A Provo lawyer argued 59 cases before he lost his life

A lawyer argued 59 cases as the nation's top advocate

An Act of Congress designated the post office at 936 South 250 East, Provo, as the "Rex E. Lee Post Office Building." It sits within a few steps of where you are standing. That name belonged to a lawyer who grew up in this part of Provo and went on to argue for the entire country.

Rex E. Lee became U. S. Solicitor General in 1981. He was the government's top courtroom lawyer before the Supreme Court. He argued 59 cases there himself. He was one of the most active advocates to hold the job in the twentieth century. He defended federal law on cases ranging from broadcasting rules to affirmative action. He stood at the lectern in Washington. The town that raised him carried on without him.

He grew up in Utah Valley. He studied law. He built a career that carried him from Provo to the nation's capital and back more than once. The Solicitor General's office is sometimes called the "tenth justice." This is the one lawyer whose job is to represent the United States itself in its highest court. Lee held it under Ronald Reagan. This was a moment when the office argued cases that reshaped how far federal power could reach.

He returned to lead the university that shaped him

Rex E. Lee left the courtroom behind in 1989. He became president of Brigham Young University. The campus sits less than a mile from this post office. He led it for six years. He returned to the town where he had grown up. He ran the school that had shaped him. He stepped down in 1995 as his health failed.

He died of cancer in 1996, at 61. The next year, Congress attached his name to the post office on South 250 East. It was a plain civic building turned into a marker. It marked a life that ran from this street to Washington and back. The building still processes mail today. Its name is the only monument most people passing through will ever read.

A dispute over a shirt ended in a killing

Before Provo had a name worth putting on a building, it had a killing nobody put a name on for long. A Timpanogos Ute man known as Old Bishop got into a dispute with three settlers over a shirt. They killed him near Fort Utah. The settlement would grow into Provo. They weighted his body with rocks and sank it in the Provo River. No trial marked it. The killing set off tensions that would not stay contained to one man.

Militiamen besieged a Timpanogos camp on the river

It ended on the same river, two hundred yards from where a lawyer's name now hangs on a post office. Roughly ninety Mormon militiamen surrounded a Timpanogos encampment on the Provo River and laid siege for two days. They killed between forty and one hundred people. They used guns and a cannon against families camped on the ground you can walk to in minutes. Heads of the fallen were displayed afterward at Fort Utah. Brigham Young gave the order to move against those who would not make peace. It is remembered today, when it is remembered at all, as the Battle at Fort Utah.

A settler died in the same siege. Joseph Higbee was a militiaman. He was shot through the neck while looking over a log during the fighting on February 9, 1850. His death was recorded and kept. His name went into the town's own account of its founding. The Timpanogos dead mostly did not.

A hillside cemetery collapsed into sandy ground

Provo kept moving its dead as often as it moved its memory. A second cemetery, called Temple Hill, was laid out on high ground after the original fort relocated in 1850. It sat where the Maeser Building now stands on the Brigham Young University campus. It was less than a mile from the post office that would one day carry Rex E. Lee's name. The soil there was sandy. By 1880 graves had begun caving in. The cemetery was abandoned. Its burials were moved again, this time to Provo City Cemetery. Nothing remained on Temple Hill but the ground itself and, eventually, a university building.