Bear River, January 1863

About sixty miles north of Ogden, where Beaver Creek meets the Bear River near the present-day Utah-Idaho state line, there is a site that most Americans have never heard of. In terms of lives lost, it is the deadliest massacre of Native people in the history of the American West, including Wounded Knee.

The Northwestern Shoshone had been watching the Bear River valley fill with Mormon settlers since eighteen sixty. The settlers had taken the farmland and the water. By the winter of eighteen sixty-two and sixty-three, relations between the Shoshone and the settlers in Cache Valley had deteriorated badly. In early January, Shoshone warriors attacked a group of miners traveling through the valley, killing two of them. A federal judge issued warrants for the arrest of several Shoshone leaders.

Colonel Patrick Edward Connor commanded the Third California Volunteer Infantry, stationed at Camp Douglas near Salt Lake City. Lincoln had sent Connor's regiment to protect the overland mail routes. Connor moved his forces north in January, marching through a severe winter that killed a number of his horses and gave some of his men frostbite. He reached the Shoshone winter camp on the morning of January twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-three.

The camp held as many as four hundred people, many of them women and children wintering along Beaver Creek. The soldiers approached before dawn. The Shoshone warriors, a force of perhaps one hundred or so, took a position in an embankment along the creek and fired at the advancing troops. The soldiers lost most of their twenty-one dead in that opening exchange. Connor changed his tactics and ordered a three-sided envelopment of the camp.

By mid-morning the Shoshone warriors were out of ammunition. What followed, as documented in Connor's own official report and in accounts collected later by historians, was a killing of those remaining in the camp, men, women, and children. Approximately two hundred and fifty Shoshone people died. The soldiers burned the camp's seventy lodges and seized the winter food stores. Connor was promoted to brigadier general.

The site near Franklin, Idaho, was not formally recognized by the state of Idaho until two thousand eight. The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation maintains a memorial there. What happened at Bear River on January twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-three, was the destruction of an entire community in a single winter morning.