Talk:Bear River Massacre/Archive 1

How is this a Civil War Battle?
I'm only a foreigner, but how can this be considered a battle of the US Civil War? Were the Shoshone allies of the South? Grant65 (Talk) 06:46, Mar 19, 2005 (UTC)
 * It appears to me the Shoshone and the Confederates had a common enemy in the Union Army, but little else. I don't know of any alliance between the two, formal or otherwise. I too would like to know why this is considered a Civil War battle rather than a battle with native Americans that just happened to occur during the Civil War period. --Faustus37 14:44, 9 February 2006 (UTC)


 * You can get a bit more context in the bio article for Patrick Edward Connor. Hal Jespersen 15:35, 9 February 2006 (UTC)


 * So are we saying that any military action taken by the Union Army between 1861 and 1865 is a Civil War battle, regardless of whether it was fought against Confederates, Confederate allies, or anyone else? This is clearly cited here and elsewhere as a Civil War battle, and I referenced it as such in the Idaho article. I just want more clarification. --Faustus37 18:52, 9 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I guess so. The key is whether the battle is listed in the NPS list, which we use as our master reference. Hal Jespersen 19:09, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

As a note, this battle took place during the middle of the Civil War, by troops meant to "occupy" Utah in an attempt to make sure that Utah did not become a Confederate territory... as New Mexico did become at least to some extent. Indeed Conner fought this battle mainly because he felt that he wasn't getting the "glory" that he deserved by serving on some silly outpost where it was virtually certain that the Civil War would never come. This is a sad moment in history.

BTW, I'm going to have to head up to where this battle took place and get a few pictures of the area. The battle field is just 60 miles from my house.--Robert Horning 16:15, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I have noticed that your two paragraphs have not been cited. I think it could help the reader to rely more on the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SISI16 (talk • contribs) 18:27, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Moving from Civil War to Indian Wars
I would be in favor of moving this out of the Civil War and into an Indian War category. There were political reasons related to the Civil War as has been mentioned, however, I would not define this as an engagement of the Civil War as it involved differing combatants that those engaged in the Civil War. Sgthone12b 12 June 2006


 * Please explain this clearly. The Indian Wars were explictly named as occuring during an explictly named period of time (marked after the Civil War) by the U.S. Department of Defense (previously the War Department) in much the same way that veterans and battles of the Vietnam War are defined.  A soldier who fought and died in Vietnam in 1945 is not considered a Vietnam War vet, for instance.


 * This battle clearly too place during the period of time when the U.S. Civil War was occuring, and Conner recieved a war-time promotion as a direct result of this military action as well, going from Colonel to Brig. General and a brevet rank of Lt. General slightly later. And the Union Army (of which Col. Connor's unit was a part) certainly was one of the combatants of the U.S. Civil War.


 * Admittedly, however, this action does seem to reflect later sentiment and actions by the U.S. Army that did occur later on during the Indian Wars. But this was not one of the various campaigns that the Army conducted explictly to subdue the various Indian tribes and push them onto reservations.  That happened several years later, and indeed Connor was involved slightly with that as well.  --Robert Horning 23:47, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Many of these Indian battles are indeed covered in the Official Records and were regarded at the time by the Army as a part of the overall military operations to secure the peace. Scott Mingus 23:04, 27 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Upon review and some much further reading, I would have to agree that this is a tough call. The one thing that really makes this part of a general campaign of the U.S. Civil War instead of one of the various Indian War campaigns is that Gen. Connor's orders came from President Lincoln as a part of the war mobilization effort during the U.S. Civil War.  His unit (Connor's) was organized as a part of the Civil War, and was paid for by Civil War-related congressional authorizations.  In fact, the primary duty of the California Volunteers was to maintain the communications links between Washington D.C. and California, and to make sure that the gold and silver of California and Nevada remained with the Union and not go to the Confederacy.  While it could be argued that there was no practical threat by the Confederacy to invade Utah or to disrupt the overland mail routes across the Western USA, the mere presence of this large of a group of soldiers made it certain that any Confederate effort to do so would have to have been rather substantial and at the battalion level or larger.
 * Now as far as this particular action is concerned, its purpose and effect or consequences were more typical with the Indian Wars campaigns. It is interesting that the U.S. Army doesn't recognize any engagement with the Indians during the Civil War (see http://www.army.mil/cmh/reference/iwcmp.htm) as a general part of the various Indian Wars campaigns.  I don't know if this is intentional or merely an oversight, and certainly battlefield casualty reports even on the part of the California Volunteers were sufficient to at least merit the Battle of Bear River as a signifcant action other than the fact that much bloodier battles were being conducted in the Eastern USA at the same time.  A U.S. Army military unit with this level of casualties today would be front page headline material.  --Robert Horning 21:07, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Article Improvement and Sources
I'm declaring my intention to substantially rewrite and improve this article, although I would appreciate any other individuals with sources that might be useful to help improve this article as well. I currently have about five different book sources about this topic that I'm going through to be used as outside citations that can verify facts about this incident as well as provide substantially more meat to this article, including names, dates, and other general cleanup. --Robert Horning 23:47, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Some massacres & incidents that occurred along the Oregon Trail, referred to as Snake Country by the Army, that attributed to the Bear River Massacre. Not included are incidents that occured on the California trail on the Humbolt, West to Carson City and CA.
 * 8/19/'54. (Indian Attack) Goodale Cutoff, Camas, ID.
 * 8/20/'54. Ward Massacre, Boise River, ID.
 * 7/26/'59. (Indian Attack) Cold Springs, Bear River, ID or WY.
 * 7/27/'59. Shepherd Massacre, Bear River, ID or WY.
 * 8/12/'59. Dragoon & Shoshoni fight, Box Elder, UT.
 * 8/20/'59. (Indian Attack) Carpenter Train, Kinney Cutoff, ID, UT, WY border.
 * 8/31/'59. Miltmore Massacre, American Falls, ID.
 * 6/23/'60. (Indian Attack) Army Wagon Road Party, Owyhee River, OR.
 * 8/26/'60. (Indian Attack) Sheep Train, Castle Butte, Owyhee, ID.
 * 9/07/'60. (Indian Attack) City of Rocks, ID.
 * 9/09/'60. Utter Massacre, Castle Butte, ID.
 * The 4 abducted Van Ornum children were members of this train.
 * 8/08/'61. (Indian Attack) Harriman Train, City of Rocks, ID.
 * 8/09/'62. (Indian Attack) Salmon River Party, East of Massacre Rocks, ID.
 * 8/10/'62. (Wagon train members attack indians), Massacre Rocks, ID.
 * 8/15/'62. (Indian Attack) Wagon train attacked, City of Rocks, ID.
 * 8/20/'62. (Indian Attack) Bristol-Kennedy Train, Rock Creek, ID.
 * 9/12/'62. (Indian Attack) East bound Californians, Raft River, ID.

Reference: "The Utter Disaster On the Oregon Trail". Donald H. Shannon. 1993. Library of Congress 93-83498. ISBN 0-9635828-2-8.

Another interesting reference is "Letters from Nevada Indian Agents 1849-1861". http://www.nevadaobserver.com/Reading%20Room%20Documents/Letters%20from%20Nevada%20Indian%20Agents%201859.htm Select the year at the bottom of page. Unfortunately not all the letters are available, but it gives a flavor of the self serving misuse of US.Gov. funds that were intended to pacify the Indians by some Superintendents of Indian Affairs of the Utah Territory.

See also, "Utah Digital Newspapers". http://www.lib.utah.edu/digital/unews/

For a more detailed account of the Utter Massacre and abbreviated account of the rescue of Reuben Van Orman see: http://www.washingtonhistory.org/wshs/columbia/articles/0187-a2.htmTinosa 17:38, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Improving Citations and other outstanding issues
I have a places in this article as needing citations. This is mainly because I'm still trying to organize the sources I'm using and find a "better" source for the information... or that I've so heavily synthesized some of the material that a clear source isn't jumping out at me for the information. I don't see any reason to dispute the factual information being presented, but I am still trying to improve the article.

The "meat" of the article is now in place at the moment. From the look of things, it appears as though it is now longer than the "32K limit" of Wikipedia, so some minor editing might be in order to tighten stuff up. Or perhaps some of the sections can be split off to become a completely seperate Wikipedia article. Of the candidates that I would strongly recommend, I would like to suggest the Battle of Providence (Utah) as a significant candidate, and perhaps a more exaustive list of Shoshone/Ute/Mormon/U.S. Army/Oregon Trail encounters listed in a seperate article with a very abbriviated list of key events. There isn't to me any real urgency to get this going at the moment, as instead I would like to try and work on simply improving this article first.

My goal here is to get this to something resembling featured article quality. In terms of content, I think we are pretty much there, but it does need some significant proofreading, grammar cleanup, and perhaps a few additional people to help verify the POV (keeping NPOV or trying to obtain that elusive goal) and try and make things work better from a reader's view of things. There are also some graphics and photos that I still want to add to this article to make it better. Most notably, I am going to create some graphics of the campaign trail that Connor used, and try to make a battle map to show the key elements of the battle from a viewpoint of a military commander.

There is also about 200K of public domain textual source material that I intend to add to Wikisource that is going to be tied to this article. That is going to be an interesting challenge, but I have a couple of diaries of soldiers and the official battle report written by Connor to the War Department. That is interesting reading by itself, and is something that needs to be integrated into this article.

I hope that I've done this topic the justice that it deserves. Certainly this was a very significant event in American History, and one that is unfortunately overlooked for many different reasons. --Robert Horning 10:14, 5 October 2006 (UTC)


 * The first thing I notice is that the lead section could be expanded and needs to conform to Wikipedia's lead section guidelines. As for the article length issue, see Article size for more info on that. --Lethargy 00:20, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * BTW, as with any good writing practice, the very last thing that should be written is the introduction. In this case I will more than agree that it needs to be rewritten and expanded some, but I've been trying to concentrate on getting the "body" written at the moment.  BTW, thanks for the link to the lead section guidelines.  --Robert Horning 10:48, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The reason I mentioned a lead section is that it is a requirement for a Good article, and I would like to submit this as a GA nominee soon. Of course, the lead will probably change a bit once we get to FA status, but for now I'd like to shoot for GA. Once we are at GA standard, I'd also like to get this peer reviewed. I'll try to look through the article more thoroughly to dig up additional suggestions. --Lethargy 02:58, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Article move: Bear River Massacre to Bear River massacre.
Is there any reason to have the M for massacre capitalized? The first sentence doesn't have it capitalized, so perhaps the page should be moved. --Lethargy 01:21, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * The only reason I would suggest preserving it is that the capital "M" is used commonly by most modern historians writing about the subject, as the whole event, the "Bear River Massacre" is itself the name of the event. As such, it is a proper noun.  Dropping the case would imply that this is about the Bear River itself, which is only a very cursory item to the conflict itself.  There is some scholarly debate about if this should be called a Battle or a Massacre, but in these more politically correct times calling this a massacre seems to be more appropriate, and is also what this is commonly refered to outside of Wikipedia circles.
 * As far as the first sentance not being capitalized, that is sort of out of my hands. I didn't write it that way, and it appears as though somebody unfamiliar with the topic got in and tried to impose their own version of English grammar rules in here.  It should be noted that early edits of this article had the "M" capitalized.  --Robert Horning 01:52, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Christianity template
I removed the Christianity template, as I don't see how this has much of anything to do with the general history of Christianity other than it involved a self-professed Christian military general who was a major personality in campaign. And a few "Christians" were involved on some other points, including the larger scope of the settlement of the American West. In terms of the history of Christianity, this is nearly irrelevant.

IMHO the only reason this template was added is because I added a general template covering LDS historical, which I believe that this is indeed a significant feature of LDS history, and is certainly as significant as the Mountain Meadows massacre in term of its general impact on the history of the LDS movement and the LDS Church in particular. This is in fact covered within the text of this article in significant depth. It also involved individuals of significance with the LDS Church, including Brigham Young. If the Roman Pope had been significantly involved with this event, I might concur with the sentiment that this is a significant Christian event, or if other significant Christian religious leaders were involved with this event besides the base chaplain at Fort Douglas.

The individual who added this template saw the LDS template, and couldn't fathom why one religion should have preference over another one, and had not (IMHO) read the full text of this article to see what the significance to the LDS Church really was in this event. As if having the soldiers spend the night in an LDS Chapel was not a significant fact by itself on the night following this engagement, nor the impact that LDS colonies had in south-eastern Idaho after this event either. The only impact that this would have in regards to Christianity is in a negative aspect, where this can be used as an example of genocide by Christian leaders. Although in this case I don't see how any Christian leader condoned or supported this effort other than the general sentiment that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian".

Along the same grounds of inclusion, this is also a very significant event in the history of the native peoples of North America, and as such if a sidebar/info box with links to other significant events of conflicts between these peoples and Americans were to be added, it would have the same if not even a greater significance than the LDS template.

If a better justification or rationale other than "gentile (non-Mormon) Christian Oregon & California Emigrants also suffered as a result of Mormon confiscation of Native American Lands." can be made, I can justify the return of this template. Yes, this is a part of the greater history of the settlement of the Western USA, but I would not try to characterize this as something where the Christians were the victims here as well. I also question how the LDS Church in any way helped Col. Connor to decide to engage in this action. This was Connor's decision to perform this action alone, and he should bear responsibility (with perhaps the U.S. government, who he was acting for in behalf of and under orders from) for all of the actions that took place with this event. --Robert Horning 00:19, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Salt Lake Tribune article on Massacre
For those paying attention, an article in the Salt Lake Tribune is covering the events of the Bear River Massacre that was just published. Apparently there is an autobiography by an early settler to Cache Valley which claims a much higher casualty count than what previous was mentioned.

I for one urge caution before adding much of that material to this article, as this count is of dubious historical relevancy. Read the article to get the full details, and even Scott Christiansen, who is already reference in this Wikipedia article, places some doubt as to the authenticity of the claims here.

Still, nearly every account of this event has suggested the number of Shoshoni who have died was much higher than the estimates given to the War Department by Conner and by contemporary newspaper accounts when this event happened. This "fact" perhaps should be incorporated into the article somehow, and reference this SL Tribune article as well. --Robert Horning (talk) 14:27, 19 February 2008 (UTC)