James Russell Ivie

James Russell Ivie (December 30, 1802 – June 10, 1866) was a Mormon pioneer, an early Latter Day Saint leader, and a pioneer settler of Sanpete County, Utah Territory. Ivie assisted Isaac Morley in the settlement of the area and laid out the town of Mount Pleasant, Utah in honor of the town of the same name in Pennsylvania, which had been founded by ancestors of his daughter-in-law Mary Catherine Barton, who was married to his son John Lehi Ivie at about the same time the area was settled.

Ivie was born in Franklin, Georgia of mixed parentage, including the Cherokee who inhabited the region. He married Eliza McKee Faucett, also of mixed Euro-American and Cherokee ancesty in 1824 at Shelbyville, Tennessee.

The Ivies joined with the Latter Day Saint church shortly after its founding in 1830 as a result of contact with missionaries who visited their home. The family settled in Missouri and were spared the Trail of Tears expulsion of other Cherokee in the spring of 1838 due to their mixed ancestry, only to be expelled in November of that year, due to their Mormon faith.

They settled near the new town of Nauvoo, Illinois, but moved to Iowa shortly after the first exodus in the spring of 1846. Eliza gave birth to a son in Council Bluffs on September 15 of that year, an to another on February 25, 1849 at Salt Lake City, so it is likely they made the journey west in 1848.

Ivie's ancestry was thought to be useful in expanding the Mormon settlements to Sanpete County, so he was sent with Morley to lay out settlements in that area. After a successful negotiated settlement of the Wakara War, Ivie took up ranching near Scipio, Millard County, Utah, where he was killed on June 10, 1866, one of the early fatalities of the Ute Black Hawk War. It is unlikely that Ivie was a target given his friendly relations with Ute tribes in the area, but was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was killed by a chance encounter with renegades. His widow and family remained in Scipio and were unmolested.