The Bear River Massacre

The Northwestern Shoshone had been in the Bear River valley for generations, moving with the seasons between the mountains and the flats, fishing in the fall, hunting in the winter, returning to the river's confluence with Battle Creek to camp in the cold months. By January eighteen sixty-three, that pattern of movement had become nearly impossible. Mormon settlers had occupied the pastures and water sources. California-bound emigrants had consumed and frightened off the game. The Shoshone people at the Bear River camp were hungry, and some had been raiding emigrant and settler supplies to survive.

On the morning of January twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-three, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor marched roughly two hundred California Volunteer soldiers from their base at Fort Douglas near Salt Lake City, through the night, in sub-zero temperatures, and attacked the camp at dawn. What followed lasted several hours. Between two hundred fifty and four hundred Northwestern Shoshone people were killed, the estimates varying across different studies of the event. More than ninety percent of the dead were women, children, and elderly people. Twenty-one soldiers also died.

The United States Army called it the Battle of Bear River. Historians and the Northwestern Shoshone Nation call it a massacre. The distinction matters because the terminology determined what happened afterward. Connor was promoted to Brigadier General. He received the thanks of the territorial legislature and of grateful settlers across Utah and Idaho. No proceedings examined the conduct of the attack.

The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation was not federally recognized until nineteen eighty-seven, one hundred twenty-four years after the event. They acquired the massacre site in twenty eighteen, calling it Boa Ogoi, which means Large River, and are building a cultural interpretive center there to tell the story in Shoshone terms.

The total death toll from the Bear River Massacre may have been the largest in any single attack on Native Americans in United States history. The public record in Utah held it as a military victory for most of the century and a half that followed. The grass still grows there, on the bank of the Bear River, in a corner of Idaho that most travelers on the interstate pass without slowing.