Existing comment:
Death of a Chief
The winter of 1854-55 found Walkara and his band camped along Meadow Creek just four miles south of this spot. In January, the chief began to feel ill, and by the later part of the month, he was suffering from pneumonia. On January 29, the Hawk of the Mountains died. Carrying out the wishes of his dead brother, Arapene slashed the throats of Walkara's two wives so that their spirits might walk with that of the Hawk. On the day of their deaths, the bodies of the chief and his wives were securely strapped to horses and carried to the mountain above what is now the town of Meadow. There, in the talus slopes which overlook the western deserts of the Great Basin, Walkara was interred in a tomb of stone.
The Chief was placed on his favorite blue blanket, and the still-bloody bodies of his two wives were laid on either side. A young Paiute girl was also killed and put into the grave while another Paiute child, a small boy, was staked alive in the pit to ward off wild animals. Before the tomb was sealed, an ornate saddle with brocaded cherubim, a Book of Mormon, rifles, bows, steel-tipped arrows, Spanish ornaments and food were placed with the dead chief. To seal the ten foot diameter tomb, logs were placed across the top of the grave. Rocks were then stacked on top of the logs to conceal the posts and the burial vault. With the sealing of the tomb, 14 of Walkara's favorite horses were led to the grave and killed. A Forest Service survey of the burial site in 1983 revealed the scattered skeletal remains of these horses 128 years after they had been killed. This survey also confirmed what had been unofficially suspected for years: Walkara's grave had been robbed by relic hunters sometime around 1909.
Two hundred yards north of Walkara's gravesite are a number of Ute burials from the same general time period; that is, the 1850's and 1860's. These burials are not as grand as Walkara's. Generally, they consist of a small vault in the talus just big enough for a single individual accompanied by a small number of grave goods. Of the 20 burials, 13 have been disturbed by grave robbers. Human bones have been scattered indisciminately across talus slopes while graves have been looted of the goods that accompanied the dead at burial. |