Union Volunteer troops attack and kill hundreds of Shoshone at Bear River, in present-day Idaho

Receiving reports of murders of trekking miners by members of the Shoshone tribe, Colonel P. Edward Connor marched his California volunteer troops from Salt Lake City in freezing temperatures to the Cache Valley, in today's Franklin County, Idaho, to confront the largest concentration of the tribe in the area. The battle was initially fierce but after the Shoshone ran out of ammunition degenerated into a massacre. Twenty-one soldiers were killed but almost three hundred Shoshone men, women, and children dies, many murdered after the fighting.  (By John Osborne)