Massacre Rocks and the Bear River Massacre: The Story That Goes Deeper

In August of eighteen sixty-two, a series of attacks near the present-day Massacre Rocks State Park on the Snake River killed between ten and fifteen Oregon Trail emigrants. The rocks that give the park its name are large volcanic formations that forced wagon trains to funnel into a narrow gap, and Shoshone and Bannock people, whose territory the emigrant road had bisected for nearly two decades, used those formations on several occasions.

The context matters. By eighteen sixty-two, tens of thousands of emigrants had passed through the Snake River corridor every year for nearly twenty years, depleting game, interrupting salmon runs, and competing for the same water sources the indigenous people depended on. The attacks in August were not random. They were the expression of people watching their subsistence economy collapse under the weight of the emigrant traffic.

The United States Army's response to the August attacks came the following January. Colonel Patrick Connor led about two hundred twenty California Volunteers north from Salt Lake City in winter to the Northwestern Shoshone encampment on the Bear River, near present-day Preston, Idaho. On January twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-three, the soldiers attacked the sleeping camp.

What followed was one of the deadliest single-day events in the history of American violence against Indigenous people. The death toll among the Northwestern Shoshone has been debated by historians for a century, with figures ranging from roughly two hundred and fifty to as many as four hundred men, women, and children killed. The historical record, drawn primarily from Army reports and the accounts of survivors, does not settle precisely on a number, and the range itself reflects genuine uncertainty in the sources. What is not uncertain is the scale. Connor was breveted to brigadier general for his conduct at Bear River. The site, twelve miles north of Preston, Idaho, has a monument placed there in nineteen thirty-two and was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety. It is one of the least-visited commemorative sites in the American West.