General Lot Smith

The plaque calls Lot Smith a friend of the Indians, but the manner of his death argues otherwise. A hard-tempered Mormon frontiersman who burned Army wagons in the 1857 Utah War and fought the Timpanogos at Fort Utah in 1850, Smith led the 1876 colonization of the Little Colorado and presided over Sunset, near here. In 1892, at Tuba City, he fenced land against his agreement with the Diné, shot a family's sheep, and threatened a woman and her daughter. A Diné herder, defending the flock, shot him in the back, and he died that evening.

What the plaque says

Family Man / Church Leader / Defender of the Prophets / Colonizer / Friend of the Indians / Stockman / Noted Horseman / Defender of Liberty. In January of 1876, Lot Smith was called by President Brigham Young on a mission to captain one of four companies of Latter-day Saints to settle along the Little Colorado River. They arrived at Sunset Crossing on March 24, 1876, where they built a fort. Later the four companies were organized into the Little Colorado Stake. Lot Smith was the Stake President, a position he held approximately nine years until the stake was dissolved. While living in Sunset, three of Lot and Alice Ann's children died and were buried here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Winslow — 2.6 mi
  The town an Eagles lyric made famous — and the home of La Posada, the last great railroad hotel and Mary Colter's finest work, at the southern doorway to Hopi and Navajo country.

More markers nearby

• Mormon Pioneers Along the Little Colorado River — 0.4 mi
• La Posada Hotel — 2.7 mi
• A City in Motion: Modern Modes — 2.7 mi
• The First Peoples of the Southwestern Colorado Plateau — 2.7 mi