LONE WOLF PUBLICATIONS
Steve Shaffer
Utah's past is full of haunting tales, but one of the
oldest and scariest is the story of the old Indian, Bishop, who was murdered by members of the Mormon
Battalion on the banks of the Provo River in 1849. The story goes something like this: "They
disemboweled old Bishop and filled his gut with river stones so he would sink in the river, and that way
they would get away with the crime. The trick did not work very well, because some Utes found his body
anyway, and it touched off a very ugly and bloody battle.
Trouble between the Ute people and
the Utah valley squatters had been brewing for years. The Mormon Militia killed four Utes in a fight at
Battle Creek, now Pleasant Grove, in the spring of 1849, and the same month settlers founded the town of
Provo on the very site of the Timpanogutz Ute fishing camp.
According to Church History, the
trouble really began to boil when Jerome Zabriskie, Richard A. Ivie and John R. Stoddard left Fort Utah to
hunt cattle. They met old Bishop who they accused of wearing a shirt that he allegedly stolen from Ivie,
and so the trio put a bullet into the old man's head and reclaimed the shirt. The killers dragged the body
to the Provo River and tried to sink it near Box Elder Island.
Well, that is one version of the
story. One Tom Orr recalls another version. Brigham Young had made a treaty with the Utes, agreeing that
the tribe would not molest the settlers' cattle if the settlers wouldn't kill the wild game in their area
that the Utes depended on for food. After a heavy snowfall, Stoddard and Zabriskie went deer hunting, or
more accurately, poaching. Old Bishop caught them and knew these white men were illegally hunting Ute game
in violation of the treaty. In the resulting scuffle, Stoddard fired first and the old man dropped dead.
His body was hidden in a nearby creek. After pulling the body to the bank, stated Orr, 'One of the men
stuck a knife into his belly and ripped him open so that his body would sink and efface all evidence of
the crime.' Instead of sinking, Bishop's body floated downstream and caught on a cottonwood root.
While Stoddard and Zabriskie boasted of the murder at the Fort, some Ute people found old Bishop's body.
The battle at Fort Utah was the
first major operation of the Nauvoo Legion, Utah's territorial militia. Gen. Daniel Wells issued orders to
take no prisoners and "to let none escape but do the work up clean!" In a brutal fight and
pursuit, stalwarts like Lot Smith, Bill Hickman, Ephraim Hanks and Robert Burton got their first taste of
Indian warfare in a cavalry charge. Infantry commander Jabez Nowlan had a large nose, fellow legionnaire
Abner Blackburn recalled. Nowlan's wife told him that if he was shot it would be in his nose. Sure enough,
he was. The Militia lost one man but killed dozens of the 75 Utes who came to fight the battle.
Wells captured 17 warriors the
Spanish Fork River and executed them on the ice of Utah Lake. The Soldiers took the surviving women and
children to Salt Lake City, where most of them ended up dying, not able to adapt to the white man way of
life.
Ute tribal lore claims that every
year, Old Bishop appears on the banks of the Provo River and one by one takes the rocks out of his belly
and throws them into the swift waters of the river, and then disappears.
Steve Shaffers Website