On a crisp and sunny November morning, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation welcomed nearly 400 people onto their land to plant 8,500 trees and shrubs. Steam rose from the Bear River’s hot springs. As volunteers arrived, the tribe’s conservation partners unloaded black plastic trays filled with cuttings of willow, cottonwood, chokecherry and more. Brad Parry, the tribe’s vice chairman, stood in a pickup truck bed and greeted tribal members, environmental activists, college students and church groups. “This is the Bear River Massacre site,” he said, “what we call Wuda Ogwa, or Bear River.”
Here, on Jan. 29, 1863, the U.S. Army murdered an estimated 400 Shoshone people, decimating the Northwestern Band in one of the deadliest massacres of Native people in U.S. history. Afterward, Mormon settlers dispossessed the Shoshone of their land throughout the Intermountain West. Some surviving Northwestern Shoshone went north to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation or east to the Wind River Reservation, but many stayed, joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and moved onto land the church claimed in northern Utah. The tribe wasn’t federally recognized until 1987, and it still lacks reservation land.
The settlers diverted water from the Bear River — the Great Salt Lake’s largest tributary — for water-intensive agriculture and livestock. “That was one of the starts of the problem for the Great Salt Lake,” Parry told High Country News. Today, as climate change-induced drought exacerbates the effect of over a century of unsustainable water use, the lake verges on ecological collapse.
In 2018, the tribe purchased roughly 350 acres of its ancestral land at the massacre site, making it the largest area owned by the Northwestern Shoshone. Now, the tribe is restoring the area, estimating that it can return 13,000 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake annually by shifting vegetation from invasives to native plants, cleaning up creeks and restoring degraded agricultural fields to wetlands.