BEAR RIVER MASSACRE

1/29/1863 - Mostly forgotten among the tumult of the American Civil War's third year of bloody battles, on a wintery day in which temperatures drop to twenty degrees below zero, near the confluence of the Bear River and Battle Creek (the locale is also known in Shoshone as Boa Ogoi), the worst massacre of Native Americans by United States troops takes place in the southeastern portion of The Washington Territory (where Idaho now is, close to the present day town of Preston) when elements of the 3rd Regiment, California Volunteer Infantry, commanded by 42-year-old army veteran, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor, attack a tribe of hundreds of Northwestern Shoshone (the word means "high-growing grasses") led by Chief Bear Hunter in a military engagement historians will dub The Bear River Massacre (other monikers for the clash are the "Engagement on the Bear River," the "Battle of Bear River," and "Massacre at Boa Ogoi").

Bear River - 1863

Located in what is now northern Utah and southeastern Idaho, Cache Valley had for hundreds of years been a favorite area of the Shoshone Indians (they call it "Seuhubeogoi" for Willow Valley) for gathering grass seeds and grains, taking trout out of it's waters, trapping small game like the ground squirrel and woodchuck, hunting large prey that includes buffalo, deer, and elk, and wintering against the region's harsh weathers (the tribe that will one day help explorers Lewis and Clark reach the Pacific Ocean, assisted immeasurably by the interpreter skills of the Shoshone woman, Sacagawea).  Sole proprietors of the sheltering real estate, in 1818, as part of an exploration of the area by the Pacific Fur Company of Donald McKenzie, Michel Bourdon becomes the first white man to delight in the charms of the valley.  Soon a favorite locale of trappers working for various fur companies (among it's early visitors are legendary mountain men, Jim Bridger and Jedediah Smith), the area is touted to Brigham Young as a potential site to settle his Mormon brood in and the area gets it's first permanent Anglo-American settlement when Mormon William Gardner plants roots in the valley in 1852 (as early as 1847, Mormons are in discussions with the Shoshone over land claims in northern Utah).  Warily at peace with each other, the whites in the area form a militia to protect themselves from potential depredations by the natives.  Expanding north into the area, in 1856, Peter Maughan settles a group of Mormons near a location called Sardine Canyon.  A natural pathway through the mountains leading to the Pacific Ocean, with gold found in California, Mormons in Salt Lake City and spreading through Utah, and new mineral discoveries being made to the northwest, Anglo travelers and settlers soon are pushing the Shoshone out of areas they have called theirs for centuries and as the American Civil War begins and President Lincoln orders troops to the area (the assignment will be given to 42-year-old Colonel Patrick Edward Connor as commander of the 3rd California Volunteer Infantry Regiment operating out of a location three miles to the east of Salt Lake City that will be known as Camp Douglas) to protect the mail and communication routes through the area, keep California a part of the Union, and to insure there are no more Mountain Meadows type incidents (an 1857 tragedy in which Mormons, disguised as Indians, wipe out a wagon train of settlers bound for California) the tribe is beginning to slowly starve to death.  And matters are not helped any when John White discovers gold at Grasshopper Creek, in the southwestern mountains of Montana in 1862, making Cache Valley the quickest and most direct route to the gold fields.

Cache Valley

Clark, Lewis, And Sacagawea

McKenzie

Connor

All the players in place for a first class tragedy, a series of misunderstandings and clashes between the natives and whites of the region lowly builds to the disastrous winter of 1863.  When a settler finds his horse missing, a Shoshone youth fishing nearby is grabbed, put on trial, and hung ... his father, one of the tribe's chiefs, retaliates and a couple of men from the Merrill family are killed to balance the scales of justice.  In 1859, a group of nineteen immigrants from Michigan are ambushed by what folks in the region believe are a band of renegade Shoshones that pillage the settlers wagons, steal their livestock, and kill at least five members of the party, torturing one five year old girl to death by cutting off her ears, gouging out her eyes, and amputating both the girl's legs at the knee while she is alive (by the time the dragoons from Fort Walla Walla arrive, the culprits have vanished into the region's mountain wilderness).  On September 9, 1860, a group of pioneers, led by Elijah Utter is attacked by what are believed to be Bannock and Boise Shoshone warriors and the white Van Ornum children are carried off (as a direct result of the attack, Colonel George Wright establishes a military fort capable of sustaining five companies of troopers near the present location of Boise, Idaho).  Seeking his missing nephew, Zachias Van Ornum puts together a small group of friends, and enlists the help of a detachment of Colonel Connor's cavalry under the command of Major Edward McGarry (a Californian politician and Mexican-American War veteran), and the group finds and attacks a group of Shoshones led by Chief Bear Hunter.  Forced to surrender, Bear Hunter and four warriors are held hostage until the small boy is returned a day later to his uncle.  Protesting that the boy is actually the son of a deceased French fur trapper and the sister of Shoshone Chief, Washakie (and confronted by 70 members of the militia), the Shoshone of Bear Hunter are momentarily placated by receiving the gift of two cows and some flour from the white residents of Cache Valley.  December 4, 1862 finds Connor sending McGarry on a new mission into Cache Valley, this time to recover some recently stolen livestock from the Shoshones.  Fleeing before being fully confronted by McGarry's soldiers, four warriors are too slow and are captured and held as hostages that will be exchanged for the missing livestock ... which is not returned and so the Shoshones are subsequently executed by a firing squad and their bodies pitched into the Bear River.  As predicted in an editorial of the Deseret News, the Shoshones begin seeking immediate retaliation for the deaths, retaliation they find when they attack the three man party of A. H. Conover (Conover's two companions, George Clayton and Henry Bean will be killed in the attack), the businessman who operates the Montana Trail freight hauling that moves back and forth from Salt Lake City and Montana's mining camps.  Shoshone blood not fully avenged, warriors of the tribe confront a group of eight miners caught in a mire of mud on the western side of Bear River, killing several horses and one settler, John Henry Smith of Walla Walla.  The deaths, coupled with another report of ten miners being murdered three days before convinces Colonel Connor that although the season isn't correct for a military campaign, he will nonetheless lead an expedition into the region to put the Shoshone problem in Cache Valley to bed for good. 

Members Of The Van Ornum Family - Young Ruben Is

The Child, Zachias Is To His Left

McGarry

Bear Hunter

Secretly making plans so the Shoshone don't find out about the expedition and scatter before Colonel Connor can punish them as he deems appropriate (making what follows appear to be legal, in Salt Lake City, Chief Justice of the Supreme court of the Territory of Utah, John Fitch Kinney, issues a warrant to the territorial marshal arrest Bear Hunter, Sanpitch, and Sagwitch Timbimboo for the recent murders in Cache Valley, and the marshal then in turn asks for Connor's help), elements of the colonel's command begin to leave Fort Douglas on January 22, 1863; 120 soldiers under the leadership of Captain Samuel W. Hoyt, with 15 baggage wagons, two mountain howitzers, and about 200 rounds of ordinance for the weapons).  The second contingent of troopers, with Connor in command (Connor is accompanied by former U.S. Marshal and Mormon scout, Orrin Porter Rockwell, once also the personal bodyguard of both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young), 220 cavalry from Companies A, H, K, and M of the California volunteers, each man carrying 40 rounds of rifle ammunition and 30 pistol bullets, leaves the fort on January 25.  Keeping the expeditions' deception viable, the infantry moves during the day, while the horsemen move at night.  Near the small community of Franklin, the two commands come together again and plans are made to move forward to launch a surprise attack on the Shoshone at 1:00 in the evening, but the advance is delayed until 3:00 a.m. by unseasonably cold weather for northern Utah ... it is estimated to be twenty degrees below zero (the troopers are not amused at all when they discover whiskey has frozen solid in their canteens or in being unable to set up the artillery properly with snow drifts in the area measuring up to six feet in height).  Not surprised at all, but hopeful that the soldiers will not actually strike (while this is going on, Sagwitch, the same Shoshone chief named in the arrest warrant that sets the expedition in motion, is in Salt Lake City trying to negotiate a peace treaty for the tribe's northwestern people with Brigham Young),  the Shoshone try to accumulate as much food as possible from local Mormons in the area (the disaster dream prophecies of an older Indian named Tin Dup, that the Shoshone should leave the area, is ignored just two days before the event actually takes place), choose a defensible position for their camp (featuring natural warm springs), dig firing pits hidden by woven willow branch screens on the eastern bank of Beaver Creek and along Bear River 

Sagwitch

Justice Kinney

Fort Douglas

Rockwell

Soldiers upset that they are fighting Indians instead of Confederate rebels, and eager for battle, led by an officer wanting to make a name for himself, just as dawn is breaking, at about 6:00 in the morning, McGarry and company finally slog their way into position and launch a frontal attack on the Shoshone camp that is quickly stopped.  Driven back in retreat, Colonel Connor reorganizes his men into smaller mobile units that are able to cut off paths the Indians might retreat over, and sets his men from attacking the flanks of the natives all at the same time so they can be swarmed into slaughter (like his subordinate, Connor is looking to make a name for himself among his military superiors thousands of miles away on the East Coast of the United States).  The change of tactics works, and by the time the afternoon arrives, return fire from the Shoshone has for all intents and purposes, stopped.  But not the dying.  Bear Hunter (the chief is stabbed in the head by a soldier's bayonet) and most of the warriors killed in the first hour of the class (and the Indians run out of ammunition in hour number two, with some warrior bodies later being found killed with bullet molds in their hands), the troopers call on the women and children to come out of their hiding places and surrender, but those that do so are quickly shown the error of their ways by being shot, stabbed, and sabered, women and teenage girls are raped before being killed, children have their heads caved in with a host of hard objects, and when nothing blunt is available, are grabbed by the legs and have their craniums pulped by the frozen earth of Cache Valley.  And there is also death by drowning as some of the Shoshone try to find shelter by swimming across the ice clogged Bear River as the troopers set fire to tepees and butcher most of the life.  Battle or massacre, the clash of cultures is over before nightfall blankets the land ... in attacking the Shoshone, Connor's command has suffered 14 soldiers killed, another 49 men wounded (seven will perish at the field hospital), and 75 cases of frostbite (though no digits or limbs are taken by the cold), while the Shoshone lose somewhere between 250 and 350 souls (walking the campground afterwards, Danish immigrant and a Franklin resident, Hans Jasperson, will write in his 1911 autobiography of counting 493 dead bodies lying about the village ... twice!), have 175 of their horses captured, 70 lodges burnt to the ground, and most of their grain for winter thoroughly trashed. 

Massacre Site

North From Salt Lake City

Soldiers Approaching The Camp In The Distance

Two Survivors - Chief Sagwitch And His Wife, 

Beawoachee, Bear Hunter's Widow

For the Shoshone that survive their morning with members of the California volunteers, living into the 30th of the month seemingly is a matter of fate and luck (or a lack of luck).  Chief Sagwitch is one of the survivors ... barely.  Trying to flee camp, Sagwitch is shot twice in the hand, mounts a horse that is promptly shot out from under him, follows a ravine down to the river, and spends the rest of the day near a hot spring, floating under a thicket of brush.  In another part of the camp, Beshup Timbimboo, Chief Sagwitch's two-year-old son, takes seven bullet wounds, feigns death, and is rescued by family members after nightfall, while another member of the family, 12-year-old Yeager also escapes death by pretending to be corpse.  For so many, living is a matter of minute randomness ... standing here instead of there, waking early rather than late, etc.  After the savagery and the soldiers withdrawal back over the river (taking their wounded back to the community of Franklin, where individual homes are used for the wounded, and the village's church is filled with hay and blankets and converted into a make-shift hospital), and once darkness has fallen, the decimated Shoshone make their way into the wilderness and build sheltering campfires.  Over finally (the belligerence is formerly called off when the parties involved sign the Treaty of Box Elder at Brigham City, Utah on July 30, 1863), the day has produced the worst massacre of Native Americans in the history of "civilizing" the North American continent, and yet, for the most part, with the American Civil War raging along the eastern seaboard at the time, the tragedy fails to make a deep impression in the hearts and souls of the citizenry (the soldiers return to hero welcomes from the residents of Salt Lake City and then, the citizens in various California communities, and Colonel Conner is promoted to Brigadier General in the volunteer army for his actions against the Indians ... after the war, he will be put in command of the newly designated Department of the Missouri, a huge amount of space which includes the former districts of Utah, the Nebraska Territory, the Colorado Territory, and the Territory of Idaho where he will continue to butt heads with the Mormons of Utah and various Plains Indians tribes ... living on in Salt Lake City after leaving the military, Connor will start on of the city's earliest daily newspapers, will become a mining entrepreneur, and will found the town of Stockton, Utah before dying in Salt Lake City at the age of 71 in 1891).

Returning As Heroes

Small Band Of Shoshone - 1860s

Adult Beshup Timbimboo

As the massacre marks the nadir of a once great tribe (disease and other smaller clashes with whites during the Snake War of 1864 to 1868, the Bannock War of 1876 and the Sheepeater Indian War of 1879, along with battles against the Crow, Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho peoples also contribute), it is never forgotten (incredibly, despite their recent experiences with the invaders of their homeland, the Shoshone will fight on the side of the United States government during their battle with the Sioux in 1876).  Without shelter and food, the people that once helped Lewis & Clark survive their expedition across America to the Pacific Ocean almost move into extinction, but are saved in large part due to the efforts of Chief Sagwitch.  Survivors struggling in the decade that follows as they continue to butt heads with the U.S. military, and the Transcontinental Railroad now bisecting the Shoshone homelands, Sagwitch determines that the Mormons are the lessor of two evils to his people, and in the spring of 1873, hundreds of Northwestern Shoshones make their way to Salt Lake City where they participate in a mass baptism into the religion (the chief is ordained as an Elder in the Melchizedek priesthood) and are assimilated into Mormon society, even creating the town of Washakie, Utah, after the famous Shoshone chief (those Shoshone that decide not to become Mormons settle at either the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho or the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming).  Northwestern Shoshones tribal cohesion maintained by Sagwitch and then members of his family (his son, Beshup, will become the first native American to serve as a missionary for the LDS Church, and his grandson, Moroni, will become the first native American to serve as a bishop for the church), the people struggle up from the massacre to a position where their nation is now federally recognized, operates several programs to assist its membership, and is involved in business, cultural, and historical initiatives in the region, growing from an estimated population of 4,500 in 1845, to approximately 12,000 by the 2000 government census.  A people that honor their ancestors struggles, in 2008, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation reacquire the site of the Bear River Massacre (it is already designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990) and immediately construct a picnic and rest area on the grounds just off U.S. Route 91 that features a monument to what occurred on January 29, 1863 and historical markers explaining the day's events (in 2018, the tribe buys 600 more acres of land at the site and announces future plans to erect a cultural interpretive center and a new memorial on the grounds.  A holy site to the Shoshone, at dawn every January 29th, members of the tribe, guests, and scores of Shoshone supporters now gather to pay homage to their ancestors ... remembering, remembering forever.   

Sagwitch

Tombstone

Washakie

Memorial

2018 Rememberance

 

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