When Brad Parry’s ancestors watched the horses go down the hill, they thought back to the first time they saw a working locomotive.
In the distance, on a frigid morning, they noticed the steam produced by the breathing of the soldiers and their horses.
Although there was tension with the army, the tribal leaders did not think that this mobilization would be a threat to their people.
They told the women and the elders in the teepees not to get up and to go back to sleep, as the children were doing.
But they soon discovered that they did not come with the intention of talking and quickly began to urge them to escape.
What followed is one of the most heartbreaking chapters in Native American history.
happened on January 29, 1863 and is known as the Bear River Massacre.
“They grabbed little children by the legs as if they were a hare and beat their heads against the ground,” said Elva Schramm, a descendant of one of the caciques.
“It was terrifying, they were aiming to kill and that lasted four hours,” says Parry.
Some estimates suggest that more than 300 natives died, 90 were women and children.
In the West
Parry, who is vice president of the Tribal Council for the Northwest Band of the Shoshone Nation (Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation) shared with BBC Mundo what, thanks to oral tradition, came out of that day.
Although there were military searches, his grandmother, Mae Timbimboo Parry, was key to knowing the shoshone perspective.
“She was the first to collect those stories, write them down and then share them widely,” Molly Cannon, a professor at Utah State University and director of the Museum of Anthropology at that institution, tells BBC Mundo.
The tragedy occurred in what is now Idaho, in the west of the country, near the Bear River, Bear River (bear river).
“It is sad that the largest massacre of Native Americans in American history I don’t knowzca ReallyDarren Parry, former president of the Northwestern Shoshone Nation group, said in a Shoshone Public Service Broadcasting documentary: Remembering Bear River: Tragedy for Idaho’s Shoshone Tribe (Remembering Bear River: Tragedy for the Idaho Shoshone Tribe).
Silent”
Initially, what happened was described as a “battle” between the army and Shoshone warriors.
But Mae, Cannon points out, made her rethink that.
“This idea that it was a battle persisted for a long time in our history and in the minds of the American people, but I think that the narrative is slowly unraveling largely due to the work of tribal groups”, says the anthropologist.
For Brad, it was a story that had been “silent” for over a hundred years.
Many people who lived near that area preferred not to go near it, others “did not want to write about a massacre of women, children and the elderly.”
On the other hand, it happened during the Civil War and most of the journalists were covering the events of that conflict in the east of the country.
In addition, he says, “we didn’t know how to write, we could only count what had happened”.
However, that changed with her grandmother, who was “an exceptional student.”
“He had an extremely good education, he wrote and spoke very well and when he graduated from high school, his grandfather was still alive. So, she began to write what he told her ”.
That testimony, together with those of others who also survived, fed the historical record of the Shoshone about what happened.
“It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that my grandmother began to insist on changing the name of ‘Battle of Bear River’ for ‘Bear River Massacre’. He stood up to the United States military, he went to Congress, he met with all these people to get a true acknowledgment of the facts.”
Strain
This event cannot be seen as an isolated event.
In the 19th century, the Shoshone and other tribes had their land invaded by settlers and groups of Mormons, as well as skirmishing with gold prospectors.
The massacre was “the culmination of nearly two decades of events that stemmed from the interaction between Indians and whites.”
This is stated by the editorial of the University of Utah in the presentation of the book The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre (The Shoshone Frontier and the Bear River Massacre), by historian Brigham Madsen.
“The homelands of the Shoshone They covered a large expanse of territory. and they were crossed by the main travel routes in the west, which forced encounters between Indians and whites.
“Initially they were friendly and accommodating to white travelers in the 1840s, (but) in the late 1850s resentment ran high among the Indians when they were killed and their food stores consumed by emigrants and their cattle.” .
Michael Andersen wrote Bear River Massacre and the Ethical Implications for Large Scale Combat Operations (The Bear River Massacre and the Ethical Implications for Large-Scale Combat Operations), an essay published by the Simons Center for Ethical Leadership and Interagency Cooperation, an organization dedicated, among many areas, to research issues of United States security.
The author notes that while the Sioux and Apache are often considered “the most violent tribes in that period of American history, in fact, the Shoshone were responsible for more attacks on settlers and travelers than other tribes.”
On January 6, 1863, the tension increased when some travelers passing through the Cache Valley reported that one of their members had been murdered and that their cattle had been stolen.
One of them offered, before the authorities, an affidavit that led a judge to issue an arrest warrant against three Shoshone leaders.
The assistance of the Irish Colonel Patrick Connorwho led the military expedition to Valle Cache.
There, near the Bear River, a Shoshone people had settled.
Meeting
“Every year during the winter, we would go there and meet with other Shoshone nations that came from other places,” says Brad.
In that area, which they call the “house of the lungs”, their ancestors found hot springs and resources with healing properties.
“It was a sacred spiritual place, but we also played, we had races and prizes were given, many times you met your spouse, there were marriages. It was like a big family reunion.”
“In January, what we call the warm dance began, intended to help Mother Earth and the great spirit to bring spring.”
The families of the other Shoshone groups began to return to their territories.
“Our little group, the one from the northwest, stayed there because we were the hosts.”
“Just before January 29, our young men and strongest men were sent out to get food, to hunt deer or elk to get them through the rest of the winter.”
There were “very few warriors” left in the camp, and when Chief Sagwitch saw the soldiers descending on horses, he spoke to the other tribal leaders.
“He told them: ‘Let’s see what they want, if they need to arrest someone, we’ll follow the rules.’ Generally, between leaders tried to negotiate an exit”.
It was obvious to Brad that they did not want to fight: “they had the women, the children and the old people in the teepees”.
According to Andersen, Sagwitch gave orders “not to fire at the army” because he thought they were only interested in the arrests and “then they would leave.”
The agony
The anthropologist Cannon notes that it was well known among the European settlers and the army that “all members” of the Shoshone people would be in this settlement and not just “warriors”.
About 300 soldiers were led by Connor.
“They rode into the camp,” Brad says, “while we had our first line of defense.”
And the confrontation broke out.
When the Shoshone ran out of ammunition, “the fighting was over and the slaughter of men, women and children began,” wrote Andersen, who collected testimony in his essay:
“Several Indian women were killed because they did not silently submit to being raped, and other Indian women were raped in the throes of death,” recounted a Mormon from that area.
Brad says that witnesses saw soldiers “grab little children by their braids and spin them around until they break their necks.”
The leaders and men of the tribe tried to keep the soldiers in the south, “so that our people could escape to the north, but the colonel found out and deployed his troops to the north, on a hill, and they began to shoot bullets, so all the people had to run south.”
He tells me about Anzie Chee, a woman who, despite being injured, managed to escape.
She jumped with her baby into a part of the river that was not frozen over and hid on one of the banks. There, she realized that there were more women.
“But her baby started crying…
he had to drop it. The baby drowned so she could save all those other people.”
pass for dead
Sagwitch was injured and was floating in the river until “a white friend helped him” and he survived.
Their son, Yeager Timbimboo (Mae’s grandfather) was about 14 years old.
Next to his grandmother, he was left lying on the icy ground and they pretended to be dead.
“Don’t open your eyes, don’t look up“his grandmother whispered to him. But the boy soon disobeyed.
“A soldier noticed, approached him and put a gun to his head, but did not fire. He raised the gun and aimed it again. He laughed and left, ”says Brad.
Yeag er grew up with those memories and, like other survivors, did not want them to go away.
“Every winter, they would get together and tell the story of the massacre. They would take a leaf from a tree, bend it and make holes in it with a nail: ‘This is how our teepees were left,’ they said”. Others were burned.
After the soldiers left, “members of the white community in Franklin County they ran to the indians to help them“.
“Many of them received very good care in the town. Bullets were removed, wounds were bandaged, children were adopted.
The numbers
Twenty-five soldiers died, but exactly how many Shoshone died is still difficult.
The soldiers counted 224 bodiesbut they made it clear that it was not the total.
A Danish immigrant named Hans Jasperson stated in his 1911 autobiography that, after touring the camp, he recounted 493 dead shoshone.
“I turned around, counted again and he gave me the same amount,” he wrote, according to the newspaper. Salt Lake Tribune.
Brad says that members of the nearby community that helped the victims counted 368 deaths.
“We estimate that between 350 and 500 people died.”
“Our group (the Northwestern Shoshones) was probably about 650 strong. They left us with about 125 people.”
“Our tribe still hasn’t surpassed 600 members since then. I think right now we’re around 578 or 580. This is the highest we’ve been in a long, long time.”
“We still haven’t recovered our pre-massacre numbers. It was almost complete annihilation, it decimated us so much that it took us 160 years to return to the same population“.
Before leaving, the soldiers seized the horses, “they looted the camp, they stole the meat, the grains, they left us with nothing.”
And, territorially, those Shoshones felt they had nowhere to go.
dehumanized
Reflecting on the slaughter of Native Americans in the United States in the 19th century, military historian Jonathan Deiss told journalist Dana Hedgpeth of The Washington Postthat at that time “people considered that the Indians were not really human, so it was easy to justify killing or mistreating them.”
In light of this dehumanizing perception of the indigenous people, Cannon points out, “the massacres did not seem like massacres, they were military actions, part of a process of occupation and expansion.”
In fact, upon his return, Colonel Connor he was praised by his superiors and promoted to Brigadier General.
A year later, he was asked for advice on how to deal with an encampment of the Arapajo and Cheyenne tribes in Colorado.
“Colonel Chivington used a similar approach: an attack in winter, early in the morning, and massacred 130 men, women and childrenAndersen noted.
It’s been 160 years since the Bear River Massacre, and like every year, the Shoshone remember that winter when their land was covered in red.
For them, the spirits of those who died are still there.
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