The Bear River Massacre occurred on January 29, 1863, following years of escalating tensions between the United States and the Shoshone people. The conflict emerged from a pattern of skirmishes, food raids on farms and ranches, and the displacement of Shoshone from their ancestral lands by settlers. These tensions culminated in a military response as the United States Army sought to suppress Shoshone resistance in the region.
Colonel Patrick Edward Connor led a detachment of California Volunteers as part of the Bear River Expedition against Shoshone chief Bear Hunter. The attack targeted a large Shoshone community at their winter encampment at the confluence of the Bear River and Battle Creek in what was then southeastern Washington Territory, in present-day Franklin County, Idaho near the city of Preston. The assault resulted in the deaths of approximately 250 to 400 Northern Shoshone children and adults near their homes, while 21 US soldiers were killed in the engagement.
The Bear River Massacre holds significant historical importance, with some sources describing it as the largest mass murder of Native Americans by the US military and the largest single episode of genocide in US history. The event is also known by alternative names including the Engagement on the Bear River, the Battle of Bear River, and the Massacre at Boa Ogoi, reflecting its contested characterization and enduring historical impact.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
c.250–400 Shoshone killed; 21 US soldiers killed
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.