Bear River Massacre Site

This ground holds the memory of the deadliest massacre of Native Americans in United States history. On January twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-three, roughly two hundred soldiers of the California Volunteers, under Colonel Patrick Connor, attacked a winter encampment of the Northwestern Shoshone along the Bear River. By the time the killing ended, estimates range from roughly two hundred fifty to as many as five hundred Shoshone men, women, and children killed.

For generations the event was misnamed a battle. It was not. Today the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation owns this land again and is building the Boa Ogoi Cultural and Interpretive Center here, to tell the story of their people, their way of life, and the lives lost on this riverbank.

It is a place of mourning, of memory, and of return.