The Bear River Massacre occurred on January 29, 1863, in present-day Franklin County, Idaho near Preston, following years of escalating conflict between settlers and the Shoshone people. The United States Army launched the attack against a large Shoshone community at the confluence of the Bear River and Battle Creek in southeastern Washington Territory after a period marked by skirmishes, food raids on farms and ranches, and the displacement of Shoshone from their ancestral lands. These tensions had built steadily as American settlement encroached on traditional Shoshone territory.
Colonel Patrick Edward Connor led a detachment of California Volunteers in the Bear River Expedition against Shoshone chief Bear Hunter. The attack targeted a Shoshone winter encampment, striking at the community near their homes. The engagement resulted in significant casualties on both sides, with approximately 21 US soldiers killed during the assault.
The massacre resulted in an estimated 250 to 493 Shoshone deaths, including children, women, and men. Some historical sources describe the Bear River Massacre 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 several alternative names: the Engagement on the Bear River, the Battle of Bear River, and the Massacre at Boa Ogoi. This single engagement represents a pivotal and devastating moment in the conflict between the United States military and the Shoshone people.
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.
Estimated 250 to 493 Shoshone killed; 21 US soldiers killed
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