Tabby-To-Kwanah, known as Chief Tabby, was a prominent leader of the Timpanogos Nation who came of age in the early 19th century, decades before the arrival of white settlers.
Standing in the Heber Cemetery during a May 2 ceremony honoring the chief, Timpanogos councilmember Perry Murdock spoke of his ancestor.
“He grew up in a time when our ancient people lived the way they did. The Timpanogos people always lived on Utah Lake and roamed all through these mountains and back and forth to Heber, their favorite hunting grounds. They roamed everywhere. There were no fences,” Murdock said.
All that changed. The decades following white settlement in the 1850s were defined by violence.
At the time, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had ordered its members to kill any indigenous people who resisted settlement, an order that has never been lifted. The Timpanogos nation dwindled from a population of 70,000 to roughly 1000 today.
“There was a Holocaust upon our people,” Murdock said. “but [Chief Tabby] didn't want that. He wanted peace among our people. That's what this monument represents today. That's why we're all here, people from all groups to represent the peace that Tabby, in the spirit world now with my ancestors, is [hoping for] today.”
The Wasatch Community Foundation and the Sons of Utah Pioneers organized Saturday’s ceremony to emplace a monument honoring a rare story of unity between settlers and the indigenous people.
That story centers around a humble gravestone marked “T.T.” which has long sat shaded by a pine tree in the Heber City Cemetery. It honors Tabby’s son, Tom Tabby, who was killed during the Black Hawk War in the 1860s.
Chief Tabby carried his son’s body to Heber, where he asked settler Joseph Stacy Murdock to bury the boy in the Latter-day Saint tradition.
On Saturday, Alice Crook Hicken, a Heber resident and a Murdock descendant said Tom Tabby’s story runs deep in her family folklore.
“But it really is the truth. And we know that Joseph Stacy was a good friend with Chief Tabby,” she said.
Together, Chief Tabby and Joseph Stacy Murdock drafted the treaty that ended the Black Hawk War in 1867.
Councilmember Perry Murdock, himself a descendent of Joseph Stacy Murdock’s plural marriage to a Timpanogos woman, said the effort for peace and recognition continues. It relates back to a respect for their land.
“Our herbs, our medicines, our food, are on these mountains here. And all of our fish and everything's down in the lakes. They used to be, anyway, but the pollution and sewage and everything going into those lakes have ruined them. We'd like to see that cleaned up. So our mission is peace, get along with everybody, and try to come up with a working relationship,” Murdock said.
The new memorial, a testament to that working relationship, now stands in the Heber Cemetery alongside the original gravestone.
The Wasatch Community Foundation also plans to place a statue honoring Chief Tabby in Heber City.
