Provo Valley Indian Peace Treaty
Heber, Wasatch County, Utah
Marker Inscription
Indian Peace Treaty. Provo Valley colonized 1859-60 by 18 families... 1864 Indian troubles;fort built at Heber. 1867 peace treaty signed and bbq held, proving BYoung's "It's better to feed the Indians than fight them.
The Story
This marker recounts the settlement of Provo Valley in Utah, colonized by pioneer families around 1859–60 during the Mormon expansion into the mountain valleys. Amid conflict in the 1860s, settlers built a fort at Heber, and in 1867 a peace treaty and shared barbecue marked an accommodation with local Native peoples. The inscription invokes Brigham Young's well-known policy of feeding rather than fighting the region's Indigenous inhabitants.
Why it matters
It captures a pivotal moment of Mormon westward settlement and the fraught negotiations between pioneers and Native peoples that shaped the American West.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years around 1859 and 1860, Mormon settlers were fanning out from Utah's older communities into the high mountain valleys, and Provo Valley was one of the places they reached. Pioneer families arrived to colonize the area, and the work of building homes and farms began in earnest in a cold, high-elevation basin far from the security of the larger towns.
The timing placed these settlers on the cusp of the nation's Civil War, but their most immediate concerns were local and practical: shelter, crops, and safety. The valleys they entered were also the homelands and hunting grounds of Native peoples, and settlement inevitably heightened tension over land and resources.
By the mid-1860s those tensions had sharpened into open trouble, and the settlers responded, as frontier communities across the territory did, by fortifying. The story recorded on this marker unfolds against that backdrop of colonization, conflict, and the search for some workable peace.
People & events
The marker traces a compact arc. Eighteen families colonized Provo Valley around 1859 and 1860. Then came the troubles of 1864, serious enough that the settlers built a fort at Heber for protection. Finally, in 1867, a peace treaty was signed, and the community marked the occasion with a barbecue.
That shared meal is the human heart of the account: a moment when, at least for a day, negotiation and hospitality replaced fear. The marker frames it as vindication of Brigham Young's well-known policy toward the region's Native peoples, summed up in his oft-quoted maxim that it was better to feed them than to fight them.
Whether such accommodations held, and on whose terms, is part of the larger and more complicated history of settler and Native relations in Utah. But the episode preserved here captures a genuine attempt to end conflict through agreement rather than force, memorialized in the plain, homespun image of a treaty sealed over a barbecue.
Its place in the American story
This site distills a defining chapter of the American West: the Mormon colonization of the Intermountain region and the fraught negotiations that accompanied it. The push into valleys like this one was part of one of the most organized settlement movements in the nation's history.
It also illustrates a distinctive approach to frontier conflict. The policy invoked on the marker, favoring provisioning over warfare, stood in contrast to the more purely militarized encounters seen elsewhere in the West, even as it remained bound up in the same fundamental project of displacing Native peoples from their land.
The fort and the treaty together tell the fuller truth: settlement here meant both the readiness for violence and the search for peace, sometimes within the space of a few years. That tension, between the wall built for defense and the meal shared in reconciliation, runs through the entire national story of westward expansion.
If you visit
Heber and the surrounding Provo Valley sit in beautiful high mountain country, and part of the pleasure of visiting is simply taking in the setting the pioneers chose, ringed by peaks and open to a big western sky.
At the marker, let the sequence of dates sink in: colonization, then a fort, then a treaty and a shared meal, all within less than a decade. It is a short timeline that carries a great deal of hope, hardship, and compromise.
If you are touring Utah's pioneer heritage sites, this monument fits naturally into a day of exploring the valley's history. Read it with an awareness that the peace it celebrates was one moment in a much longer and more complicated relationship between settlers and the Native peoples of these mountains.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Brigham Young
Themes & tags
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