Boa Ogoi: The Memory of the Bear River Massacre

Preston, Idaho Post Office (1940) featuring the mural "The Battle of Bear River" (1941) by Edmond J. Fitzgerald. Image by me (2022)

On Jan. 29, 1863, the U.S. Army massacred a group of So-So-Goi (Shoshone), in their home/land at Boa Ogoi (Bear River). Up to 500 Shoshone were murdered on this freezing winter morning–likely the most massive massacre in U.S. history. It was celebrated openly by Mormon colonists.

Site of the Bear River Massacre

Site of the Bear River Massacre

Twenty-five years earlier, on July 24, 1847, So-So-Goi Chief Sagwitch greeted Brigham and company as they first entered So-So-Goi, Goshute, and Timpanogos land of the so-called Salt Lake valley.

On that day, Heber C. Kimball told Sagwitch: “The land belongs to our father in heaven, and we calculate to plow and plant it; and no man shall have the power to sell his inheritance for he can not remove it; it belongs to the Lord.” (ie, We’re taking this land, we’re not paying because we decided its God’s land and we’re God’s Chosen People.)(See also: Lamanite Identity / Doctrine of Discovery)

Some of So-So-Goi’s main hunting, farming, and gathering lands were in what colonists named Cache Valley (where the Logan temple is). By 1856, Mormon colonists moved to occupy, farm, and ranch this land. This decimated Indigenous foodways, destroying and replacing plant and animal lives and relationships cultivated for millenia. 

Beawoachee and spouse cheif Sagwitch, c. 1880 photographed by Charles R. Savage. LDS Church History Library.

Rachel Perdash - Rachel Perdash survived the Bear River Massacre as a young girl in 1863. She escaped and ran to spread the news of what had happened.

Bear River Massacre Monument

Logan, Utah temple

Because of this and other colonist activity, So-So-Goi were starving. So-So-Goi tried to charge Mormons rent, but they refused. So they began to eat what food was left on their lands–Mormon cattle. And even though Mormons had stolen So-So-Goi lands, animals, fishes, and grasses, they claimed So-So-Goi taking Mormon cattle was a crime punishable by death. 

Mormons called on the U.S. Union Army to “wipe them out.” And so, early in the Morning on January 29th 1963, the Union Army did just that. Mormon assassin, Porter Rockwell, led them to the So-So-Goi camp where they spent hours murdering these Indigneous families. They then destroyed the So-So-Goi camp and along with all of their winter food storage. 

U.S. soldiers celebrating the massacre

Mormons in Cache Valley celebrated the massacre. In the official minutes of a Logan Bishop’s meeting is recorded: “We, the people of Cache Valley, looked upon the movement of Colonel Connor as an intervention of the Almighty, as the Indians had been a source of great annoyance to us for a long time.”

They also blamed So-So-Goi for their own massacre, saying that this happened because they’d rejected Mormonism (like their supposed Lamanite ancestors).

Chief Sagwitch and a few others survived the massacre. And 10 years later, Sagwitch had a vision which led to his People seeking baptism from the Mormons.

In 1873, 102 So-So-Goi were baptized by the same group who sought their destruction in the same river where they were nearly genocided.

Out of the limited options for survival under colonial occupation, they chose assimilation over a reservation.​

A Shoshone encampment in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, photographed by W. H. Jackson, 1870

Yeager Timbimboo (a son of Chief Sagwitch) and Ray Diamond Womenup were survivors of the Bear River Massacre. About 1935 near the Washakie Ward Mormon meetinghouse.

They now mostly live among the settler population along the Wasatch Front. As So-So-Goi leader Darren Parry says, “We are your neighbors.” 

​Three generations and 59 years after Sagwitch’s People were baptized, the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers erected a monument which frames this massacre as a noble deed done against “Indians guilty of hostile attacks” in service of innocent settlers. ​

Today, the Northwestern Band of Shoshone, and their 559 members, own the land of the massacre site and are raising funds to memorialize their history and this massacre through a Cultural Interpretive Center built on the site.

You can contribute to this at BoaOgoi.org

Learn more: “The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History” by Darren Parry.

"The Battle of Bear River" (1941) by Edmond J. Fitzgerald