Shivwit tribe

The Shivwit tribe enters the narrative through two linked histories: the disputed deaths of three members of John Wesley Powell’s expedition and the later removal of the tribe from its ancestral range on the Arizona Strip. Powell’s account presented Shivwit people as the killers of William Dunn, Oramel Gass Howland, and Seneca Howland. But the evidence surrounding the deaths, the circumstances of the reported confession, and the record of Indigenous people being blamed for crimes committed by Latter-day Saints leave that attribution unsettled. The tribe’s displacement for Mormon cattle grazing gives the episode a material aftermath beyond the question of who killed the explorers.

The reported encounter with Powell

In September 1869, after Powell’s party emerged from the Grand Canyon, a report circulated that three expedition members had been killed by Shivwit people. An anonymous telegram sent to Erastus Snow in St. George said the three men had been found exhausted, fed by the Shivwits, and directed toward Washington. It further claimed that the explorers had killed an Indigenous woman, after which Shivwit men pursued and killed them. The message also said that two of the alleged killers were in the Washington Indian camp with two of the men’s guns, and that Indian George had gone to retrieve papers and property. The report provided a sequence of events, but its anonymous source and the absence of the men’s names in the newspaper account left important questions about its origins and reliability.

Powell doubted the story, particularly its accusation that one of his companions had assaulted and killed a woman. He had known Oramel Gass Howland for years and rejected that portrayal of his character. Jack Sumner, who had traveled with the expedition and was close to the missing men, also doubted that Indigenous attackers had killed them. His doubts were shaped by his knowledge of William Dunn’s experience and preparedness: Dunn had spent years facing danger on the frontier and had been wounded four times by Comanches. These objections did not establish what had happened, but they showed that the first account was contested even among people close to the expedition.

A year later, Powell returned to investigate, accompanied by Jacob Hamblin as guide. In Parowan, the party met Brigham Young and about forty local Saints, including William Dame and John D. Lee, both identified in the account as leading perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows massacre. Powell and Hamblin then traveled south with an escort of Kaibab Indians. Near Mount Dellenbaugh, Hamblin arranged a meeting with Shivwit people. Powell later reported that the Shivwit chief, speaking through Hamblin, confessed to killing three white men. According to a further account Powell recorded, the explorers had been fed and sent toward the settlements; an arriving Indigenous messenger then told the Shivwits that miners had killed a woman in a drunken fight. Believing the explorers were responsible, Shivwit men pursued and killed them. Powell treated the killings as the result of mistaken identification, forgave the Shivwits, and sought no revenge.

A contested attribution

Powell’s account became the basis for the prevailing explanation, supported by Jacob Hamblin’s reputation among southern Utah Saints as a man of exceptional honesty. Yet the book questions whether that reputation should settle the matter. It describes Hamblin as willing to deceive when he believed it served the Kingdom of God, and also records a history of deception for personal gain. That context does not by itself disprove the reported confession, but it complicates the authority of an account that depended on Hamblin to translate and arrange the meeting.

The narrative also places the accusation against the Shivwit tribe beside documented instances in which Mormon perpetrators disguised themselves as Indigenous raiders. In September 1857, Hamblin directed an attack on the William Dukes wagon train after the emigrants had paid Mormon guides $1,815 for safe passage. The attackers, described by the emigrants as Indigenous, stole more than three hundred cattle and other possessions; some had visible features that led the travelers to suspect that they were not Paiutes. The account attributes the robbery to Mormon men wearing disguises under Hamblin’s direction. This earlier episode does not prove who killed Powell’s men, but it gives concrete grounds for caution when an Indigenous group is made the sole explanation for violence in the region.

A letter discovered in 1980 by Wesley P. Larsen further unsettled the accepted version. Written in 1883 by William Leany to John Steele, it suggested that Dunn and the Howland brothers had been killed in Toquerville, inside an LDS ward house, by a local Saint. Larsen’s hypothesis that Mormons, rather than Shivwits, killed the explorers was disparaged by most historians. The majority view relied heavily on the accounts by Powell and Hamblin describing a confession. The book argues that those accounts deserve scrutiny, while stopping short of treating the Toquerville theory as conclusively established.

The practical objections to the conventional account are also emphasized. The Shivwit tribe is described as a small, impoverished community without firearms, while the three explorers were experienced, armed men carrying two rifles and a shotgun. Dunn, in particular, had reason to be wary of ambush. The author considers the evidence insufficient to establish that Toquerville residents killed the men, but also finds little credible support for the claim that Shivwit people filled them with arrows. The distinction matters: uncertainty about one theory does not automatically validate the other, and the surviving accounts do not resolve the deaths beyond dispute.

Land loss and narrative significance

The Shivwit tribe’s history does not end with the Powell investigation. About two decades after the meeting, the Saints forced the tribe from its extensive ancestral homeland on the Arizona Strip because the land was wanted for Mormon cattle grazing. The tribe was relocated to a reservation on the outskirts of St. George measuring only six miles by six miles. This reduction from a vast range to a small reserve makes the consequences of territorial power explicit: the community whose members had been placed at the center of a disputed account of violence also lost its land to the expanding needs of Mormon settlement.

The episode therefore turns on more than a question of individual guilt. In the story of Dunn and the Howland brothers, the Shivwit tribe appears first through reports and translations made by outsiders, with Powell’s published interpretation giving the alleged confession lasting authority. Later testimony and archival material reopen the case, but do not offer a universally accepted resolution. Against that uncertainty stands a clearer outcome: the Saints took the tribe’s ancestral range for cattle and confined the Shivwits to a small reservation. The contrast between an enduring accusation and a documented dispossession gives the tribe’s place in the narrative its larger significance.