing. And that's what is overlooked in the victors’ accounts."

But Black Hawk's story didn't end there. Forty-nine years after his death, in 1919, his grave was looted and his remains were first put on public display in the window of a hardware store in Spanish Fork, then later in the LDS church museum on Temple Square in Salt Lake. He was not reburied until 1996, thanks to the humanitarian efforts of Boy Scout, Shane Armstrong and Charmain Thompson, National Forest Service Archeologist.

Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. - Jeremiah 6:15

It is important we understand that the Black Hawk War was not a single incident; there were over 150 bloody confrontations in a 20-year period that began in 1849 when Brigham's private militia, led by Capt. John Scott, premeditated the murders of Black Hawk's family, who were innocent of any wrong doing, at Battle Creek. Mormon depredations continued on into 1873, resulting in the eradication of 90% of the Indian population, estimated to have been between 40,000 and 70,000 when Mormon pioneers arrived in 1847. While fewer than .05% of the Mormon population died as a result of the war during the same period.

By 1909 the U.S. Census reported that the Indian population had decreased to just 2300. Some scholars are quick to point out that the cause of the rapid decline in population was due to disease—that the tragedy was merely an unfortunate circumstance. It is true, it was an unfortunate circumstance of epic scale, a genocide fueled by religious fanaticism and racist dogma. Brigham Young was quoted by the Denver Rocky Mountain Newspaper as saying, "You can get rid of more Indians with a sack of flour, than a keg of powder." What is omitted from the victors’ account is that germ warfare was not an uncommon tactic. And, one of the dark truths about Utah's history is the use of poison by Brigham's privately funded militia.

The gruesome beheadings of some 40 Ute corpses, heads stacked in boxes, and hung by their long hair from the eves of buildings at Fort Utah, has long been ignored, "You didn't see the Indians beheading the Mormons." - Historian Robert Carter

"In those early days it was, at times, imperative that harsh measures should be used. We had to do these things, or be run over by them. It was a question of supremacy between the white man and the Indian." - John Lowry 1894

"We forget that our ancestors, both Indian and non-Indian, lived close together; that our children grew up with each other. And that's what makes this story so difficult to talk about and remember. But, if we are going to understand who we are, then we have to understand and remember the Black Hawk War." -Historian Will Bagley

Virtually no one considers generational traumas, such as war, genocide, oppression, poverty, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, death or loss of parents or siblings, which have not yet been grieved and healed by individuals, families and communities. In Utah the effects of unresolved trauma due to the war are carried into the next generation.

I feel we have a responsibility to compassionately understand their pain and to not sanitize the Black Hawk War. The indigenous people of Utah are, all said and done, those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and we should see who they are and what they are doing. We need to experience their pain...to feel it. We owe it to the native Indians of Utah to feel it. Thousands of lives were lost in the war. Most never knew why, and now we don't even think about the war.

Our documentary film will, for the first time, reveal the truth of one of the darkest chapters in western history. The story will be told respectfully and with compassion from the perspective of the First Peoples of Utah. But our documentary goes beyond the war as we explore its legacy of perpetual demoralization. For Utah's American Indian peoples, the war meant the loss of their inheritance and heritage. It was the end of a sacred time—a time that should be honored, remembered and never forgotten.

- Black Hawk War Researcher Phillip B Gottfredson

The Story of Black Hawk... please click here.

This Is The Book That Started It All

The story of Black Hawk is based in part upon the oldest firsthand accounts from Peter Gottfredson's book titled Indian Depredations in Utah. In 1890, journalist Peter Gottfredson commenced a twenty-year project compiling personal eyewitness accounts of the Black Hawk War. Earlier, Peter had spent most of his time in the Ute Indian camps during the war, and witnessed first hand the exploitation that surrounded him and the people he loved.

Peter Gottfredson
working on his manuscript of
Indian Depredations in Utah
Photo by George E. Anderson

Highly respected by noted historians as being a reliable account, to the honor of Peter Gottfredson, authors, historians, researchers, journalists, scholars and academics have cited his work in countless publications, articles, and books for decades, underscoring the importance of his time-honored account. Most recent is historian John Alton Peterson's award-winning book titled Utah's Black Hawk War wherein Gottfredson's account is cited numerous times. Original copies of Peter's book are to be found in the New York Public Library, and other major collections. I republished his book in 2002 which can now be purchased at our on-line bookstore.

Being a product of the time, the book Indian Depredations in Utah is a testament to man's inhumanity to man, a window that looks upon a landscape of extreme hardship, brutal violence, desperation, despair; a human condition of immense complexities and consequences resulting in the genocide of the American Indian people of Utah.

Get your copy today here.
Read some excerpts from Peter's book here

BLACK HAWK WAR FORUM We welcome your comments, stories, questions, answers... Please join us in our online discussion forum.

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