http://www.sltrib.com/ci_8282225

Newly uncovered documents claim far higher number of Shoshones killed in
Bear River Massacre

By Kristen Moulton
The Salt Lake Tribune

Article Last Updated: 02/16/2008 10:42:31 AM MST

BRIGHAM CITY -- The autobiography of a Mormon pioneer written nearly a
century ago and recently made public indicates the number of Shoshones
killed in the 1863 Bear River Massacre could be much higher than previously
believed.

In his 1911 autobiography, Danish emigrant Hans Jasperson claims to have
walked among the bodies, counting 493 dead Shoshones.

"I turned around and counted them back and counted just the same,"
Jasperson writes. He was just 19 at the time of the massacre.

That is a far higher number than previous accounts of the Jan. 29, 1863,
massacre when the U.S. Army's Third California Volunteers - intent on
punishing the region's Indians for pestering mining supply wagons and
pioneers in Cache Valley and along the California Trail - rode from Fort
Douglas in Salt Lake City, surrounded the Shoshones on the banks of the
Bear River near Preston, Idaho, and slaughtered most of four bands.

Accounts at the time said 210 to 300 Shoshones were killed (17 soldiers
died on the battlefield and several more died of their wounds later).

The highest previous number - nearly 400 Shoshones - was reported by three
pioneers who rode horses through the battlefield the next day, says
historian Scott Christensen, who wrote a biography of Sagwitch, a surviving
chief.

Even at the lower estimates, the Bear River Massacre stands as the worst in
the western United States since the nation was founded.

Christensen and another historian described Jasperson's autobiography as
"exciting" new information, although it will require much more research.

"Assuming it's true and accurate, it is very, very significant," said Bob
McPherson, who teaches history at College of Eastern Utah's San Juan campus
in Blanding. He specializes in military and American Indian history, and
has led military group tours of the Bear River battleground.

Family documents

Merrill Nelson is a retired accountant living in West Valley City who,
realizing it could be significant, last year sent his great-grandfather's
autobiography to the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation.

But he doesn't know how to check out the veracity of the account. He knows
of no original journal, although one is mentioned in a separate biography
written by his great-aunt.

"We don't really have any idea about it," he says.

All Nelson has are two documents, a typed copy of Jasperson's 1911
autobiography -- written in the first person, but labeled a biography and
witnessed by a grandson -- and a 1913 handwritten and signed letter in
which Jasperson seeks compensation from the Utah Legislature for fighting
Indians during the Indian Wars.

Both were left behind by his mother, a family-history buff, who received
them from her mother, Jasperson's oldest daughter.

In both, Jasperson writes that he saw 493 bodies.

The 11-page autobiography touches on the massacre in just two
matter-of-fact paragraphs. The rest details other exploits, like helping
pioneers make the long trek to Utah, marrying and raising a family on a
farm in Goshen near Payson.

Jasperson, young but already experienced driving oxen teams, writes that he
was hired to go to the Salmon River country (mining camps) and, as he was
headed through northern Utah, came across Mormon frontiersman Lot Smith,
who told him the Army was fighting the Indians up the river.

Jasperson writes that he went with "him," implying Smith, to the
battleground.

His description of the battlefield - indeed most of the autobiography -
rings true, said Christensen. The verbiage fits the era, and Jasperson does
not seem to exaggerate. The topographical details he supplies are accurate.

Two aspects, however, trouble Christensen.

Jasperson writes that Lot Smith told him the Indians had killed 60 soldiers
and wounded 60 more, numbers far higher than the military casualties at
Bear River.

"It's fairly compelling as history, but I can't square that," Christensen
says,

Jasperson also does not mention Shoshone bodies piled eight and five deep,
as the three pioneers who rode through the battlefield described,
Christensen notes.

Christensen says he has not researched whether Lot Smith was at the Bear
River, but it's possible.

Smith was a good friend of Porter Rockwell, according to a short biography
in the University of Utah Marriott Library's Special Collections, and it
was Rockwell who led the soldiers to the Shoshones' winter camp along the
Bear River.

'Better understanding'

Christensen, a historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, says he hopes the Jasperson autobiography will spur more research
and analyis.

"Hopefully we can keep piecing it together and get a better understanding,"
he says.

Patty Timbimboo Madsen, the Northwestern Band's natural-resources manager,
says the few Shoshone survivors of the massacre did not speak much about
how many men, women and children died.

Her aunt, Mae T. Parry, however, listened to the stories of survivors and
argued in her essay, "Massacre at Boa Ogoi," that the military engaged in
wholesale slaughter of her people.

The tribe's written history estimates 350 died that day.

If the casualties were in fact higher, says Madsen, it will affirm Parry's
conclusion.

"The only thing it does is tell me that the stories my Aunt Mae told were
true stories, that it wasn't a battle. It was a massacre."

Parry died last spring.

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