The Bear River Massacre occurred on January 29, 1863, in present-day Franklin County, Idaho near Preston, at a Shoshone winter encampment located at the confluence of the Bear River and Battle Creek in southeastern Washington Territory. The attack followed years of skirmishes and food raids on farms and ranches, as well as the displacement of the Shoshone from their ancestral lands by settlers and the United States government. These tensions culminated in a military response against the Shoshone community.
Colonel Patrick Edward Connor led a detachment of California Volunteers during the Bear River Expedition, directing an attack against the Shoshone under Chief Bear Hunter. The assault targeted a large Shoshone community at their winter encampment near their homes. Around 250 to 400 Northern Shoshone children and adults were killed in the engagement, while 21 US soldiers died. The event is also known as the Engagement on the Bear River, the Battle of Bear River, and the Massacre at Boa Ogoi.
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 estimated death toll of 250 to 493 Shoshone—predominantly children, women, and men—represents a devastating blow to the Northern Shoshone people and remains a significant and tragic episode in the history of Indian Wars and US-Native American relations.
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.250–493 Shoshone killed; 21 US soldiers killed
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