Washington, Utah, is a key place in the disputed accounts of what happened to three members of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition. Reports said the men had been sent toward Washington after receiving food, then were killed by Shivwits; an anonymous telegram also placed two alleged perpetrators and two of the explorers’ guns at a Washington-area Indian camp. The town’s significance lies less in any confirmed event there than in the leads associated with it—and the failure to pursue them.

Washington in the First Reports

On September 8, 1869, the Deseret News published a report that three men from Powell’s expedition had been killed by Indians. Based on a dispatch from St. George, the account said peaceable members of the Shivwit tribe had found the men hungry, fed them, and directed them toward Washington. The men were then said to have shot a woman gathering seed, prompting three Shivwits to pursue and kill them. The report offered a specific route and sequence, but it was not an eyewitness account.

The report followed an anonymous telegram sent to Mormon Apostle Erastus Snow in St. George the previous evening, after Powell had asked local Latter-day Saints to watch for his missing companions. It likewise claimed the men had been fed and put on the trail to Washington, and said that two of the Shivwits accused of killing them were at the Washington Indian camp with two of the men’s guns. The telegram did not identify its author or where it had been sent from.

A Nearby Lead Left Unpursued

The alleged camp was reported to be less than ten miles from St. George. Yet no Latter-day Saints made the short journey to arrest the alleged killers or ask where the bodies had been left. Nor was there a serious effort to recover the explorers’ guns, scientific instruments, or papers. That inaction became a central difficulty for the accepted account: if the telegram’s specific claims were accurate, the alleged perpetrators and some of the missing property were reportedly close at hand.

Washington thus enters the narrative through the geography of an untested accusation. The reports connected it to the men’s supposed route and to a camp where alleged killers might have been found, but the evidence does not establish that the killings themselves took place in Washington, Utah, or that the men ever reached it.

The Location in a Contested History

The dominant historical account attributed the deaths to the Shivwits, drawing in large part on descriptions by Powell and Jacob Hamblin of Shivwits confessing to the killings. Later critics questioned the reliability of that account and pointed to the lack of investigation around the Washington-area lead. Wesley P. Larsen argued that Powell depended on Hamblin to translate, while Powell did not speak Paiute fluently; this made the reported confession less straightforward than it first appeared.

The place-name therefore carries two competing roles in the story: Washington was presented as the destination toward which the explorers had been directed, and its nearby camp as the location of alleged perpetrators and recoverable evidence. Neither report resolves what happened. The distance from St. George sharpens the unanswered question of why no one followed up, while the uncertainty surrounding the telegram and the translated accounts prevents Washington from serving as proof of either version.