U.S. Is Expected to Admit Idaho Indian Massacre : Landmark: The chief historian for the National Park Service has concluded that the 1863 “Battle of Bear River” was really a massacre--the worst on record. The U.S. Cavalry killed hundreds of Shoshone, including infants, women and children.

More than a century after the blood of hundreds of Northwestern Shoshone stained the snowy banks of the Bear River, the federal government may be ready to admit that U.S. soldiers here carried out a massacre unrivaled in the annals of the West.

Since Jan. 29, 1863, this spot 110 miles north of Salt Lake City has been known for the “Battle of Bear River,” described by Col. Patrick Connor as a glorious struggle won by classic military tactics and superior firepower.

Persistent Shoshone claims to the contrary were ignored. Survivors recounted the “battle” as a day of savagery in which soldiers smashed infants’ skulls, raped dying women and dispatched the wounded with bullets, clubs and axes.

Connor lost 14 of his 200 men. An estimated 270 to 400 Shoshones died, two-thirds of them women and children.

Edwin C. Bearss, chief historian for the National Park Service, agreed after extensive research that history should be rewritten to reflect the Shoshone side.

“The attack was sharp, sudden and vigorous. There were heavy casualties,” he said. “A good case can be made that there were more Indian casualties in this attack than any other made by U.S. forces west of the Mississippi.”

Bear River was “much more grim” than better-known Indian massacres at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory, where troopers killed 133 Cheyenne on Nov. 28, 1864, and at Wounded Knee, S. D., where soldiers slaughtered 153 Sioux on Dec. 28, 1890, Bearss said. He said that news of the attack was pushed out of most newspapers by accounts of fierce Civil War battles at Fredericksburg, Va., and Stone’s River, Tenn.

Estimates of Indian losses at Bear River varied; no official count was made. Tradition has it that Connor, from horseback, counted between 220 and 270 dead. Settlers who arrived later found many more bodies in ravines or under deep snow and put the number as high as 500. The tribe maintains that 400 of their number were killed there and no more than 60 escaped or survived.

On April 3, Bearss will recommend that the ground, just outside Preston, Ida., be designated a National Historic Landmark as the site of the “Bear River Massacre.” If it passes muster with the agency’s advisory panel, the proposal will be sent to Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr., probably in May.

As for Connor’s version, Bearss says history is replete with lies and omissions made to paint heroic pictures. Connor and his California Volunteers had signed up to fight Johnny Reb and resented being assigned to protect Mormon settlers here and keep an eye on the Indians.

Attacking an Indian village was a poor substitute for battlefield glory, but it was all the ambitious Connor could do to impress his superiors.

“If I was a colonel,” Bearss said, “it would be to my career’s benefit if I portrayed (Bear River) as a pitched battle. As a career soldier you’re looking for career success, and body counts have always been important.”

In late January, 1863, hundreds of Indians had set up tepees at Bia Ogoi , or Bear River, for the Warm Dance, an annual winter ritual to drive away the cold.

The night of Jan. 27, one tribal elder awoke from a nightmarish vision: The white man’s pony soldiers were slaughtering his people. Tin Dup took this as as a warning from the Great Spirit and told anyone who would listen to flee the camp.

“Do it now! Tonight!” he begged them.

Few left with Tin Dup. Most dismissed the gloomy prediction and remained with the campfires for sleepy conversation.

A variety of sources, including Army reports, books and carefully preserved tribal oral histories, prove that Tin Dup was a visionary.

Just before dawn on Jan. 29, Connor’s cavalry formed up on the bluffs that rose 200 feet above Chief Sagwitch Timbimboo’s still-sleeping encampment. After a frostbitten, three-day ride from Utah’s Ft. Douglas, 110 miles to the south, the unit of 275 was on a mission to “chastise” and “exterminate” Indians believed responsible for recent clashes with white settlers.

Three Shoshone had stolen some horses and cattle a few weeks before, and Connor also blamed the tribe for killing a miner and two settlers. The Shoshone insisted that the killings were the work of other Indians.

Across the Bear River, Sagwitch rose early to watch his camp awaken. Suddenly, his eyes were drawn to the eastern hills. A strange dust was moving down the slopes, out of which thundered Connor’s soldiers.

Even as his startled warriors gathered their bows, tomahawks and a few muskets, Sagwitch ordered them not to shoot, believing that the soldiers would seek to parley. Had Connor asked for the livestock thieves, they would have been surrendered, according to tribal accounts.

Connor’s expectation of hostility could only have been strengthened by his scout, Orrin Porter Rockwell, a bodyguard of Mormon pioneer Brigham Young. Rockwell, who would watch the bloodshed from the safety of the bluffs, had told Connor that perhaps 600 Shoshone warriors were ready to do battle, according to a 1985 history.

Connor sent his cavalry across the river, determined to block any retreat. As the infantry closed in, the Indians ran for the ice-clogged river and the banks soon were bloody with wounded and dead. Women, many with infants on their backs, joined the desperate plunge. Most drowned; others were shot as they swam. A few escaped.

Sagwitch, wounded in one hand, tumbled into the river and floated under some brush. After nightfall, he and a few warriors found ponies and fled north.

Back in camp, soldiers took babies by the heels and dashed them to death. Wounded women were raped even as they died.

Another chief, Bear Hunter, endured a savage beating. His wife, Be-ah-wa-a-chee, who watched from hiding in nearby willows, recalled that Bear Hunter did not cry out, even when soldiers rammed a heated bayonet through his head, ear to ear.

Sagwitch’s 12-year-old grandson, Yeager Timbimboo, played dead. A soldier who discovered him alive raised his musket to the boy’s head three times but couldn’t fire.

The trooper walked away, leaving the youth to grow up telling a story far different than the account of a pitched battle given by soon-to-be Brig. Gen. Patrick Connor.

One who heard his story was his granddaughter, Mae Timbimboo Parry. For Parry, who has spent much of her 70 years recording tribal oral history, landmark designation of the Bear River site is long overdue.

“I’ve been telling this story for so long, I felt I was like the Lone Ranger,” she said. “I’ll say it was a massacre to my dying day.”

So will Allie Hansen, president of the Bear River-Battle Creek Monument Assn., although that wasn’t always the case.

In 1986, her group was behind passage of a resolution by Utah and Idaho legislators that would have erected a Battle of Bear River monument. Parry threatened to sue, insisting that the word “battle” had no place there.

To resolve the dispute, Sen. James McClure (R-Ida.) asked the Park Service to study the attack as part of a landmark application. The assignment went to Bearss, a Civil War expert.

Meantime, Hansen’s own research persuaded her that the Indians were right. A descendant of southern Idaho homesteaders, she said she had been “naively kept in the dark.”

She also learned to appreciate the tribe’s intense feelings about the massacre. “Even after all this time, to them it is like something that just happened,” Hansen said.

In the 1860s, the Northwestern Shoshone thrived by following game and the seasons over eastern Nevada, northern Utah, southern Idaho and Wyoming.

Today, the tribe counts only 350 members.

“We have never recovered from the massacre,” Parry said. “We’ve never quite recovered.”