St. George, the principal city of southern Utah, serves as a geographic and informational crossroads in the account of John Wesley Powell’s Colorado River expedition. The city is where surviving explorers received help, where reports of three missing men circulated, and where Powell’s passage became entangled with competing claims about what had happened to them.

A Southern Utah Hub

The book places St. George within a region shaped by Mormon settlement and by tension surrounding the Mountain Meadows massacre. In 1857, George A. Smith rode from Salt Lake City toward southern Utah, addressing Saints in towns along the way and urging preparations for holy war. The account describes his campaign across the southern settlements rather than identifying a particular stop in St. George, but it establishes the wider climate in which the city later figures.

St. George’s more specific role emerges in 1869, when Powell’s party reached the confluence of the Virgin River after leaving three members behind. Local Mormons fed the exhausted explorers and escorted Powell over the Beaver Dam Mountains to St. George, making the city a place of refuge and onward travel during the expedition’s search.

Reports of the Missing Explorers

On September 7, 1869, an anonymous telegram was sent to Apostle Erastus Snow in St. George. It claimed that three of Powell’s men had been killed by members of the Shivwit tribe after an encounter involving a woman gathering seed. The telegram also said that two alleged participants were at a nearby Indian camp and that Indian George had gone to recover the men’s papers and belongings. These were claims in a mysterious message, not an independently established account of the deaths.

The following day, while Powell was traveling by carriage from St. George toward Salt Lake City, the Deseret News published a report under a headline announcing that three members of his expedition had been killed by Indians. The article repeated the account that the men had been fed and directed toward Washington in southern Utah before the alleged killings. St. George thus marks the transition from a local telegram to a public story about the explorers’ fate.

Powell’s Doubts and the City’s Significance

Powell rejected the newspaper account’s portrayal of Oramel and Seneca Howland, and William Dunn, particularly its allegation that they had attacked a woman. Jack Sumner, who had traveled with the missing men, also doubted that Indigenous people had initiated their deaths; he later recalled seeing a watch he had given Howland in the possession of a white man. Those doubts placed the report circulating through St. George within a larger dispute over whether the missing explorers had been killed by Indigenous people or by white men in the region.

A year later, after the Howland family asked Powell to investigate, he sought Brigham Young’s assistance and traveled back to southern Utah. The subsequent inquiry proceeded through other locations, including Parowan, Pipe Spring, and a meeting with Shivwit people. St. George’s importance in this episode is narrower but consequential: it is the place where Powell’s party was helped and where the first known report accusing the Shivwits was transmitted and published, even as later evidence and testimony left that account in doubt.