Settlers walled themselves in against a war they helped start

Families slept inside an unfinished fort through two winters

Settlers in this stretch of the valley started building a fort in 1854, right where you are standing. They were afraid of a war they had helped bring on. For years, Mormon leaders had pushed to break up the trade in captive Native children, a trade that ran through Ute communities and their neighbors. At the same time, settlers kept fencing off land the Utes had hunted for generations. Both pressures came from the settlers' own choices, and both fed the anger building against them.

Chief Walker led the Ute resistance to that squeeze. Raids and reprisals spread across the territory through 1853 and into 1854, a stretch of fighting that came to be called the Walker War. In Draper, families responded by throwing up a defensive wall and moving into it at night. The fort was never finished. It was never attacked either. Through the winters of 1855 and 1856, people left their houses each evening. They slept behind the unfinished walls. They were afraid of a fight they had helped start.

By around 1864 the danger had passed, or people stopped believing in it, and the fort was abandoned. No battle was ever fought over this ground. The walls came down. The land went back to grazing and orchard. More than a century passed. Then in 2001, Briar Crest Court and its houses were built here.

Twelve miles northwest, at Battle Creek near present-day Pleasant Grove, that same friction turned deadly five years before Draper's fort went up. In March 1849, a militia of thirty-six men surrounded a Timpanogos camp. They killed four men accused of taking cattle. The women and children in that camp were left exposed to the cold. They made their way to Salt Lake City. This was one of the opening acts in a longer, wider conflict. It was a conflict between settlers and the valley's original people. The same conflict later put a half-built wall around a handful of families in Draper.

A prison wall replaced the fort three miles west

Fear did not stop building walls once the Draper fort came down. Three and a half miles west, the state raised a much bigger enclosure. It was meant to hold people rather than keep them out. The Utah State Prison eventually stood at Point of the Mountain. It was a walled institution guarding against dangers the surrounding towns had a hand in making. Where Draper families once slept behind unfinished timber, the state built something permanent. It was fenced and locked. It answered a different fear. But it was still a wall raised in an anxious valley.

An inn kept travellers moving through unsettled ground

Porter Rockwell opened an inn, brewery and Pony Express station at Point of the Mountain in 1856. The same year, Draper settlers were still sleeping inside their unfinished fort walls. The Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery sat at the narrow pass. The valley's roads squeezed together there. It stood about four and a half miles west of where you stand. It served travelers, mail riders and freight wagons. They moved through a landscape still unsettled by the Walker War. It was not a fortification. It was a waystation. It was built to keep commerce moving through ground that fear had made dangerous.

A lookout tower watched for raids east of Draper

East of Draper, in Alpine, settlers built a different kind of defense. The 3.8 miles east paired an ordinary house with a lookout tower. It was built to warn of raids during the same unsettled years. Like the fort in Draper, it was a structure raised by people whose own expansion onto Ute land had helped provoke the danger they were watching for. It still stands. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a stone reminder. Many households across this valley built their own small defenses against the same conflict.