A Battle Becomes a Massacre

In a four-hour fight that became a massacre, a Shoshone band was decimated and terrified as lodges, food caches, and belongings were burned, women and children were murdered, and Chief Bear Hunter was cruelly tortured to death. When the killing ceased, bodies lay unburied across the field at the mercy of scavenging animals and people. Survivors' stories, handed down through the years, recount the horrors of that day, including mothers jumping into the freezing river with children in their arms when crying babies threatened to reveal the hiding places of other tribal members, and a young boy and his grandmother playing dead as soldiers searched the camp for survivors. The number of dead ranges from the Army's official count of 240 to as many as 500, with historians and tribal members best estimating between 250 and 350, making the Bear River Massacre one of the largest mass killings of Indians in U.S. history.

Idaho · United States