The siege that cleared this valley

Militiamen besieged a Timpanogos camp on the Provo River

Ninety armed men surrounded a camp of Timpanogos families on the Provo River and would not let them leave. The siege lasted two days. Cannon fire and gunfire killed as many as a hundred men, and one woman. One militiaman died. Eighteen more were wounded by return fire.

The killing had a small beginning. In January 1850, a Timpanogos man known to the settlers as Old Bishop was accused of taking a piece of clothing. Three settlers murdered him for it. His band answered by driving off around fifty head of cattle. The settlers at Fort Utah wanted war for it, and they got one. Brigham Young resisted at first. Isaac Higbee, Parley P. Pratt and Willard Richards pushed him until he agreed to send the militia to wipe out any Timpanogos judged hostile. He sent Captain George D. Grant with the Nauvoo Legion, and later General Daniel H. Wells to take command of the field.

When the siege camp broke, the people inside ran two ways. One group went south. The other, following Chief Old Elk, ran east toward Rock Canyon. The militia hunted down both groups. The men captured in the chase were executed on the spot. More than forty women and children were marched back to Fort Utah as prisoners. They were taken north to Salt Lake Valley. There they were sold as slaves to church members. The battle site sits close enough that the ground under the Provo River bottoms today held that camp, that siege, and what came after it.

A misfired cannon killed one settler and maimed another

The cannon that ringed the fort during the siege did not stay pointed only at the Timpanogos. During a demonstration at Fort Utah, a spark caught the powder while the gun was being reloaded. William Dayton died in the blast. George W. Bean lost his left arm. A rider covered 120 miles in twenty hours to bring a doctor from Centerville. But the damage was already done. The same weapon that had helped drive people from this valley turned, once, on the men who fired it.

Provo's early dead were buried at the fort and hillsides

Provo had no cemetery yet in the years around the massacre, so its dead went into the ground wherever there was room. Some were buried inside Fort Utah itself. Others went into the earth at Temple Hill, where the Maeser Building at Brigham Young University now stands, or near the mouth of Slate Canyon. A few were buried downtown. Years later some of those bodies were dug up and carried to consecrated ground. A marker placed by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers still stands near the old Fort Field graveyard site.

Grandview Hill Cemetery gave the city its consecrated ground

Grandview Hill Pioneer Cemetery opened on the rise 195 feet from where you stand, a formal, named resting place the Timpanogos dead never received. It replaced the scattered burials at the fort and on Temple Hill with rows and headstones the city would keep. The valley the militia had cleared eleven years earlier now had its own consecrated ground, laid out for the people who took it.

A doctor built a sanatorium and died in it

By the time Stewart–Hills House went up half a mile from here, the siege was two generations gone. Dr. Andrew Jackson Stewart, born in Provo in 1873, bought the land in 1914 and began building it as a long-term care facility. He moved in before it was finished, with only the first floor complete, and died there of pneumonia in 1919. Clinton N. Hills bought the empty house the next year. He finished the upstairs himself. Later he wired it for electricity. He added one of the first indoor bathrooms in the area. Neighbors came by just to see it. Nothing in that house, or in the ordinary yards and driveways built up around this square since, marks whose river this had been.