Bear River Massacre
29 January 1863Boa Ogoi, on the Bear River near Preston, Franklin County, ID
California Volunteers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone winter village at dawn and killed at least 250 people, most of them women, children and elders. It is the deadliest massacre of Native people in United States history, and the least known.
Note: Describes the killing of children and the rape of survivors.
The Northwestern Shoshone wintered at Boa Ogoi, where Beaver Creek meets the Bear River. Emigrant trails and Mormon settlement had taken the valleys that fed them, and hunger had driven some raiding on the wagon roads. Colonel Patrick Edward Connor marched his California Volunteers north from Fort Douglas in January 1863 intending, in his own words, to punish them.
The soldiers reached the village before dawn on 29 January 1863 and attacked across the frozen river. What began as a fight became, once the Shoshone ran out of ammunition, four hours of killing. Chief Bear Hunter was killed. Soldiers shot women and children, raped survivors, burned the lodges and drove off the horses, leaving whoever lived through it in the open in January. Connor counted 224 dead; Shoshone accounts and later scholarship put it between 250 and 400, including about 90 women and children.
Twenty-one soldiers died. Connor was promoted to brigadier general. Because it happened during the Civil War, in a territory few were watching, the killing was recorded for a century as the "Battle of Bear River" and left out of the national story - though by death toll it exceeds Sand Creek and Wounded Knee together. The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation has since bought the land and is restoring it.
Connor reported 224 killed; Shoshone accounts and modern scholarship put the number at 250 to 400.
Sources
- Bear HunterNational Park Servicenps.gov
- Bear River Battleground, National Register of Historic Places registrationIdaho State Historical Societyhistory.idaho.gov