Bear River Massacre Continues to Haunt
Utah History After 140 Years

By WILL BAGLEY
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

This Wednesday marks the 140th anniversary of the bloodiest day in Territorial Utah's history when soldiers under Col. Patrick Edward Connor committed the worst massacre of Indians in the history of the American West.

Before dawn on a bitterly cold Jan. 29, 1863, the California Volunteers attacked Boa Ogoi, the winter camp of the Northwestern Shoshone on Bear River near today's Preston, Idaho. U.S. troops came to Utah the previous fall to protect America's overland wagon roads fromIndians, specifically Shoshone raiders who had attacked travelers on the Oregon-California Trail.

The bands at Bear River had little to do with these raids, but they had resisted the settlers who began moving into Cache Valley in 1860, appropriating their land and water during the next three years.

"They rejected the way of life and salvation," Mormon leader Peter Maughn told Brigham Young. The settlers wanted the tribe out of the way.

There was no love lost between the Army and the Mormons, but Young's bodyguard, Porter Rockwell, led the soldiers north to the Shoshone camp. Before leaving Salt Lake, Connor announced he would take no prisoners.

Frostbite crippled almost a third of the soldiers before they reached Brigham City, and the approach of the Army was no secret to the Indians. Years later, William Hull recalled that three Indians from Bear Hunter's band visited his father's farm the evening before the attack. When he saw the approaching "toquashes," or soldiers, Hull told them, "Maybe you will all be killed."

Maybe touquasho be killed, too," one warrior reportedly responded.

The Shoshone had fortified the 10-foot bank of Beaver Creek. When the freezing soldiers arrived, the warriors were ready for a fight. Hull remembered that Bear Hunter waved his buffalo robe and shouted, "Come on, you California sons of bitches! We're ready for you!" Others believe it was Sylvanus Collett, a white man, who taunted the soldiers.

The outraged troops launched a disastrous frontal assault before flanking the Shoshone position and cutting off their retreat. By 8 a.m., the Shoshone were out of ammunition. Soldiers shot down the survivors with their revolvers.

Hull recalled Connor ordered, "Kill everything! Nits make lice." The battle quickly became a vicious slaughter of women and children with the undisciplined soldiers pausing only to rape and pillage. The next morning Hull counted nearly 400 dead, "two-thirds of the number being women and children."

The soldiers took their dead back to Camp Douglas and buried them in the post cemetery. They left the vanquished corpses for the wolves and crows.

Local Mormons hailed the atrocity "as an intervention of the Almighty," but Army surgeon John Lauderdale thought otherwise. This "hardest fought battle was instigated without a doubt by the Mormons. The latter being unfriendly to our army thought they would betray us into the hands of the Indians. They thought by so doing they would make a little speculation out of it themselves. They made the Indians believe they could capture us most easily & agreed to reward them finely if successful."

The sequel of the story, Lauderdale wrote, "proved the destruction of the Indians."

Despite its historic significance, only a few roadside signs identify the blood-stained ground at Boa Ogoi.

"Only time will tell," historian Kerry Brinkerhoff observed last year, "if Congress will make amends for this massacre, protect the site and put the slain to rest."

"The Shoshone," said Brigham Madsen, the dean of Utah's historians, "must keep this memorial alive as it is sacred holy ground."

Will Bagley's mentor Brigham Madsen, who wrote The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre, considers changing the name of the Bear River bloodbath from "battle" to "massacre" his greatest achievement.

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BEAR RIVER MASSACRE
Brigham D. Madsen
Utah History Encyclopedia

On 29 January 1863 Colonel Patrick Edward Connor and about 200 California Volunteers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone winter village located at the confluence of Beaver Creek and Bear River, twelve miles west and north of the village of Franklin in Cache Valley and just a short distance north of the present Utah-Idaho boundary line. This band of 450 Shoshoni under war chief Bear Hunter had watched uneasily as Mormon farmers had moved into the Indian home of Cache Valley in the spring of 1860 and now, three years later, had appropriated all the land and water of the verdant mountain valley. The young men of the tribe had struck back at the white settlers; this prompted Utah territorial officials to call on Connor's troops to punish the Northwestern band. Before the colonel led his men from Camp Douglas at Salt Lake City north to Bear River, he had announced that he intended to take no prisoners.

As the troopers approached the Indian camp in the early morning darkness at 6:00 a.m., they found the (Northwest Band) Shoshone warriors entrenched behind the ten-foot eastern embankment of Beaver Creek (afterwards called Battle Creek). The Volunteers suffered most of their twenty-three casualties in their first charge across the open plain in front of the Shoshoni village. Colonel Connor soon changed tactics, which resulted in a complete envelopment of the Shoshoni camp by the soldiers who began firing on the Indian men, women, and children indiscriminately. By 8:00 a.m., the Indian men were out of ammunition, and the last two hours of the battle became a massacre as the soldiers used their revolvers to shoot down all the Indians they could find in the dense willows of the camp.

Bear River Massacre site, looking east for the Shoshone camp. General Connor came down the slope.

Approximately 250 Shoshoni were slain, including 90 women and children. After the slaughter ended, some of the undisciplined soldiers went through the Indian village raping women and using axes to bash in the heads of women and children who were already dying of wounds. Chief Bear Hunter was killed along with sub-chief, Lehi. The troops burned the seventy-five Indian lodges, recovered 1,000 bushels of wheat and flour, and appropriated 175 Shoshoni horses. While the troops cared for their wounded and took their dead back to Camp Douglas for burial, the Indians' bodies were left on the field for the wolves and crows.

Although the Mormon settlers in Cache Valley expressed their gratitude for "the movement of Col. Connor as an intervention of the Almighty" in their behalf, the Bear River Massacre has been overlooked in the history of the American West chiefly because it occurred during the Civil War when a more important struggle was taking place in the East. Of the six major Indian massacres in the Far West, from Bear River in 1863 to Wounded Knee in 1890, the Bear River affair resulted in the most victims, an event which today deserves greater attention than the mere sign presently at the site.

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