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.
