In the Footsteps of Chief Sagwitch
Subscribe Now!Native and pioneer descendants remember the Bear River Massacre and its aftermath
Chief Sagwitch is seated beside his wife Beawoachee.
Charles Roscoe Savage
The first glimmers of the morning sun were in my eyes as I pulled into the neighborhood. Squinting at the group of houses that looked pretty similar, I drove to the driveway of the only house that had a tipi in the yard. Darren Parry, the great-great-great-grandson of Chief Sagwitch, came out the front door. Our objective for the day was simple: to increase our understanding of the past.
The drive allowed us time to talk, and Darren shared his thoughts and feelings as he told me about his Northwestern Shoshone people, including Chief Sagwitch.
When Sagwitch was born, he was named Sagwip, meaning “mud puddle.” Shoshone children were not sent to schools to learn and conform – they were given latitude under the watchful eyes of the extended family. It allowed them to discover and develop their own unique strengths and gifts.
Sagwip developed two skill sets in his youth. One was the ability to select the right woods to make high quality bows and arrows and use them with amazing precision. The other was his ability as an orator and peacemaker, both within the tribe and with the white trappers and explorers who had started to enter the territory. It was the latter that would define him as an adult, and he was given the new name of Sagwitch, meaning “great orator.”
Darren and I talked about the chief and what made him great. We both agreed he had strong personal values. Those values included a belief in the goodness of people, a sense of stewardship for the land and a sense of hope for the future. His life would test those values, and he would remain true to all of them.
Sagwitch became the chief of his band by his early 20s. The Northwestern Shoshone were nomadic hunters and gatherers who lived close to the land and moved through northern Utah with the seasons. They would also participate with closely related tribes in bison hunts and salmon fishing elsewhere, but they spent most of their time in northern Utah. The Northwestern Shoshone lived and loved a land that seemingly no one else wanted; they wanted nothing more, and they lived in relative peace.
In the chief’s early years, white explorers would pass through, and trade was positive and was mutually beneficial for everyone. Sagwip, at age 4, likely attended the 1826 rendezvous with his tribe in south Cache Valley. This was the second trapper rendezvous and came to define trapper rendezvous of the West. Fur trader Gen. William Henry Ashley came in with 300 pack mules loaded with supplies. The crowd was made up of more than 500 trappers and thousands of Native Americans.
Cache Valley was the breadbasket for the Northwestern Shoshone. It had plentiful grasses with seeds, wildlife, firewood and water. Times changed in the late 1850s, when whites started settling in the valley and not just moving through. As settlers, including my ancestors, introduced cattle and farming into the valley, it meant a loss of food for the Shoshone who could no longer adapt enough to survive. Conflict began between the Shoshone and the settlers. During this same time, warriors from a neighboring tribe killed some miners traveling through the area.
U.S. Army Col. Patrick Connor hoped that mining could attract enough prospectors to Utah to overthrow the control that Brigham Young, the leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had on the territory. This was one of Connor’s greatest ambitions. The killing of the miners was likely the spark that led to the most horrific moments of Shoshone history, which was the focus of our first stop for the day, just 10 miles north of the Utah state line, along the Bear River in Idaho.
Sagwitch’s grandson Moroni Timbimboo, seen with his wife, Amy,
became the first Latter-day Saint bishop in 1939.
Charles Kelly/J. Willard Marriott Digital Library
Looking down on the place along the Bear River where, on the cold morning of Jan. 29, 1863, the deadliest Native American massacre in U.S. history occurred, Darren started to teach me. He pointed to where the soldiers rode down over the bluff, where the tipis were situated and where the Indian ponies were corralled. He pointed to the steam rising from the hot springs at the edge of the river that concealed many of the hiding women and kept them from freezing in the icy water of the river.
Over the last several years, the Northwestern Shoshone have acquired much of the land where the Bear River Massacre occurred. Darren also pointed to the knoll where a visitor center will be built and where they will break ground for an amphitheater this year. You could tell as he talked that Darren could see the dark past as vividly as he could see a bright future.
The scene of the massacre was horrific. A young mother named Anzee-Chee had to drown her infant baby who started crying, so a hiding place in the river would not be detected. Sagwitch, with only a wound in his hand, was one of the handful of people who survived. Most of his family were killed; the ones that survived had bleak stories to tell.
His 2-year-old son, Beshup, wandered in a daze carrying a bowl of a mush made with pine nuts. He had been wounded multiple times. Another son, Yeager, was told by his grandmother to lie still and act dead, saving his life. An older son, Soquitch, and his girlfriend tried to escape on a horse; Soquitch survived, but his girlfriend was shot.
Sagwitch found his infant daughter alive next to his dead wife and other lifeless children. With no survivors to nurse the infant, Sagwitch placed her in a cradle board and hung it in a tree hoping a pioneer family would find her and take her in. It worked – she lived to be an adult and was named Jane Hull.
Beshup would also be raised by a settler family. After the massacre, Sagwitch went to meet with church leaders to acquire food and basic needs for his tribe. He left Beshup with a family member when he was gone. The family member lost patience with the young boy and traded him to a Mormon family for a bag of beans, a sheep, a sack of flour and a quilt.
Sagwitch was faced with another hard choice. He concluded the family could give Beshup the immediate help he needed and possibly a better life. Sagwitch became a close friend of the Mormon family, and the family became close friends with his people. Beshup became Frank Beshup Timbimboo Warner.
The victor writes the history and builds the monuments. Initially, the massacre was called a battle, and Col. Connor became Gen. Connor for his efforts. For years, a roadside marker has commemorated the “valiant” efforts of the “brave” soldiers who killed the “savage” Indians to protect the “peaceful” settlers. It probably accurately portrayed the event from the perspective of the soldiers and many of the settlers.
Just recently, another plaque has been added to the marker that starts with the words: “In memory of the estimated four hundred men, women and children of the Northwestern Shoshone Nation who were brutally massacred in this vicinity … .” Darren read the plaque with a smile. The story is grim, but it is finally being told, and people are learning of the Bear River Massacre.
For the next stop, we headed toward a valley to the west, again immersed in conversation. Darren and I come from somewhat different backgrounds. Darren is possibly the foremost living expert on the oral history of the Northwestern Shoshone. He lived the life and understands its heart and soul – things that I can only learn, he can feel.
I do have some connection to the Shoshone that goes beyond book learning. I have lived in and explored Shoshone country my entire life. My great-great-grandfather was one of the early settlers in Cache Valley; his cabin still stands in present-day Wellsville.
Nick Wilson, a boy who lived near Grantsville who ran away with some Shoshones and became Chief Washakie’s adopted brother, was my great-great-grandmother’s brother. Many have read about his life in the book The White Indian Boy. Darren said he kept that book by his bed when he was young and loved reading it. Darren has written his own book now, The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History. It includes his grandmother’s translation of the oral histories, as well as many of his own thoughts and experiences.
The federal government tried to force Sagwitch and his people onto a reservation in Idaho at Fort Hall. There is little doubt that their tribe’s identity would have been lost at Fort Hall, something Sagwitch understood clearly, and they would also be removed from their land. For Sagwitch, like all Shoshones, the land where he had lived his entire life was as much a part of him as his right arm.
With the coming of the railroad, Utah was rapidly changing, and in the middle of this change Sagwitch tried to find a future for his people. The boomtown of Corinne intrigued Sagwitch; the people there were very different than the Mormon communities. He was impressed by the hardworking Chinese.
Sagwitch had always been a friend to Brigham Young, having met with the pioneers just days after they arrived in Salt Lake Valley. Ultimately, he would accept an offer to allow the church to help his people learn agriculture. Compared to other leaders in the West, Brigham Young was mostly a friend to the native people, saying of them: “We are now their neighbors. We are on their lands which belong to them as much as any soil belonged to any man on the earth. We are drinking their water, using their fuel and timber, and raising our food on their ground.”
We took an exit from Interstate 15 onto a farm road. Many people call themselves Saints. For Darren and his ancestors, George Washington Hill was a saint. He took seriously his church assignment to help the Shoshones farm and made personal sacrifices the rest of his life to make it happen. After a few years of false starts and challenges, the Shoshones finally were placed on farmable church-owned land.
While preparing raw land for farming one more time and digging by hand a canal more than 16 miles long, the Washakie farm began in 1880. Eventually, it would provide more than 300 jobs, and hundreds of Shoshones would live there. The Shoshone people developed both the skills of farming and animal husbandry. During World War II, many of the younger men enlisted in the armed forces, and many of the older men took high paying jobs in the war factories in Ogden and Brigham City. This was the beginning of the end; the farm was sold in the 1970s.
Little remains of the original farm. Darren’s great-grandparents’ house and a church are the only remaining buildings; Darren has fond memories of both. The canal that was dug by hand is still used today. As Darren and I explored the farm, we talked about the time period. It was hard for his ancestors to understand how the whites could take the land from them. Other things they accepted. Darren thinks that if his people would have been exposed to agriculture earlier, like the Pahvants to the south, they would have adopted basic agricultural methods. Farming was not inconsistent with the culture.
Religion was another unifying influence with the whites. Darren told me there was nothing about the white man’s religion that was contrary to the beliefs of the Shoshones. The religion felt natural. The entire tribe was baptized, and they held church services in their native language. Chief Sagwitch and many other Shoshones helped in the construction of the Logan Temple. Yeager Timbimboo would be the first Native American to speak in the church’s general conference on April 6, 1926.
Darren thinks it was at baptism that Sagwitch adopted the surname Timbimboo. The name was somewhat prophetic: It means one who writes on rocks. Mae Timbimboo Parry, great-granddaughter of Sagwitch and Darren’s grandmother, was the one who captured and documented her people’s oral histories in English, writing them on paper – which was the rock of the future – so they could be preserved for future generations.
We stood at the graveside of Chief Sagwitch, not far from the farm. I think both of us were reflecting on what the great orator would tell us today as we stood by the grave. I think he would tell us to live as one. To cherish our likeness and celebrate our individual uniqueness. To honor the stewardship we have for the earth and all things that live on it and in the sky above it. To have gratitude for what we have and for those who made the trails we follow. He would also tell us to allow for everyone’s story to be told.
On the way back home, we drove through south Cache Valley, home to both of our ancestors. My family’s ranch has always been open access to the public. As we drove through the ranch, Darren commented that he had shot a wild turkey on one of the hillsides just a few years ago. Late that evening, Darren sent me some pictures. He was with his wife, Melody, and good friend Will Munger, riding horses in the pasture where he had shot the turkey. It was a change from childhood years; we spent the day with a cowboy playing Indian, and an Indian playing cowboy.
Northwestern Shoshones from Washakie encamp in a Logan park during a 1908 Pioneer Day celebration.
J. Willard Marriott Digital Library
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