The condemned man who chose the bullet over the rope

Wilkerson chose the bullet and got a slower death

Wallace Wilkerson stood tied to a chair, a target pinned over his heart. Four men raised their rifles. Utah Territory had convicted him of murder two years earlier. Utah law at the time gave a condemned man a choice: hang or face a firing squad. Wilkerson chose the bullet.

He may have shifted at the last second, or the marksmen may simply have aimed badly. The shots missed his heart and tore through his chest and arm instead. Wilkerson did not die at once. Witnesses said he lived for several minutes, in visible pain, before death finally came. Newspapers across the country reported the account. The botched shooting became one of the arguments later used against firing squads as a method of execution.

Wilkerson was not a public figure before his crime. Wallace Wilkerson is remembered now almost entirely for the way he died. He tried to choose the quicker death and got the slower one instead.

Militia killed dozens of Ute people at Fort Utah

Thirty years before Wilkerson faced the firing squad, a much larger verdict was carried out near this ground. Mormon settlers built Fort Utah in 1849. They planted it directly on a campsite the Timpanogos Ute people had used for generations. The fort sat in the path of their hunting trails. Within a year, militia acting under orders from Brigham Young attacked the Timpanogos there. Between forty and a hundred Ute men died. One or two Ute women were killed as well. One militiaman lost his life. The Battle at Fort Utah left no trial, no jury, no chosen method of death. It was a verdict handed down by rifle alone, on ground that would later host a courtroom's version of the same thing.

Smoot's generation built the law that shot Wilkerson

Abraham Owen Smoot helped build the settlement that grew out of that fort. It became a town with courts, juries, and the machinery to carry out a sentence like Wilkerson's. Smoot was a Mormon pioneer who spent his later decades in Provo, shaping its civic and religious institutions until his death there in 1895. He belonged to the generation that turned a fortified camp into a place with laws on the books. The laws were detailed enough to let a condemned man choose his own manner of dying. The firing squad that killed Wilkerson in 1879 answered to a legal order Smoot's generation had built. The rifles were different from the militia's. The ground was the same.

A crash at the junction killed a passenger

At the intersection of 2230 North and University Avenue, a crash happened. It killed a 90-year-old woman riding as a passenger. Two vehicles collided there. The other driver was taken to a hospital in stable condition. No firing squad, no militia order, no trial. Just a junction that turned fatal in an instant, the way this stretch of ground has done before, in older and more deliberate forms.