Washakie: A Shoshone Village on the Malad River
Utah
About thirty-five miles north of Brigham City, on the Malad River near the Idaho border, sits the small community of Washakie, named for the celebrated Shoshone chief who maintained peace with his Latter-day Saint neighbors. The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation came to this land in eighteen eighty after years of displacement following the Bear River Massacre of eighteen sixty-three, in which hundreds of Shoshone men, women, and children were killed by United States Army troops just across the border in Idaho. More than a hundred members of the Northwestern Band had converted to the Latter-day Saint faith, and their leader, Chief Sagwitch, appealed to the church for land to farm.
The church granted them acreage here, and the community took root, learning carpentry and agriculture while keeping their cultural gatherings alive. Washakie is a ghost town today, but it remains a place of memory for the Northwestern Band of Shoshone, whose small tract there holds a cemetery.
