The Nephi massacre was an 1853 incident occurring during Wakara's War, a series of skirmishes between Native Americans and Mormons in present-day Utah. The massacre was carried out by LDS Church settlers from Salt Creek Fort in Nephi, Utah as retaliation for the recent deaths of four Mormons killed in the Fountain Green massacre by the Ute nation. Although the Goshute people who were targeted were described as peace-seeking, the Mormon settlers held them responsible for actions committed by a different Native American nation, demonstrating the broader tensions and violence characterizing the conflict in the Utah region during this period.
The massacre itself involved a deliberate act of deception and violence. LDS settlers invited a group of Goshute Native Americans—consisting of men, children, and one woman—into Salt Creek Fort under the pretense of peace. Once inside the fort, the settlers took the group prisoner and systematically executed the seven men by shooting them in the back of the head. The victims were then buried in a mass grave at the fort.
The immediate outcome was the deaths of seven Goshute men and the capture of three survivors—one woman and two children—who were taken as prisoners. This massacre exemplified the violence and mistrust characterizing relations between Mormon settlers and Native American groups during Wakara's War, though it also reflected the settlers' tendency to conflate different Native American nations and seek retribution against groups unconnected to the attacks that had prompted their violent response.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
Seven Goshute men killed; three survivors (one woman and two children) taken prisoner
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