Oregon Trail

The sign's 1854 is the Ward attack. That August a Shoshone party killed eighteen of the twenty people in Alexander Ward's wagon company on the Boise River, and the Army answered in 1855 by hanging Shoshone men over the emigrants' grave. The fighting left the trail so unsafe that the Hudson's Bay posts at Fort Boise and Fort Hall were given up, and wagons crossed southern Idaho without them until the gold rush of 1862. The Shoshone resistance of August 1862 near this rest area came at the end of those eight years.

What the plaque says

Oregon Trail Immediately west of here, you will cross a small canyon that Oregon Trail emigrants regarded as their most dangerous exposure to Indians. After 1854, they had good reason to be alarmed. Wagon traffic had ruined important traditional Indian trails. Uncounted thousands of oxen, horses, sheep, and cattle had overgrazed a broad zone along their trail, leading to Indian resentment. Worse yet, a few emigrants had shot enough Indians to provoke a great deal of bitterness. Aug. 9, 1862, Pocatello's Shoshoni band resisted further wagon traffic here, trapping a small emigrant party in a deep gully. An unusually fine stretch of wagon tracks leading to that site can be reached by a marked trail from here. 338 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Massacre Rocks State Park — 1.5 mi
  Named for emigrant deaths that happened somewhere else, five months before a massacre that was called a battle.

More markers nearby

• American Falls Power Plants — 7.0 mi
• American Falls — 8.4 mi
• Emigrant Trails — 11 mi
• Idahome — 30 mi