Wakara (abt. 1815-1855; his name is often anglicized to “Walker”) was one of the great Ute leaders when the Mormons arrived in the Great Basin. Long before that 1847 arrival, Wakara had been trading with white “mountain men” in the region, and his welcoming of the Mormons may have been in part due to the expectation that they would be profitable trading partners. His skill with English (he also spoke Spanish, as well as Native languages) made him a particularly capable intermediary between the local tribes and Brigham Young. Wakara was even baptized in 1850.

Good relations between whites and Natives soon soured, however. There were so many whites, and their settlement on prime lands disrupted Ute food sources. Brigham Young moved to halt the slave trade, both in the Valley and along the Spanish Trail within Utah, interfering with a prime source of Wakara’s wealth. Then a Mormon killed one of Wakara’s men near Springville, and the so-called “Walker War” of 1853 commenced, with raids by Natives against Mormon encampments. Many more Natives than whites were killed in those skirmishes, some of them unprovoked attacks by whites against unarmed Utes who were seeking food and shelter at Mormon hands. The Walker War was resolved when Brigham Young asked to buy the Ute lands; Wakara refused to sell, but agreed to live peacefully with the whites if they would live peacefully with him. The treaty was never officially approved by the U.S. government, but Wakara’s men ceased their raids against Mormon settlements.

Wakara died of pneumonia a few months later, early in 1855.

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Sometime in 1851, before the troubles that soured relations between the Mormons and the Utes, Wakara “wrote” a letter that has been preserved in the Brigham Young office files at the Church History Library. I wish we knew more of the circumstances behind the letter – a clerk’s filing notation that it is “Walker’s writing, 1851” doesn’t tell us much – it suggests that someone kept the pages as a curiosity but did not file them in the office papers until the exact date of the writing had been forgotten. I also suspect that Wakara made this writing while he visited the office of Brigham Young or his clerks, as there is no indication that the letter was delivered by a third party – and because there is a clue that Wakara’s model for this letter was one (or many) letters received and filed by office clerks (I’ll explain in a minute).

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I ran across this letter some 15 years ago while I was searching the Brigham Young papers methodically, just before and just after they were opened to carefully controlled public access – they are freely available now to the entire world. A visit to the Church History Library catalog (churchhistorycatalog.lds.org), with a search for “brigham young office files” (its call number is CR 1234 1) allows anyone anywhere to freely search the vast majority of Brigham Young’s papers, viewing and even downloading images at will.

This “Walker’s writing” immediately struck me as extraordinary. I could not (still cannot) tell from the black and white image whether the writing is done in ink or in a very dark pencil – I think it’s ink – but I could easily distinguish this writing from that of most other people to whom holding a pen or pencil is an unusual event. My notes from that time say “The pen is firmly held to the paper as though the writer were confident of his writing; there is no trembling, no trailing off at the end of a mark, no stopping and starting the way semi-literate people do when they are unfamiliar with holding the pen.”

The marks themselves do not make letters or words, of course, but neither are they simple doodles, the way you scratch a ball point pen when you try to start the ink flowing. My eye keeps trying to make roman letters out of these marks, which vary from “character” to “character.” Imagine looking at a sheet of handwriting in an alphabet you don’t know – something from India or Thailand, perhaps – and a rapid imitation of such writing might look very much like this as you roughly mimic the angles and curves of the unfamiliar characters. It looks to me that that is what Wakara was doing.

Wakara had obviously seen other English letters, even if it was only in the office the day he made this writing – the pages are set up as letters, with an obvious underlined “salutation” (or, possibly, a date line), and parallel lines of words. The second page has been folded as an envelope, the way so many 19th century letters were constructed – and Wakara has not only imitated an address, but has also rotated the page so that the address runs the long way as envelopes are addressed.

And here’s the thing that makes me think Wakara was modeling his writing after letters that had been received in Brigham Young’s office and already filed, or prepared for filing. Notice the writing at the end of the “envelope”? The first line is underlined, and beneath that are several lines of much smaller writing. That is exactly the way letters were prepared for filing in that office. The top line recorded the name of the letter’s sender and the date of writing or receipt. Usually that information is separated by a line from what follows – one or several lines of smaller writing indicating the subject of the correspondence. (The clerk’s filing notation on this Wakara letter is incomplete – possibly because it was not planned for permanent filing until the exact date had been forgotten, and also because the “letter” can have no summary of content, but you can still see the general outline of such a notation.) After letters were bundled up for filing, these notations at the end of the folded correspondence made it easy for a clerk to fan through a bundle of letters to find the one that was wanted. Those marks don’t ever appear on correspondence until a clerk prepares a paper for filing – Wakara could have seen them only in an office setting.

I was impressed then and am impressed now with Wakara’s keen observation of handwriting and correspondence conventions, and his confidence in holding his writing materials. I really wish we did know more about the context for this document. Perhaps a search of the presidential or Historian’s Office journals will turn up an entry mentioning Wakara’s presence in the office, and perhaps a reference to his writing.

In any case, I’m grateful to the clerk who preserved this document, which could only have been a curiosity, not a useful reference for later office work, so that scholars with specialized experience far beyond my own have a chance to tease out meanings from a rare artifact.