Four Plaques, One Morning

Four Plaques, One Morning

October 12, 2026

A stone monument stands beside Highway 91, a few miles northwest of Preston, near the Utah line. It has four sides and a small stone tipi on top. Since 1932, four plaques have been mounted on it, each telling a version of what happened nearby on a winter morning in 1863. 

At first light on January 29, 1863, U.S. Army volunteers from California, led by Colonel Patrick Edward Connor, attacked a Northwestern Shoshone winter camp on the Bear River. By the time the shooting stopped, hundreds of Shoshone people lay dead, many of them women and children.

Yeager Timbimboo was a boy in the Shoshone camp. When the soldiers attacked, he hid with his grandmother among the bodies of the dead, pretending to be one of them. Years later, Yeager told that story to his granddaughter, Mae Timbimboo Parry. She made telling it part of her life’s work, and she insisted on calling what happened that morning a massacre. 

For most of Mae’s life, a different story stood beside the highway. The first plaque, dedicated in 1932, told the soldiers’ version. Titled “The Battle of Bear River,” it said Connor’s men fought Indians “guilty of hostile attacks on emigrants and settlers.” It reported 250 to 300 Indians killed or incapacitated, among them about 90 “combatant women and children.” Yeager attended the unveiling. A photograph from that day shows him with his son. He had lived through the morning the plaque described. 

In 1953, the Franklin County Daughters of Utah Pioneers, one of the groups behind the first plaque, added a second. It honors the pioneer women who nursed wounded soldiers. The plaque also blames the violence on Indian attacks against “peaceful inhabitants.”

Mae would not let this story stand. According to her grandson, Darren Parry, she carried soldiers’ own journals to Washington, D.C., and testified about what they described. In 1990, the National Park Service added a third plaque declaring the Bear River Massacre Site a National Historic Landmark. It is the first plaque on the monument to use the word massacre, yet it does not say who died.

The fourth plaque came from the organization that had helped place the first two. After Alexis Beckstead became president of the Franklin County Daughters of Utah Pioneers, she began attending the tribe’s annual memorial for its dead. She saw that the Shoshone were unhappy with the 1932 plaque. The Daughters prepared new language, and Parry, a former tribal chairman, approved it. On January 29, 2021, the 158th anniversary of the massacre, Parry unveiled the new plaque, which replaced the 1932 plaque. It honors “the estimated 400 men, women, and children of the Northwestern Shoshone Nation.” Eighty-nine years after Yeager stood at the first unveiling, his great-great-grandson led this one. 

Read the four plaques in order, and you can watch the Shoshone people’s place in the story change. In 1932, they were enemy combatants. In 1953, they were attackers. In 1990, they went unmentioned. In 2021, they came first.

The Northwestern Band has also reclaimed land. In 2018, the tribe bought several hundred acres of the massacre site, which it calls Wuda Ogwa. Tribal members and volunteers are restoring wetlands and replanting native trees and shrubs along the creek, and the tribe is raising money for its own interpretive center.

Language has been shifting beyond the monument, too. For decades, Indigenous people called for a day honoring the nations who lived here long before Columbus arrived, and cities and states adopted it one by one. In October 2021, the year the new plaque went up, President Biden issued the first presidential proclamation recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Here in Idaho, it is a day to honor the Coeur d’Alene, Kootenai, Nez Perce, Shoshone-Bannock, and Shoshone-Paiute Tribes, along with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, whose ancestors were killed at Bear River.

Honoring people starts with listening, and the fullest accounts come from Native people telling their own histories. We can find them at the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum at Fort Hall, in Darren Parry’s book The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History, and someday at the interpretive center at Wuda Ogwa. 

The stone beside Highway 91 has been changed three times, and it may be revised again. Down the slope, on land the Shoshone own again, new trees are taking root along the creek where the winter camp once stood.