CHC in cooperation with the Idaho Historical Society and the Northwest Band of Shoshone have begun interdisciplinary investigations of the Bear River Massacre Site. Funding for the project comes from the National Park Services’ American Battlefield Protection Program. On the morning of 29 January 1863 Colonel Patrick Connor and his regiment of California Volunteers attacked a Shoshone village along the Bear River in present day southeastern Idaho. Historic estimates place the Shoshone dead between 224 and 400, many of them women and children. Connor’s casualties included 23 dead or mortally wounded and 49 wounded.
The Bear River Massacre, as it came to be known, was the culmination of tensions in the area and along the Oregon-California Trail between Native American tribes, emigrants and settlers. One of four western Civil War battlefields, the property has never been formally recorded and does not have a Smithsonian trinomial. Archaeological investigations during this past field season involved the reconstruction of the geomorphic history in the Bear River valley, along with geophysical prospection and metal detection to uncover evidence of the material remains of the village and fighting.
