Bear River Massacre Traditional Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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Just a micro near a DUP marker. This spot marks the Bear River
Massacre. Take time to read the history in this area as well as
Winter Camp cache just north of this site. Micro with log only
so bring your own pencil.
PRESTON HISTORY:
BEAR RIVER MASSACRE
On 29 January 1863 Colonel Patrick Edward Connor and about 200
California Volunteers attacked a Northwestern Shoshoni winter
village located at the confluence of Beaver Creek and Bear River,
twelve miles west and north of the village of Franklin in Cache
Valley and just a short distance north of the present Utah-Idaho
boundary line. This band of 450 Shoshoni under war chief Bear
Hunter had watched uneasily as Mormon farmers had moved into the
Indian home of Cache Valley in the spring of 1860 and now, three
years later, had appropriated all the land and water of the verdant
mountain valley. The young men of the tribe had struck back at the
white settlers; this prompted Utah territorial officials to call on
Connor's troops to punish the Northwestern band. Before the colonel
led his men from Camp Douglas at Salt Lake City north to Bear
River, he had announced that he intended to take no
prisoners.
As the troopers approached the Indian camp in the early morning
darkness at 6:00 a.m., they found the Shoshoni warriors entrenched
behind the ten-foot eastern embankment of Beaver Creek (afterwards
called Battle Creek). The Volunteers suffered most of their
twenty-three casualties in their first charge across the open plain
in front of the Shoshoni village. Colonel Connor soon changed
tactics, which resulted in a complete envelopment of the Shoshoni
camp by the soldiers who began firing on the Indian men, women, and
children indiscriminately. By 8:00 a.m., the Indian men were out of
ammunition, and the last two hours of the battle became a massacre
as the soldiers used their revolvers to shoot down all the Indians
they could find in the dense willows of the camp.
Approximately 250 Shoshoni were slain, including 90 women and
children. After the slaughter ended, some of the undisciplined
soldiers went through the Indian village raping women and using
axes to bash in the heads of women and children who were already
dying of wounds. Chief Bear Hunter was killed along with sub-chief,
Lehi. The troops burned the seventy-five Indian lodges, recovered
1,000 bushels of wheat and flour, and appropriated 175 Shoshoni
horses. While the troops cared for their wounded and took their
dead back to Camp Douglas for burial, the Indians' bodies were left
on the field for the wolves and crows.
...the Bear River Massacre has been overlooked in the history of
the American West chiefly because it occurred during the Civil War
when a more important struggle was taking place in the East. Of the
six major Indian massacres in the Far West, from Bear River in 1863
to Wounded Knee in 1890, the Bear River affair resulted in the most
victims, an event which today deserves greater attention than the
mere sign presently at the site.
See: Brigham D. Madsen, The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River
Massacre (1985).
Brigham D. Madsen
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
abegu jrfg pbeare
Treasures
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