DARREN PARRY: We lived here. We hunted. We gathered. We traveled with the changing seasons, out to the City of Rocks by Nevada to harvest pine nuts in the fall. We'd hunt bison with our Eastern Shoshone relatives in Wyoming area. We'd find ourselves in the middle of Idaho catching salmon. We harvested enough to eat for the day, but we also harvested to save for the wintertime.
Brigham Young and the first group of pioneers got here on the 24th of July in 1847. Sagwitch, the chief of this small band of Shoshone people, knew they were coming. He'd had interaction with white men before but the mountain men always came and left. I think Sagwitch had an idea in his mind that this was going to be different, and decided that he needed to meet with that first group of pioneers. And at the conclusion of that meeting, Heber C. Kimball told Sagwitch that, "You Native American people do not own the land. The land belongs to the Lord and we calculate to plow and plant it."
Native American peoples live a communal life; they have no concept of personal property. None. If a family is starving, it's okay to take from someone else that has. Think about that for a minute. Sagwitch probably got on his horse and rode home, realizing now that he lived in indeed two different worlds.
Patrick Connor was the commander of Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City. He had 250 cavalry with him. They were supposed to go fight in the Civil War, and on their way to the Civil War, the government changed their mind and told them they're going to Salt Lake to keep an eye on the Mormons. Connor and his men were angry. They didn't want to babysit the Mormons. They wanted to fight and make a name for themselves. Now they find themselves there watching a group of people who aren't causing trouble.
Miners were also coming through this area, the California and Oregon trails cut through the heart of this land. You have such a great amount of pressure now from immigrants coming from the east to the west. That interaction between the Shoshones and those immigrants and the pioneers just became too much. The pioneers began writing letters to Salt Lake City for someone to come take care of — as the way they quoted it — "the Indian problem." Those letters found their way to a federal judge. He issued arrest warrants for Chief Sagwitch and Bear Hunter and Chief Pocatello. Now, when they get these orders from a judge saying there's Indian problems less than 60 miles away, Connor and his men jumped at the chance.
Before he left Salt Lake City in January, Connor did an interview and he said that he's not going to arrest anyone. And then he made the famous quote, "I'm not going to deprive my men a little fun of Indian killing." And on January 29, in 1863, Connor and his men appeared on the rim of the village just north of our location today, and four hours later, he perpetrated the largest massacre of Native Americans in the history of our country. More than 450 Shoshone men, women and children died that day.
Well forever the government referred to the massacre site as the Battle of Bear River. My grandmother, Mae Timbimboo Parry, testified at Congress more than 10 times throughout her lifetime that it was actually a massacre. Taking back proof from soldiers' journals, they found at Camp Douglas that were talking about killing babies by holding their ankles and bashing their heads out on any hard surface they could find. She took this evidence with her to Washington DC, and through her activism, meeting presidents and senators — through all of those efforts, the government, and National Park Service changed that designation to the Bear River Massacre. She was an amazing soul. And that story just helps to propel me to do the activism that I do today.
