Massacre Rocks State Park

Emigrants called the gap in the rocks Gate of Death and Devil's Gate, a narrow break where the Oregon Trail squeezed between outcrops and anyone could imagine an ambush. The fighting that gave the park its name happened east of it. On August 9 and 10, 1862, Shoshone attacked emigrant wagons along this stretch of the Snake, and ten emigrants died in the attacks and the skirmishes that followed. The deaths were real; the place in the name is not. A 1927 granite marker, moved when the interstate came through, still says the name came from reported attacks in this gap.

Five months later, on January 29, 1863, Army volunteers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone winter camp on the Bear River and killed hundreds of people, most of them women and children, in a campaign cast as punishment for that year's attacks on travelers. The emigrants' deaths gave their name to a state park, if not the right spot. The Bear River dead were remembered on their roadside monument, for most of a century, as a battle; the survivors' descendants are restoring that ground now, at Boa Ogoi.

The park itself is quieter than its name. The boulders scattered across it were rolled into place by the Bonneville Flood about 18,000 years ago, when Lake Bonneville broke out at Red Rock Pass and poured down the Snake. Wagon ruts survive near the rest areas at either end, and at Register Rock, now under a shelter, emigrants carved their names and dates. Interstate 86 runs through what is left of the gap.

There is a campground on the river, trails through the rocks, and a visitor center with exhibits on the trail and the fighting.