The Shoshoni Frontier And The Bear River Massacre

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Although it has been largely ignored by historians, it was the war waged against the Shoshoni tribe that opened the book on Indian massacres in the West. The Shoshoni were victims of a bloodbath more extreme than that at Wounded Knee, and more deadly than the more famous slaughter at Sand Creek.

A history of the Bear River Massacre by the current Chief of the Northwestern Shoshone Band.

Explores how a pivotal event in U.S. history-the killing of nearly 300 Shoshoni men, women, and children in 1863-has been contested, forgotten, and remembered.

*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading From the "Trail of Tears" to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the first contact between natives and settlers, tribes like the Sioux, Cherokee, and Navajo have both fascinated and perplexed outsiders with their history, language, and culture. The Shoshone are still remembered for their assistance, especially Sacagawea, and they maintained contact with Americans throughout the 19th century, but unfortunately, the cooperation gave way to conflict as white settlers began to move westward and enter onto lands occupied by the Shoshone. In 1862, California officials sent the Third California Volunteer Infantry under the command of Colonel Patrick Connor to construct a fort (Fort Douglas) in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains above Salt Lake City, in an effort to keep lines of communication open so pioneers would not be hesitant about settling in the region. Meanwhile, Shoshone Chief Bear Hunter (Wirasuap) led his band on raids against mining camps and Mormon settlements. In January 1863, Colonel Connor led 300 volunteers out of the newly completed Fort Douglas through 140 miles of bitter cold to reach Chief Bear Hunter's camp on the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, culminating in what would become known as the Bear River Massacre at Preston, Idaho. During the fighting, Connor's men trapped and killed an estimated 350-500 Northwestern Shoshone, including women, children, and the elderly. According to William Hull, a local settler sent to look for survivors, "After killing most of the men and many of the children, they raped and assaulted the women. In some cases, soldiers held the feet of infants by the heel and beat their brains out on any hard substance they could find. Women who resisted the soldiers were shot and killed. Never will I forget the scene, dead bodies were everywhere. I counted eight deep in one place and in several places they were three to five deep; all in all we counted nearly four hundred; two-thirds of this number being women and children. We found two Indian women alive whose thighs had been broken by the bullets. Two little boys and one little girl about three years of age were still living. The little girl was badly wounded, having eight flesh wounds in her body." This would be the highest number of fatalities suffered by the Shoshone at the hands of the U.S. military, but the fighting was far from over. Capitalizing on their victory, which effectively ended what had been widely reported as "Wirasuap's War Path," the federal government approved an open claim on the most hospitable lands of the Great Basin, leaving the Shoshone with the understanding that their lands would soon be lost to white ranchers, farmers, and prospectors. The Shoshone would continue to oppose American soldiers during the "Snake War," a reference to Americans' collective term for the Northern Paiute, Bannock, and Western Shoshone bands living along the Snake River in Oregon, Nevada, California, and Idaho Territory, but most of the Shoshone's resistance ended by 1865. By the time the Shoshone had been relegated to reservation life, there were fewer than 5,000 members left. The Bear River Massacre: The History and Legacy of the U.S. Army's Most Notorious Attack on the Shoshone in the Pacific Northwest looks at the chain of events that led to one of the most notorious attacks of the 19th century on the frontier. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Bear River Massacre like never before.

A brilliant and riveting history of the famous and infamous massacres that marked the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century. In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked—and marred—the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today. Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres—Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children. McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small—Custer's famous defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead—yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horrors they had committed. From letters and diaries, McMurtry has created a moving and swiftly paced narrative, as memorable in its way as such classics as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. In Larry McMurtry's own words: "I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites—the Sacramento River massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live nearby. None of the massacres were effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River massacre was overlooked for a very long time. "But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood—in time, and, often, not that much time—will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency. "The deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary-literature of the pioneers, particularly the diary-literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnap."