The Black Hawk Indian War was the longest and most destructive conflict between pioneer immigrants and Native Americans in Utah History. The traditional date of the war's commencement is 9 April 1865 but tensions had been mounting for years. On that date bad feelings were transformed into violence when a handful of Utes and Mormon frontiersmen met in Manti, Sanpete County, to settle a dispute over some cattle killed and consumed by starving Indians. An irritated (and apparently inebriated) Mormon lost his temper and violently jerked a young chieftain from his horse. The insulted Indian delegation, which included a dynamic young Ute named Black Hawk, abruptly left, promising retaliation. The threats were not idle - for over the course of the next few days Black Hawk and other Utes killed five Mormons and escaped to the mountains with hundreds of stolen cattle. Naturally, scores of hungry warriors and their families flocked to eat "Mormon beef" and to support Black Hawk, who was suddenly hailed as a war chief.
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The decimated lives of some 40,000 Native people caused by the Black Hawk War has simply been swept aside. Brigham Young's victory was perhaps a hollow one for, in order to fulfill his dream, he had to destroy a civilization. He complained it was "cheaper to feed them than to fight them," as he was spending millions in church funds equipping his private army to war against them. 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 providence. Twenty-six years of Utah's Indian history have since been deliberately ignored, only to disappear like shadows in the pine.
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