Few Remember the Worst Slaughter of Native Americans in US History

Historians consider it the worst massacre of Native Americans in U.S. history. Yet few have ever heard of it.

The Bear River Massacre of 1863 near what’s now Preston, Idaho, left roughly 350 members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation dead, making it the bloodiest — and most deadly — slaying of Native Americans by the U.S. military, according to historians and tribal leaders. The Indians were slain after soldiers came into a valley where they were camping for the winter and attacked, leaving roughly 90 women and children among the dead.

The death toll, historians say, exceeded some of the country’s most horrific Indian slayings, including the 1864 slaying at Colorado’s Sand Creek, where 130 Cheyennes were killed. And the death count was nearly double the roughly 150 Sioux killed at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, four days after Christmas in 1890.

Some accounts put the Bear River death toll even higher than 350.

In one account of the brutality, Danish immigrant Hans Jasperson in his 1911 autobiography, said he walked among the bodies, counting 493 Shoshone Indians dead, according to a 2008 article in the Salt Lake Tribune. Jasperson wrote, “I turned around and counted them back and counted just the same."

Historians said roughly two dozen U.S. soldiers died at Bear River.

“It almost annihilated us as a people,” said Darren B. Parry, former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. “But it’s largely been forgotten.”

Many historians say the biggest reason the Bear River slaying is lost — or ignored — in history lessons is because its “carnage [was] eclipsed by Civil War battles” raging at the time, according to Charles S. Peterson, a historian at Utah State University who wrote the foreword on a book called “The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre.” He said it’s ironic it receives so little attention, given the well-known Native American woman — Sacagawea — was Shoshone and became famous for having served as a guide to explorers Lewis and Clark across the West earlier in the 19th century.

Jonathan Deiss, a military historian based in Washington, compared the slaying of Native Americans in the 1800s to mass shootings in the 21st century. “People became numb to them,” Deiss said.

“People considered Indians not really humans,” Deiss added, “so it was easy to justify killing them or mistreating them.”

The Shoshones were once a nation that had 17,000 people that included several bands that stretched across parts of Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. They traveled with the seasons. In early autumn, they went to Salmon, Idaho, to fish. In the spring and summer, they’d go to Utah to gather seeds, berries and roots.