The Bear River Massacre occurred on January 29, 1863, following years of conflict between the United States and the Shoshone people. The immediate causes included skirmishes and food raids on farms and ranches, as well as the displacement of the Shoshone from their ancestral lands by settlers moving into the region. These tensions had built over time, creating a situation that prompted military intervention by the United States Army.
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 the confluence of the Bear River and Battle Creek in what was then southeastern Washington Territory, near present-day Preston in Franklin County, Idaho. The assault struck the Shoshone during their winter encampment, when the community was most vulnerable.
The Bear River Massacre resulted in an estimated 250 to 493 Shoshone children, women, and men killed, with 21 US soldiers dying in the engagement. The event is considered by some sources to be the largest mass murder of Native Americans by the US military and the largest single episode of genocide in US history. The massacre is also known as the Engagement on the Bear River, the Battle of Bear River, and the Massacre at Boa Ogoi.
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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