The Bear River Massacre occurred on January 29, 1863, following years of escalating tensions between the Shoshone and American settlers and military forces. The conflict arose from a combination of factors: skirmishes and food raids on farms and ranches, and the displacement of the Shoshone from their ancestral lands by settlers. These mounting pressures created conditions that prompted the United States Army to launch a military action against a large Shoshone community.
Colonel Patrick Edward Connor led a detachment of California Volunteers during the Bear River Expedition, attacking a Shoshone winter encampment led by chief Bear Hunter. The attack took place on January 29, 1863, 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 present-day city of Preston. The military force attacked the Shoshone community near their homes, resulting in a significant loss of life among the Native American population.
The Bear River Massacre has been described by some sources as the largest mass murder of Native Americans by the US military and the largest single episode of genocide in US history. The event resulted in an estimated 250 to 493 Shoshone children, women, and men killed, while 21 US soldiers died. The massacre represents a pivotal and tragic moment in the history of US-Native American relations and remains a significant event in the Indian Wars period.
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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