The Provo River Massacre (also known as the Battle at Fort Utah, or Fort Utah Massacre) was a violent attack and massacre in 1850 in which 90 Mormon militiamen surrounded an encampment of Timpanogos families on the Provo River, and laid siege for two days. They eventually shot between 40 and 100 Native American men and one woman with guns and a cannon during the siege and subsequent pursuit, capture, and execution of the two groups that fled during the last night. One militiaman died and eighteen were wounded from return fire during the siege.
Of the Timpanogos people who fled in the night, one group escaped southward, and the other ran east to Rock Canyon. Both groups were captured, however, and the men were executed. Over 40 Timpanogos children, women, and a few men were taken as prisoners to nearby Fort Utah. They were later taken northward to the Salt Lake Valley and sold as slaves to church members there. The bodies of up to 50 Timpanogos men were beheaded by some of the settlers and their heads put on display at the fort as a warning to the mostly women and children prisoners inside.
Before the massacre the Timpanogos people initially tolerated the new presence of the settlers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) who had only recently begun moving south into Utah Valley in the past year from the main settlement in the Salt Lake Valley. The two groups enjoyed some moments of mutual friendship.
Tensions rose, however, when, according to LDS settler accounts, in January 1850 a Timpanogos man (called Old Bishop) stole an item of clothing from an LDS person, and three LDS men retaliated by murdering him.
A group of Timpanogos people responded to the murder by stealing around 50 cattle. Settlers in Fort Utah petitioned leaders in Salt Lake City to go to war with the group. Isaac Higbee, Parley P. Pratt and Willard Richards convinced Brigham Young to exterminate any Timpanogos hostile to the Mormon settlement. Young sent the Nauvoo Legion down with Captain George D. Grant and later sent General Daniel H. Wells to lead the army. After the Timpanogos defended themselves from within their village and an abandoned cabin, they fled their camp. The Mormons pursued the Timpanogos people from Chief Old Elk's tribe and killed any other Timpanogos people they found in the valley.
=== Mormon settlers massacre Timpanogos men at Battle Creek ===
Around February 1849, Dimick B. Huntington spoke with Timpanogos leader Little Chief about some of the settlers' missing cattle. Little Chief said that Roman Nose and Blue Shirt were great thieves who had decided to live off of the settlers' cattle all winter. Little Chief said that the Mormons should kill these renegades, perhaps out of fear that his tribe would be blamed and killed for the missing cattle. Captain John Scott took fifty men into Utah Valley to put a "final end" to the "depredations.".
The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) grew from the annexation of Texas (1845) and a disputed border between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande. President James K. Polk ordered US troops under General Zachary Taylor into the contested zone; after a skirmish that killed American soldiers, Congress declared war in May 1846. US forces won a series of engagements — Palo Alto, Monterrey, Buena Vista — before General Winfield Scott led an amphibious landing at Veracruz and an overland campaign to Mexico City, which fell in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) transferred California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the United States in exchange for $15 million and assumption of $3.25 million in claims — roughly 525,000 square miles, a 67 percent expansion of US territory. The war's outcome immediately reopened the slavery question: the Wilmot Proviso, debated throughout the war, proposed banning slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico, foreshadowing the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
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