Bear River Massacre Site Stirs Tears,...

Melinda Dunford and Allie Hansen embraced in a quiet southeastern Idaho meadow and wept over the unmarked graves of hundreds of Northwestern Shoshoni.

It was a moment of healing for Dunford, a descendant of one of the few survivors of the 1863 Bear River massacre, and Hansen, a local historian whose ancestors were among the area’s first white settlers.

“The tears just ran,” Dunford recalled. “It was very humbling, very sacred to me, to know I was walking on the ground that ancestors had walked on, and their lives had been taken.

“The helplessness they must have felt,” she said with emotion. “I am blessed. . . . I feel that reverence.”

Dunford is not alone. Now, 132 years after Col. Patrick E. Connor’s troops slaughtered as many as 400 Shoshoni--the largest single loss of Indian life in the Old West--the massacre site is being considered for incorporation under the aegis of the National Park Service.

The spot, about 100 miles north of Salt Lake City, was declared a national historic landmark five years ago, but that does not offer Park Service protection.

Though disturbed only by occasional visitors and grazing livestock, the 120-acre massacre site remain privately held.

“We’ve been told that after the massacre, the bodies of our warriors and the rest of the people were just left on the field,” said Tom Pacheco, vice chairman of the 350-member Northwestern Band of Shoshoni. “No. 1 is to leave the site undisturbed.”

Brad Smith, chairman of the Franklin County Commission, said local white residents are generally sympathetic and supportive.

“You hate to be noted in your county as the site of something that tragic,” he said. “But it happened, and proper knowledge of it should be taught.”

A partnership of government, local residents and the tribe is the next logical step for protection of the site, said historian Edwin C. Bearss, who recommended the landmark designation.

“It is not a well known site, such as merited by its historical significance,” he said. “Wounded Knee or the Sand Creek massacre are much better known.”

Not only were there more deaths at Bear River--the official count at Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1890 was 145 Lakota Sioux, and 130 Cheyenne died at Sand Creek, Colo., in 1864--but Connor’s attack set the pattern for frontier genocide.

“The ideal time to successfully campaign against [Native Americans] was the winter, and that seemed to characterize the Army’s activities,” said Bearss, now special military sites assistant to the Park Service director in Washington. “[The Army] could not compete with the Native Americans in their summer campaigns.”

Dunford said members of the tribe, relying on accounts passed from generation to generation, have long known the truth about Bear River: that Connor’s Jan. 29, 1863, assault was launched at dawn against her tribe’s still-sleeping village.

Connor lost 14 of his 200 troops to what resistance Shoshoni warriors could offer. Afterward, by some accounts, soldiers roamed the camp looting, raping, and dashing infants to death on the frozen ground.

Cut off from escape on three sides by Connor’s California Volunteers, women ran with their children into their sole avenue of escape, the ice-clogged Bear River. Among those fleeing was Anzee Chie, Dunford’s great-great-grandmother.

“Her baby had started to cry, and she was hiding under the banks of the river with some other women,” Dunford recalled. “She was afraid the child would let the soldiers know they were there--so she drowned her baby.”

Connor later submitted a self-serving report of a pitched battle with well-armed, dug-in Indians. The War Department promoted him to brigadier general.

Despite gunshots to the chest and shoulder, Anzee Chie recovered to have other children--and to tell them and their offspring what really happened that bitterly cold morning.

Hansen, too, heard the stories. In 1860, her forebears had been sent by Mormon pioneer leader Brigham Young to what is now Franklin County, and settled near the massacre site.

It was as chairwoman of the County Historical Committee that she first met Dunford during a late-summer meeting with Shoshoni representatives about the site.

For 10 years, Hansen had been telling the story of Anzee Chie, but she had not met one of her descendants. Dunford asked Hansen to take her on a tour of the site.

“She just looked and looked. You could see the emotion,” Hansen remembered. “My hair was standing up. She looked at me, I looked at her; she put her head on my shoulder and just cried, and I did too.”

Dunford said the experience filled a spiritual void she felt both as an American Indian and as a Mormon.

“As I’ve walked in these hills, I’ve often felt their presence,” she said. “I have a spiritual side of me that hungers to learn more about my people.”